A Sydney Beer Crawl

My wife is working in Sydney so I inadvertently ended up on a solo beer crawl last Tuesday. I'd been to most of the bars/hotels before but I had to be doubly sure of what I thought!

I started at the Lowenbrau Keller in the Rocks (for a meeting). I didn't know it had been there in some form since about 1971... Instead of then going home (Kel wasn't getting home until late), I then moved on to the Lord Nelson (great atmosphere there. I could have stayed there all night), the Australian Hotel before checking out the Belgian Beer Cafe and then the Bavarian Beer Cafe in York Street. Finally, I ended up at Redoak shooting the breeze with co-owner Janet until I went home.

There's other beer-friendly bars in Sydney I'd still like to try but it wasn't a bad effort.

World's best brewery tours

While I've been lucky to have propped up some of the world's great beer bars (in the name of research) and will drink at many more in the years ahead, I'd like to visit more of the the world's great breweries and taste beer at the source (for yet more research).

I remember reading an article by Willie Simpon about his visits to great breweries in Europe. Today, I found this article from Forbes magazine on the web and it'd make a great starting point. Maybe I could knock a few off the list when I'm overseas next year!