Visit Date: August 25, 2021
When we moved here, I had great intentions of spending time with friends I had not seen for 30 years or so. I'm old. It's true. I've got friends from High School and College who all live in and around the DC area. We chat on facebook, we make plans. The pandemic and life in general just set things back sometimes. It breaks my heart a little.
One of my college roommates and her husband live out to the west of us off I-66, about an hour away. They share a birthday, they're selling their house and moving away, and they threw a shindig to have a hurrah and huzzah before departure.
It was on a Wednesday night, and normally I never go anywhere (I hardly go anywhere anyway) on a "school night" as it were, but for a shared birthday and a goodbye? How could I pass that up.
They held it at the Farm Brewery at Broad Run, which looks shiny, new, expensive, and where Life Is Brewtiful. Yeah, I bought the T-shirt.
It's a farm, that's for sure, with six acres of all kinds of pastoral beauty with a giant freshly built beer barn, a gorgeous outdoor grill space with ample seating, tons of field picnic table seating, and the latest and greatest in entertainment while drinking beer - Axe Throwing. It looks like the kind of place where on a weekend like this, you're not going to find a parking space or a table, even though they are for sure ready to host people. I bet it is jam packed right this minute.
It was lovely to spend time with our friends, and meet their friends. It's bittersweet knowing they'll be moving along and away, but that's life. Hey, at least we squeezed in a lovely time at a great location before they go. No regrets here!
We didn't drink a lot, we had two of their brews. First was the Rooster King, and I'm sorry this picture came out kind of out of focus. The lighting was a bit wonky with the late afternoon sun coming in from behind.
This beer was delicious, a little lighter of a flavor than you'd expect by looking at the red caramel color. Our friend Mark kept buying pitchers of it, so we kept drinking it.
Doug does his due diligence when we go to a brewery since neither of us should drink a whole ton of beer, so as to keep the A1C at bay.
He likes to know what to expect from the taps, and he decided he wanted to try the Smolder, which is a Rauchbier, a smoked ale.
I didn't argue with him, I hadn't done any research and when I drank the beer I guess my face was one of disappointment.
The description on the website says it is a traditional ale, known as Polish Champagne. He liked it very much, I did not. I don't like Rauchbiers, for the same reason I don't like a lot of coffee from places where it tastes like burning. It isn't a flavor I groove with.
But it was pretty, and the light of the evening at the farm while we looked to the north shone through the pitcher. He got to drink most of it, and thankfully the ABV on this one is in the #% range because otherwise he would have been feeling it.
We ended up hanging out until the place closed. There was a lot to catch up on, and 2 of our friends' friends were there to babysit our friends and get them home safe. There were a lot of emotions, and my college roommate had some tears. I know what it is like to move away from all your people, having recently done it, and by the looks of things they were surrounded by good friends.
Well, dear friends, I didn't get a picture of all of us but we got this one of me and the old roomie. I forgive you for making fun of my teddy bear behind my back when I wasn't in the room, and for always coming in and turning on the overhead lights at 2 in the morning and turning on music when I was sleeping. Happy trails to you in your next endeavors and maybe let's not wait 30 years before we see each other again.
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