The latest search for weird beer took us to one of the fastest-growing craft breweries in the U.S.
Two beers were in contention for the weirdest beer at Flounder Brewing, a fast-growing nanobrewery in Hillsborough, NJ. There was the “off-menu” pumpkin spice latte ale, with a milk chocolate cream to confound the flavor profile even more, as well as a beer called the “Pitmaster” described as an “amber ale brewed with smoked malts and maple syrup.”
Being a non-coffee drinker, the choice was easy: the Pitmaster. Just three bucks for 7 ounces.
The smokiness hit me first, as if I had barbecue in my mouth. That faded as I sipped more, putting the maple syrup more forward, horrifying my beer aficianado friends. I’d rather have the smokiness. (Actually, I’d rather have some real BBQ, but this bikes and BBQ ride isn’t for a few more weeks.)
We took a free tour of our local Amazon warehouse (I mean fulfillment center).
We picked an unusual bike-ride destination this time: our nearby Amazon warehouse, er, I mean fulfillment center.
Ads for (free) Amazon tours have been popping up in my Twitter feed for a while, so when I saw one for a Saturday that worked for us, I pounced. (Pro tip for all my retired friends: weekday tour spots are much easier to get.)
Lead me to a food adventure on the East Coast Greenway in New Jersey.
Lead me to a food adventure
We finally repeated our “Portugal to India” bike ride of two years ago, and I have to say I love it just as much the second time around. And so many more discoveries!
Where to ride our bikes? That’s a regular question in my house because we don’t like riding the same route time after time. (Besides, what would I blog about?)
The 2019 list included an interesting challenge: to the Jersey Shore and back in one day.
Now I’ve biked it one way (to Ocean Grove, lousy route), almost there (to Allaire State Park) and even one way and partway back. But the Brit never had. And this was his goal.
So when some friends said they’d be in Sea Girt this weekend and wasn’t it time we got our annual dip in the ocean, we knew it was time.
So off we headed on Sunday morning. This would be roughly 38 miles each way, mostly on quiet roads but also on a bit of trail.
We found beer made using spontaneous fermentation and the technique of the ancients. And then (modern) ice cream.
Last month’s bike ride to Screamin’ Hill sparked a discussion of other area breweries — places I, as someone who doesn’t love beer, hadn’t heard of. But, hey, they make good bike-ride destinations. And the one four of us cycled to on Sunday definitely is out of the ordinary.
You see, the Referend Bier Blendery in Pennington (or perhaps it’s really Hopewell Township) believes in using the bacteria in the air for spontaneous fermentation. I’m not going to claim I understood everything about this approach, which goes back to the ancients and has at its core “as little interference as possible” in the process. But even I know that using a truck parked outside to house “The Coolship” is out of the ordinary.
Screamin’ Hill brewery is 17 miles from the West Windsor library and not much further from the Princeton Junction train station.
Out of the freezer at home and ready for a beer.
I’ve given quite a few talks on biking in New Jersey, and I always talk about the sites you’ll discover and how anything can be a destination. One example I use is Screamin’ Hill brewery, a farm brewery in the middle of rural New Jersey. And then I realized that aside from our first ride there (when it was closed), I’ve never given it its own blog post, just shared billing.
Time to fix that, and its fourth anniversary was a good excuse. Plus we wanted a shot at the free anniversary mugs. Little did we know that it opened two hours earlier than usual! The only reason we came home with one was because someone abandoned it by the plastic cups and one of the riders in the group was kind enough to hand it to us.
We discovered this place thanks to an article in Edible Jersey that described it as New Jersey’s first (and as of then only) farm brewery. Most of what goes into the beer is grown on the farm, and they have some funky offerings (what some friends would call “weird beer”). There’s IPA, wheat beer, fruit beer, pilsner, sour and more. Even one with tomato. So, yeah, you could say that’s weird. (I had the tomato one once. It doesn’t taste anything remotely like tomato juice mixed with beer.) Among the five beer drinkers I was with, however, one called his choice the best beer he’d had in a long time. Another noted how fresh the beers are.
What’s on tap varies according to what’s ready, and when they run out of something, they run out. Hours are incredbily limited — 3 pm to 8 pm on Fridays and 1 pm to 6 pm on Saturdays. BYO food. Really. It’s a very casual, picnic atmosphere with a few kids running around. (But no dogs.) We started out in the sun and ended up sprawled under a shady tree.
Even if you’re not much of a beer drinker, it’s a lovely bike ride. Once you get to the other side of US 130, the roads are pretty quiet, with a little bit of up and down as you get close to the farm (whose address, after all, includes the word hill).
A camping option smackdab between New York City and Philadelphia.
Lots of space!
There are plenty of places to stay along the East Coast Greenway — unless you want to camp. That’s one of the challenges of a route that goes through densely populated urban areas as it connects some of America’s largest cities.
So add this camping option to the list — and in New Jersey no less, the most densely populated state. Mercer County, smackdab between New York City and Philadelphia, has just opened 10 camping spots in one of its biggest parks. Cost is $20 per night for no more than seven nights.
One more segment of the Lawrence Hopewell Trail is finished.
What a way to end National Bike Month and lead into National Trails Day — a ribbon-cutting for a new section of the Lawrence Hopewell Trail.
I’m a big fan of this 22-mile loop in Lawrenceville and Hopewell (between Trenton and Princeton for those of you not from here). I wrote about riding the entire loop in April, and we got excited at the sight of construction for this new piece of the trail.
This section, just 0.6 miles, lets users avoid busy Rosedale Road by going from Province Line Road into the ETS campus. Once there, you can ride a loop through the campus or just keep going south, across Rosedale and into a neighborhood and then the Carson Woods.
And once the ribbon was cut, joggers and walkers immediately started using it.
What a shakedown ride: 133 miles over 2 days, going through New Hope and Easton on the D&L Trail. Plus the food report.
This mile marker is along the Lehigh River; unfortunately they aren’t used along the Delaware.
We’ll soon be heading out on another of our longer bike rides, and like last year, we have some new gear. So we needed another shakedown ride, like last year. Also like last year, we chose to make the Delaware & Lehigh Trail the focus. But unlike last year, we made it a two-day affair over Memorial Day weekend.
For a 165-mile trail (admittedly with a few road sections), the D&L Trail seems to still be pretty unknown, as I first said four years ago and again two years ago. Oh sure, people in our area may know there’s a trail on the “Pennsylvania side” of the Delaware between Lambertville and Frenchtown, NJ, and maybe as far south as Washington Crossing. But few realize the trail begins in Bristol, a Philadelphia suburb, and goes through Easton, Bethlehem and Allentown and ends north of I-80. I just keep trying to spread the word.
A bike ride in New Jersey and Pennsylvania with a food destination in mind.
Turn left! Turn left!
I always say a bike ride is better with a destination or theme in mind. Or that it’s all about the food. Our latest two-state ride did both.
After stumbling across the Stockton Fire Department‘s pancake breakfast years ago, we’ve been talking about going to its roast beef dinner. When the post card announcing this spring’s date arrived in the mail, it went on the calendar. No more stalling.
Stockton is along the Delaware River, and we’ve ridden both the D&R Canal on the Jersey side and the D&L Trail on the Pennsylvania side. (We picked up lunch here on our bike ride to watch polo last fall, for example.) This time, though, we weren’t going to take it easy with a flat ride. Instead we picked out a ride posted on Ride With GPS that took us into the hills on both sides of the Delaware River.
Early on, we crossed New Jersey’s only covered bridge, the one-lane Green Sergeant with wooden planks for the floor as well as wooden sides and top. (Traffic going the other way takes a flat modern bridge.)
Exploring by bicycle 