Hop on the Brew Trail

While you probably have your spot staked out and your cooler stocked with your fave sudsy treats for tonight’s firework festivities, you may well have forgotten all about planning something for this weekend. Consider heading north on a pilgrimage of the liquidy sort to Central New York, where you can check out over 30 breweries, brew pubs, tap-happy watering holes, and cideries in and around the great city of Syracuse.

Once upon a time a hundred or so years ago, greater Binghamton, Madison, Oneida, Onondaga, Otsego and Schoharie counties were the hoppin’ hop capital of the country, believe it or not, to the tune of 3 million pounds annually by the mid-nineteenth century. But by the early twentieth, blight, bugs, and booze-shunning (e.g., Prohibition) put the hops industry out of business in New York state. Over the last couple of decades, though, a multitude of beer-happy haunts have popped up here and, thanks to the organization Brew Central, are accessible via a great, new, sippin’-centric website to help you grab the whole Omme-gang (see what we did there? Beer humor!) and plan out an edible escape of the sudsy kind. Cheers!