Brewsterwalk 2017

Another summer has rolled past in southern Virginia and fall festivals have begun to seep into our calendar.  If the 2017 Brewsterwalk Craft Beer Festival can serve as an omen for our upcoming fall festivities, we are in phenomenal shape for a great pre-Christmas season.

The 2015 Brewsterwalk is where we discovered the locally brewed Raven’s Roost porter by Parkway.  It’s now a regular in our refrigerator.  This was our first beer festival with Mom, a die-hard Budweiser fan.  It’s been a challenge to find beers for her but we have been making some headway. We’ve discovered that she likes some Kolschs and some hefeweizens.  Her hands down favorite so far has been Mountain Valley Hops’ Vulture’s Roost (a double IPA with a fruity twist). That’s great, since Mountain Valley Hops is the first craft beer brewer in Henry County and they have a great little brewery/pub in Axton, not far away.

There were two stand-outs for us this year. Everyone loved Chaos Mountain‘s Edge of the Sun Lager.  Chaos Mountain is about an hour’s drive north of us and its really on a mountain.  The turn off from 220 is around Boone’s Mill and you follow a seriously winding road up through fields and woods to their brewery.  It’s a great idea for coupling a craft beer stop with some leaf peeping and they have some great brews (all very high ABV, so watch out if you’re driving).

The other great find was Danville-based Ballad’s dunkel hefeweizen, a dark wheat beer. We are going to have to make it over to Danville one of these days.

So we set up our chairs and sat back, drinking a great variety of beer and listening to great music.  There were two great bands: Mission in the Rain with Josh Shillings and Yarn. The music was so good, in fact, that we bought the latest Yarn CD and would have gotten one of Mission’s too, had they brought any.

The folks who put this together did a bang-up job. There is very little room for improvement. Food trucks weren’t advertised but they were there.  Hylton’s Grill was there as well as a food truck from the Roanoke restaurant Fork in the Market.  Excellent choices. Word to the wise: the buildings cast more and more shade on the area in front of the stage as the afternoon passes.

If you’ve ever thought about going to a Brewsterwalk but haven’t, you are missing out. This is an annual event held each year in September. Be sure to check it out if you are in the area.