Deep in dark days of Booze Free February, my wife and I saw a post on Miami Bike Scene for the Beer Snob Bicycle Pub Crawl. It’s like this event was tailor made for me, falling just outside my self-imposed beer moratorium, and a wonderful chance to find some places for good beer in Miami while getting a bike ride in. My wife was nice enough to put together an afternoon/evening of Miami exploration herself, and dropped me off at Lincoln Road, where I walked my bike in to Zeke’s Roadhouse.
I’ve noticed Zeke’s before when we’ve been down at the Lincoln Road Mall, but I’ve never gone in. It’ll definitely go on my short list of places to go in Miami when I have friends in town. Four dollars for any of their excellent beers is what passes for a killer deal in Miami. I started off with a Titan IPA, which was a wondeful way to start the evening. When I arrived, I estimated there were 20 or so bikes chained together in front of Zeke’s. As I finished my Titan and moved on to a Black Bavarian (that was a Wisconsin beer?), people kept rolling in. I’m a terrible estimator, but I’d say we were at least a crowd of 100. With 224 confirmed on the Facebook page, I’m sure it was more.
I saw people mounting up, so I latched on to a group heading to the second location, The Abbey Brewing Company. The ride over was incredibly pleasant and the weather couldn’t have been nicer. The Abbey brews their own beer, and I started out with their IPA, which is hands down the best homebrewed/brew pub IPA I’ve ever had. I ran into the owner of one of our favorite places in Ft. Lauderdale, Brew Urban Cafe. I definitely wish there were more places like his in our area.
The ride to The DRB was definitely the most scenic, taking us over the Venetian Causeway down to the bar across from the Adrienne Arsht Center. The DRB was mainly full of people either on their way to or from Wicked, but was another nice place I didn’t know existed. I got a bit less adventurous, and went with my old standby, a Dogfish Head 90 Minute IPA. Having arrived at The DRB with one of the first groups, I got the Dogfish Head pretty quickly. By the time I finished it, I decided I needed something with some caffeine. The rest of the group had arrived by now, and I didn’t want to fight the crowd at the bar, so I rode over to a convenience/liquor store up the street.
I made my purchase, and started riding back to the bar. I got stopped at a light on the corner by the liquor store, and there was an older woman heading my direction on a bike stopped as well. I asked her if she was heading back to the bar as well, and she said, “No, I don’t really do that. I’m just out here trying to make some money.” I inquired as to her line of work, and she replied, “Sexual healing. Lots of men enjoy my services.” Even the prostitutes on bikes. Now that’s a bike town.
The last ride turned out to be the roughest, heading from the Arsht Center all the way down to The U. Not a super long ride, but the whole crowd is, um, in the spirit of the evening by this point, and it seemed that people who knew where they were going were few and far between. (I did not know where I was going myself.) The pack I was riding in hung together fairly well, but started to space out quite a bit. Finally we made a right turn, and most of the pack rode right up the ramp onto I-95. A group of six of us decided that might not be the wisest move and broke off to stay off interstate highways.
We took side streets down until we made it to Dixie Highway, then got on the excellent off road path underneath the Metrorail. I busted a pedal on the way in (damn cheap pedals, I’ve had nothing but problems with these), but arrived there safely just a few minutes before my wife. I said goodbye and got on home.
All in all, about 13.5 miles of riding. The crowd was definitely mainly Miami locals, but I ran into quite a few people from the Ft. Lauderdale area. It would be great if we could organize an event like this further north. I felt a bit silly driving 45 miles to go ride my bike, but I’d definitely ride out for something like this in Broward County. Thanks again to the organizers, I had a blast.
