About Us

The Brewery Lovers have been visiting craft breweries since long before craft beer exploded. You had to search far and wide to find a craft brewery, when we started out.

Suffice to say, things have changed a little. Nowadays, you can barely swing a cat without hitting a craft brewery. With more opening every week—our quest to find the best accelerated. And after spending years trying to visit as many as we could, a light bulb flickered on. We won’t live forever. Why not expand the territory and visit even more?

Like, all-over-the-country more.

You know you have stumbled on a good idea when it won’t go away, right? That germ of a seed of a concept kept poking its head above the chaos of work, kids, house, cars—as we financed the American dream.

But how do you visit breweries in all the lower 48 with the house, the cars, the job … ? It slowly came into focus. We’d take the show on the road. American Dream 2.0. We sold the house, got rid of our stuff, bought an RV and hit the road. An epic journey to discover the U.S.A., one brewery at a time.

You’re invited to join the adventure.

A brief history of the Brewery Lovers

The Brewery Lovers are on a mission; discovering America’s best microbreweries, one craft beer at a time.

But the story starts much earlier. Before craft beer happened, we settled for import lager. That was pretty much the most flavorful beer you could get in the U.S. in the late 80s, but it was only slightly more flavorful than the sole alternative; American Industrial Light Lighter Lightest.

The game changer came when we first visited the UK in 1985. We discovered something completely alien in North America; beer with flavor. That was the epiphany moment. Two weeks of beer bliss.

Then, frustration.

Back on Yankee soil, we searched high and low for anything like it. We failed, finding only the same surfeit of the same crappy beer. A hundred labels and flavors, all delivering a virtually identical making-love-in-a-canoe* flavor profile. Yeah, you could get Bass Ale, but Bass Ale in a bottle is nothing like the what get on tap in the UK. Now and again, we’d find a dusty old bottle of something interesting down on the bottom shelf. But it had generally been sitting there so long that whatever flavor it started with had long faded. Or worse, it was spoiled and self-ejected as soon as the bottle was opened.

Only one solution; learn to brew our own. That was our beer lifeboat through the 90s, experimenting through both UK and Continental styles—bitter, stout, Kölsch, alt, brown, mild, Abbey, strong—we could make almost anything we could think of, as good as store-bought and drink it fresh for half the price.

That invariably led to writing about beer and breweries, in Brew Your Own magazine, Brewpub magazine and for the companion website to Michael Jackson’s Beer Hunter TV series on Discovery, among other places.

Obsessed with flavorful beer, when we traveled, we always visited a craft brewery. Or a dozen. We’ve been checking states off the list since the early days.

One of our first craft brewery visits was in the First State, hanging out with Sam Calagione as he brewed 10 gallons on his original system at his little brewpub in Lewes, Delaware. (You may have heard of it. Dogfish Head.) We’ve since sought and found good beer in California, Oregon, Washington, Maine, New Hampshire, Massachusetts, New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Maryland, D.C., Virginia, West Virginia, Tennessee, North Carolina and South Carolina. (Plus Australia, Panama, Holland, Portugal, England, Scotland and Ireland, but who’s counting?)

One day, a light bulb flickered on. We like beer. We like visiting breweries. And we’re not gonna live forever. Why not expand the territory and visit more breweries, more often? That germ of a seed of a concept kept poking its head above the chaos of work, kids, house, cars—as we financed the American dream.

And it morphed into American Dream, 2.0. We sold the house, gave away most of everything we owned and bought an RV. We’re writing (and filming) the next chapter in an epic journey to discover the U.S.A., one craft brewery at a time.

You should follow along. It will be fun.