I wonder what they serve here

Looking at the Beer section of this new website design, I saw I needed more content. So I got hold of Rob Cheshire of the This Week in Craft Beer podcast to talk about our approaches to taproom tourism and to trade taproom travel stories. I also talk about mask hassles on a couple of recent flights, Hertz’s continuing downward service spiral, and Uber and Lyft driver shortages. All this and more – click here to download the podcast file, go up to the Subscribe section in the top menu bar to subscribe on your favorite site, or listen right here by clicking on the arrow below.

Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #174:

This Week

• Intro music — Warmth by Makkina
• Coming to you again from the TravelCommons studio in Chicago, Illinois as things here start to open up from winter and COVID shutdowns. Increasing temperatures and vaccination rates have people out and about. Irene and I got a jump start on the better weather by flying out to San Diego on St Patrick’s Day to hang out at an Airbnb in Ocean Beach a block off the ocean and a couple of blocks south of Newport Avenue, the main drag that surprised me with its kinda hippy/surfer vibe. Which I liked. It reminded me of Huntington Beach in the mid-80’s when my folks moved there, before they tarted it all up. I give Ocean Beach credit for resisting the face lift, even if I meant I had to avoid the homeless guy changing his pants on the sidewalk when walking back with the morning coffee and doughnuts.
• It was a low-key trip. Nothing scheduled, no real itinerary; mostly walking the coast during the day — beaches or rocks — and then at night, chipping away at the list of some 150 microbrewery taprooms in the San Diego area; a lost cause for sure, but one I willingly threw myself at. Indeed, the only time we looked closely at the time was Sunday afternoon to make sure I could get to all my “gotta go” taprooms before they closed since we were flying back Monday after lunch.
• The bookends to the trip, the flights out and back on United, were a bit more stressful. The flights were just about completely full. And for some reason, United kept shoving me out of my aisle seat to the adjacent middle seat. But because I checked our seats after receiving United’s “We’re full; you can move to another flight for free” e-mail before each flight, there was enough time to rejigger our seats to adjacent aisles, which gave each of us a bit of room to lean away from a full middle seat. The bigger and, honestly, more surprising hassles were mask compliance. On the flight out of ORD, the guy in the row behind me had a loud, extended grumble session with his seatmate after the flight attendant told him to pull his mask up over his nose. I thought he was winding himself up for a protest, but he eventually calmed down. The flight back was worse for Irene. A young couple with an infant landed in the middle and window seats next to her. Both continually pulled their masks down below their chins; at some point, the husband fell asleep and started snoring with his down. And this is after the flight attendants made a number of very clear and pointed announcements on mask rules.
• This all really surprised me. All my prior flights — to Nashville, Philly, Phoenix — there wasn’t any of this. Now I’m no mask scold, but like I said in the last episode, everyone agrees to wear one before they can check-in. So if you have a personal objection or don’t think you can handle it for 4 hours, don’t get on the plane. And if you do, treat yourself to a new mask before the flight; one with new elastic so it says up over your nose.
• Bridge music — Dreaming by Astral (c) copyright 2013 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license.

Following Up

• Long-time TravelCommons listener Nick Gassman sent in a note about last episode’s travel insurance update and COVID-related coverage. Nick writes:
  • “In the UK, a recent survey found that whilst insurers would give you emergency medical cover if you caught COVID when you were away, none would cover you if the government advised against travel because of COVID and you therefore could not travel. Some would give you cancellation cover if you are diagnosed with COVID before travel, and others would further give cancellation cover if you had to self-isolate even without a positive test.
  • As ever with insurance, the thing is to make sure you understand the small print and to compare policies.
• Nick, thanks for that. I think the advice to “read the small print” is valid in life in general, and in travel insurance in particular. I think the pandemic and known event carve-outs lurking in the small print caught a lot of travel insurance holders back when the initial lockdowns hit. I wonder, a year on after all that, how many more people are clicking through the “Buy Travel Insurance” box at the bottom of their Expedia booking page to the full rider and doing a Control-F in their browser to search for the word “COVID”.
• In the last couple of episodes, I’ve been talking about my efforts to decipher the activity rules for British Airways’ frequent flier program to stave off a year-end extinction event for my non-insignificant stash of Avios points. Since I’m not planning to fly BA anytime soon, I booked our Ocean Beach Airbnb through a link on BA’s site and, to my surprise, I saw 1,800 Avios points automagically hit my account a week later. I can’t seem to find the expiration date to see if it updated, but I’m pretty sure this reset the 36-month clock. And it was a nice find, the Airbnb-Avios link. It let me double-dip on Avios and Chase Ultimate points. Not sure when I’ll get to spend them, but it was a nice little get.
• In the last episode, I talked about having to work through a lot of cars in the Hertz PHX lot to find one with less than 24,000 miles. In SAN, I had to work to find a car — period. We walked to the Five Star aisle and it was empty. I tried to flag down a Hertz employee, but he just waved me off. After 5 minutes or so, a car showed up. I didn’t bother to look at the mileage; we just got in and drove off. I was late for a lunch date with a fish taco. Returning the car, I did my normal drill – top off the tank, get a receipt, and then when dropping it off, place the receipt under the keys on the dashboard so the check-in guy will see it. It usually works — except this time. The receipt hits my e-mail as we’re trundling the perimeter of the airfield in the rental bus. I open it up and see a fuel charge! Really? The last time this happened was about 4 years ago in ATL. I hit Twitter and the Hertz team fixed it in a half-hour. This time, the Twitter team got back to me pretty quick asking for the rental agreement details, but then… nothing. I pinged them the next day, nothing. And the next day, nothing. So I challenged it with Amex and got the fueling charge and associated taxes credited back in a couple of days and then moved on. Until earlier this week, two weeks later, Hertz popped up on my Twitter DMs asking for more information. It’s amazing how fast their service has cratered during this bankruptcy, which makes me wonder how long it’ll take them to recover. I gotta get some good discount codes for Avis.
• There was a spate of articles this week about Uber and Lyft driver shortages. We experienced it first hand trying to get a morning ride out to ORD for our San Diego flight. I swallowed hard and agreed to a good-sized surge, waited for a while, and still had the Uber driver cancel on us at the last minute. It shouldn’t be surprising, though. Drivers left the platforms when demand cratered at the start of the pandemic, when Uber said (and this was last May when everything was shutdown) that their volume was down by 80% vs. the prior May (May 2019). And in Chicago, the run of Uber drivers getting carjacked at the beginning of this year probably didn’t help either. But with stimulus checks in the bank and vaccine rates rising, demand has snapped back, a lot faster than driver supply. The headline of the Financial Times article reads “Uber and Lyft ‘throwing money’ at US drivers to ease shortage” and says that Uber is spending $250 million on a one-time “stimulus” package of driver incentives. But even with that, it takes time to on-board even returning drivers — re-doing vehicle inspections, background checks. In episode #160, my last pre-pandemic episode back in February 2020, I talked about the shrinking difference between Uber and Lyft, and how I found myself beginning to shift back to regular cabs. These recent experiences are only accelerating that. I’m thinking I may need to reload taxi dispatch numbers back into my iPhone.
• And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send ’em along to comments@travelcommons.com — you can send a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or the Instagram account at travelcommons — or you can post comments on our fab new web site at TravelCommons.com.
• Bridge Music — Emily and the Djembe by mghicks (c) copyright 2008 Licensed under a Creative Commons Noncommercial Sampling Plus license. Ft: Emily via Briareus

Taproom Tourism

• Putting together the new website, I was thinking about what to put on the top menu. “Subscribe” and “Episodes” were given, but I also put “Food” and “Beer” because, well, I write and talk about them a lot. But then, when I clicked through the new “Beer” menu, it felt a bit sparse. I needed to add some content. And so in the craft beer tradition of collaboration beers, I pinged Rob Cheshire, a long time TravelCommons listener and now craft beer podcaster with his This Week in Craft Beer podcast, to talk about why we go out of our way to find brewery taprooms, and how he organizes his travels to hit the most taprooms he can on each visit.
  • Mark: So what are you drinking?
  • Rob: I’ve got a Bio Machine Brew Co I had on the podcast about six weeks ago.
  • Mark: I’m doing a Springbock from Half Acre, about 6.8%. It’s not a shy beer
  • Rob: Good Lunchtime beer. Yeah.
  • Mark: Taproom Tourism. Why do we go and search out brewery tap rooms as opposed to the cool beer bar?
  • Rob: You want to be drinking at the source I think is the first point. So it’s just in terms of freshness and, quite frankly, value for money, but also variety. And just everything’s better without the middleman. If I can sit and chat to the brewer while I’m drinking their beer, then so much the better. At least even the guy behind the bar is going to know a lot more about products and the nature of the business than our average barman. And, you know, as good as they might be, it’s always better dealing direct, I think.
  • Mark: As I was thinking about it, I had that same set of thoughts. First of all, there’s more selection and especially if you want to go past the usual suspects. So if you want to go past the usual IPAs, maybe random stouts and stuff like that, and the light wheat that they’ll put on to keep the non-beer drinkers happy. If you want to get past that and you want to see where that brewer is stretching their muscles a little bit, then you’re right. You gotta go to the taproom because nobody else is going to take it. And to your point also, from a cost standpoint, you’re going to be able to do flights or at least small pours, which means you’re going to be more willing to try the wacky beer.
  • Rob: Yes, definitely. I want to taste every single beer in the taproom if I can. Another aspect, I just like the atmosphere in taprooms. Some of them are super slick and fabulously well fitted out. And others are literally some barrels to sit on or empty pallets. Complete extremes of decor, but they’re always sort of charming in their own way. And there’s something about being in a brewery that pleases me, even if I’m not drinking.
  • Mark: My undergraduate degree is in chemical engineering and I never practiced as a chemical engineer. But having said that, I really like to go and look at breweries. There was one time we were in Portland. The brewery was in the basement. I’m kind of looking at going “How in the hell did they get these tanks down here?” Because there was no obvious way that you could get a massive steel tank down into this basement. And then we ended up sitting wedged in a table between three fermentation tanks. It wasn’t like we were looking at the brewery; we were in the brewery.
  • Rob: You were actually in an integral part of it. I had a very similar experience, actually, one of the new local breweries that’s opened up here in Reading that I’ve become quite friendly with called Crafty Cats, and they are brewing in an impractical barn, terribly difficult to sanitize everything. It’s a broken concrete floor. We went round this brewery, and we started actually with the finished beer and he said, Well, taste this and taste this and this and which we’re getting right back to the last one we tasted. It was the first time I’ve ever tasted what I can only describe as the overwhelming smell of brewer’s yeast you get in a brewery. That was what this liquid tasted like, and I’ve never tasted anything quite like it before. It was a really interesting experience.
  • Mark: How do you plan your taproom visits?
  • Rob: It’s all driven through Google for me. I might have some idea based on previous reading about some big-name places that I want to visit in a particular city. But beyond that, I’m just going to Google. First of all, I’ll plot a Google map for the city. I’ll end up with 50-60, maybe even 100 pins on the map. Pretty quickly, I’ll go to Untappd and look at the average brewery rating. And this really makes brewers cross how much I rely on Untappd for this type of thing because I had this conversation a load of times on the podcast with them. But I do rely on brewery ratings on Untappd, and I find it very reliable, quite frankly. If a brewery has an average rating of anything close to 4, then, obviously it’s a massive generalization to say whatever they brew, but most of their beers are gonna be great. If the brewery rating is anywhere close to 3.5, it’s going to be very mediocre at best. And somewhere in between is where most people land. So 3.6, eh…;  3.8, it’s a good brewery; 3.9 is a terrific brewery; 4 is a great brewery. And so I’m looking for those 3.8 and 3.9 average brewery ratings. But what I’m looking for, really, is that district where I can walk from one to another and really make an afternoon of it.
  • Mark: But that’s kind of the DIY spin. And I know, Rob, that you’re doing with This Week In Craft Brewing, you guys are launching tours, the Good Lord willing and COVID don’t rise…
  • Rob: Yeah. I’ve been lucky enough to travel pretty frequently to East Coast of the US for business trips, particularly the past 10 years. And so I’ve always been comfortable with traveling in the US, And in the last few years, I’ve been basing my travel around taproom visits quite frankly. And so I’ve been doing business trips where I have some business meetings, but really, what I’m doing is trying to plan my schedule so I’m in the right place at the right time each evening to visit the tap room that I want to visit. And so, I’ve become quite familiar with the tap rooms most of the way down the East Coast. Since then, I’ve got my This Week In Craft Beer business (if you want to call it a business) off the ground. It’s a fun side project. We publish a weekly newsletter and we do a weekly podcast doing a different interview with the UK Craft Brewery each week. And so, in conversation with the brewers, I started to float the idea with them, either before or afterwards, when we’re wrapping up and finishing off the beer and whatever. I would say, “Well, I’m thinking about putting together tours to the US. Does that sound like something you’d be interested in?” And so, on the back of a few of those conversations, I started to figure out that what we could do is actually promote it with the brewer and basically sell it to the brewer’s customers and have the brewer come on the tour. So we’ll put together a schedule where we’re going to visit, hopefully, some amazing tap rooms. From what I know about how brewers react to being visited by other brewers, usually they get the red carpet out. Brewers are very hospitable. It’s almost like a private members club. You know, one brewer visits another brewer, and they may be supremely welcome. So I’m hoping that we can leverage that, and I think we can put together a pretty killer 5-day, 4-night tour where we visit 2 tap rooms a day and have a fantastic curated experience at each one.
  • You may be seeding a whole other series of collabs, of cross-Atlantic collabs.
  • Rob: That would be nice. Yeah, I hope so.
  • Mark: Here’s the last thing I wanted to think about – best, worst, most unusual taproom experience. It got me thinking about the number of times that going to tap rooms, search them out, and then going out to them has taken me to parts of town that I would not normally go. I mean, it gets you out of it, busts you out of what I’ve called in the travel bubble or the tourist route.
  • Rob: I’ve been to a few places where I probably shouldn’t have been in search of tap rooms. You know, that’s the thing. Isn’t as well as you know. I think I remember once in Baltimore where I, you know, I ended up probably in a slightly down-on-its-luck neighborhood. Let’s call it that for one of the better turn of phrase. And that’s when you start to think “Well, maybe, you know, is there a taproom down here? And maybe I shouldn’t perhaps be wandering this district.” I don’t know, but I do. What I do know when I’m in the US is I can always break out my British accent and that, you know, it doesn’t matter how sort of threatening the bad guys look as soon as they hear I’m from the UK, they immediately become unofficial tour guides. And, you know, they want to point me in the right direction and give me advice and make sure I’m enjoying my visit to the city. And it is an extraordinary experience and this, you know, it’s overwhelming that level of hospitality that we always get from Americans. And that’s it’s not an exaggeration to say that I don’t think I could find myself in any part of any city where that didn’t work, and it hasn’t happened yet anyway. So probably once too many. I’ll push that luck too far. It’s worked so far anyway.
  • Mark: And again, you talk about doing business trips? I was in mid Jersey, and I found this place Demented Brewing, and I found it on Untappd. And so we head out there, we find it. It’s across the street from a glass repair shop and sort of kitty corner from a motorcycle repair shop. But no food, no food trucks or anything and said “Okay, well, we’re gonna need to lay a base here.” And so, across the street was this little place with an El Salvadorian flag hanging out the front of it. And it’s some little family restaurant/bodega thing, and we roll in there. They look at us like, “Who in the hell are you guys?” We go. We like the menu posted up on the wall. It’s like pupusa is I don’t know. We’re like, give us all of them, right? Just like give us one of all; we’re gonna do a flight of pupusas and then we went back across the street, but at that time in New Jersey, they had to give you a tour.
  • Rob: You have to do a tour. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
  • Mark: Okay, so you hit that too. You had to do a tour before you could do the sample.
  • Rob: I’ve been to more places in Jersey than probably anywhere else, actually.
  • Mark: It’s the only place I’ve had that happen has been in Jersey. Okay, “Well, you got to do a tour, then you can have beer at the tap room.” I was like, “Okay, fine. Cool.” It was a very abbreviated tour.
  • Rob: Yeah. I actually watched that policy evolve in 2018 from at the start of the year, where they were quite strict about saying yet we’ve got to give you a bit of a tour, you know. And after a while, it got to the stage where they just had laminates printed where they have shown you the map of the brewery. If you’d like us to come and show you any particular feature on this, please let us know. But just otherwise, you can just sit at the bar and look at it while you have your beer and say that obviously sort of figured out that that was sufficient to satisfy the local regulations.
  • Rob: Probably my best taproom experience in Asia was in Hanoi, Vietnam, and there’s a bar there called the Standing Bar, which I think is by far the most celebrated craft beer bar in probably the whole of Vietnam. Actually, a great selection of beer. When we were there, they had a comedy night and they’d flown in English- speaking comedy acts from a number of different Asian capitals. And it was fantastic. There’s a big local beer scene in Vietnam. It’s called Bia Hoi. It’s basically lager, 3.5-3.8% alcohol I think, but served almost ice cold in ice glasses. So it’s drunk extremely cold, and it’s very hot and humid there, of course, and these Bia Hoi bars are — to say they’re on every street is understating it. About every third shop front is a Bia Hoi bar, and they’re mostly… they’re not bars in the way that you would recognize that term. They’re oftentimes just a little sort of plastic furniture, almost in, but the front room on the ground floor, you know, So you walk in there and you sit down and they’re always really tiny because we’re obviously taller than the Vietnamese. So you know, you sort of get your knees under your chin. It felt like going back to kindergarten, where you’re going to the parents’ evening at school and you’re sitting on the tiny chairs that are designed for five- and six-year-olds. It was exactly like that, these bia hoy bars. It was a good experience drinking bia hoi.  Crap beer, of course, but you know, it was just, you know, it’s cold and very refreshing. You can drink lots of it because it’s very weak. But the point is, bia hoi is like 20 cents a pint. Something like; that is super super cheap. And the beer in the Standing Bar was, quite frankly, Western European craft beer prices and then some. You know, you were paying probably $10 plus for a pint, maybe more than that. So this was a good beer, you know, They had some good Vietnamese beers. They had imported beers from around Asia. So it was a good choice of craft beer, as I would recognize that. But 20-30 times the price of the local beers, you know. And it was bringing it back to the comedy night. Several of the comedians were absolutely ripping into the crowd, saying, “You know what? Are you guys doing it? How on earth can you justify paying the price of the beer in this bullshit bar when you could be next door drinking pints of bia hoi with the locals for 20 cents a pint? You know, it’s ridiculous. You should be ashamed of yourselves” and you are absolutely right. It was a good experience.
• Thanks again to Rob Cheshire for that collab. I hope you could tell that it was a lot of fun. Indeed, the full session ran around an hour and a half and a bit more beer. If you want to hear more of our taproom stories, head over to Rob’s This Week in Craft Beer podcast feed, he posted a longer version as a bonus Easter episode, or check out the TravelCommons website, Facebook page or YouTube channel for the full video.

Closing

• Closing music — Pictures of You by Evangeline
• OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #174
• I hope you all enjoyed the show and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.
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