Today I am going to do something I haven’t done in a while. I am going to tell you guys a memorable beer story from my travels over the years. We are going to rewind the clock almost a decade back to the Summer of 2015. We are going to talk about my first trip to Short’s Brewing Company in Bellaire, Michigan.
Until about the year 2018, every Summer in the month of August, I would head up North for a week to the town of Maple City to celebrate my friend and follower of the page, Evan Alexander’s birthday. We stayed at his family’s cabin with various different friends every year and went fishing, played disc golf, went on hikes, cooked good food, went to the casinos and of course visited breweries, distilleries and wineries.
The Summer of 2015 rolled around and when I was getting ready for our annual trip, I realized that my Mother and I had concert tickets for the weekend that I was set to leave for the up North trip.
As a result, I had to wait until Monday and drive up separately from my friends and meet them on Monday. At the time, I was driving a 1996 Mercury Grand Marquis and was trying to save up for a new car. This car was very reliable and was a tank until the day I drove it to the junk yard in 2016 but it had 250,000 miles plus on it at the time. It was a great local driver, but I did not want to take it on a long trip and risk breaking down on the drive to Maple City. I decided it would be better to rent a car for the day and drive to Traverse, have my friends meet me and drop off the rental car.
My Mother and I went to the Palace of Auburn Hills, which is no longer with us, the Sunday before I left for my trip to see Motley Crue and Alice Cooper. We went to lunch at another brewery before the concert, 51 North in Lake Orion, which is also no longer with us. In all honesty, I forgot that another brewery tied into this story before I started typing it. I got a flight while we were there and we had some food to line our stomachs for tailgating for the concert. I was not on untappd at the time, I couldn’t even begin to remember the beers that I tried on our visit.
We started tailgating at around 3 in the afternoon in the parking lot of The Palace. I remember crushing a 6 pack of Two Hearted before the concert. My Mom drank her 6 pack of Bud Light Lime, I have tried so many times over the years to get her to enjoy good beer, alas she is stuck in her ways. We had run out of beers and still wanted to tailgate, I popped open my trunk and there was a bottle of Kahlua in my trunk that was like a quarter full. I don’t know how long it had been there, I don’t know when it was put there, but I decided to pour it over ice and drink it. This is the bad decision where the night starts to get a little hazy for me.
We ordered another beer once we got into the concert and then we went to our seats. After this, a concert happened, we walked from our seats to the car, my mom drove us home and I fell asleep. To say that I remember all of these events happening would be a stretch of the imagination, like I said the details got hazy for me.
Therefore I woke up to leave for up North at 8 am on Monday, absolutely loving life. A massive headache, uneasy stomach and a 4 hour drive ahead of me, this was going to be fun. My mom took me to the local Enterprise to pick up my car rental so that I could start my journey up North. The car that they gave me for the rental was a glorified go-kart, it was tiny and sounded like it was dying anytime I pushed it over 70 mph. This really helped my uneasy stomach, a lot. About halfway through the journey, I started to think that the only thing that was going to settle my stomach and ease my headache was some hair of the dog.
I met my friends in Traverse City four hours later, we met in the Meijer’s parking lot. I asked Evan what plans we had for the day. He responded by saying that there were no plans for the afternoon. I had cooked up a crazy idea on my drive and proposed that we still have the car rental until 6 pm. Let’s leave his car at Meijer’s and head up to Short’s in Bellaire for the afternoon. We had talked about going to Short’s on a few occasions and we just never went through with it, this was the perfect opportunity to finally pay Short’s a visit.
Our friends Doug, Lisa and Theresa were all with Evan, so we all piled into this tiny piece of shit car that I was driving and headed towards Bellaire for a couple of hours at Short’s before we had to return the car rental. It took us approximately an hour to reach Bellaire and we arrived at about 2 pm. This gave us until 5 to enjoy ourselves before we had to leave to return the car rental before Enterprise closed at 6.
We proceeded to enjoy the next 3 hours at Short’s, I only had 2 beers during our visit since I had to drive us back. I don’t remember the beers that I specifically had on this visit, but we all had a great time, enjoyed some food and a couple of great beers at Short’s Brewing Company.
5 o’clock hit and we all rushed to the car to get back to Traverse in time before the car rental was due back. We hit the road and made it back at 5:52 pm, just in time to drop the car off before Enterprise closed for the evening. At that point we went along our merry way and enjoyed the rest of our week up North doing our normal trip activities.
I decided to write this piece today to show that getting to the brewery and enjoying the beer is only a small part of my travels. It is the engine that drives my travels, but there are so many other components that make my travels to breweries rewarding. The places along the way that are visited, the things I would never have seen, the circumstances surrounding the trips, the people that I do it with and the memories that are made are the reasons that I continue to visit these places. Every brewery I have visited over the years has another story attached to it that I use to remember my visits to specific breweries. To all the breweries that continue to brew beers so that I can have an entire story to tell about my visit to your brewery, I salute you. Cheers!
#cheers #beer #beerlovers #brewery #brewerylife #craftbeer #drinklocal #michiganbeer #roadtrip
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