Greetings all, and a Happy Friday to you! I’ve been asked to write a guest diary for FNBB documenting my recent four week trip to Europe, which focused on the Alps of Germany, Austria, Italy, and Switzerland. I’ll be breaking this diary into two parts. Tonight’s entry will describe the first two weeks, starting with an airplane landing and overnight in Munich, subsequent day and evening in Innsbruck Austria, then down to the Italian Alps for two one week stays, plus some overnights in different locations. This will be part travelogue and part beer blog, describing parts of the trip, and including regular indulgence in sampling local beers, wine, and food along the way.
Just a travel note or two first. I’m primarily an outdoors person, with particular interest in mountain and lake country. The majority of this diary will show outdoors scenery and small towns along the way, with their culinary and beverage samplings. In order to access a lot of remote mountain areas and towns for sightseeing and hiking, my wife and I rented a car for the month. The entire trip was planned starting a year in advance, when Covid was initially raging. It was my sense that the pandemic would be under control a year from then, so we took the risk of making reservations.
We left in late August last month, still unsure of whether new clampdowns would be forthcoming as the Delta variant raged. Luckily, we only needed to show full vaccination to fly in to Europe, and would have to show a negative Covid test to return to the US, which we did three days before returning. Most of our destinations had indoor mask requirements, and some indoor locations required vax cards too. Everywhere we went, people seemed to comply reasonably, without ever throwing tantrums in our experience. Oh, to be a civilized European…
We flew out of San Francisco and landed in Munich after taking in a lot of movies shown on the plane, which makes for a much more enjoyable flight. And no, fortunately this converted AirstreamPlane above was not our mode of travel, but was a little BBQ serving popup at the Munich airport.
Staying a night in a local hotel near Munich, we were greeted with a coupon for a free beer, a nice surprise, though a relatively weak (for my hoppy preferences) local Weihenstephaner was the best I could muster up. Still, it was a way for them to get us to try their restaurant, which had a mos’ scotious veggie Thai dish, which suited me just fine.
On to Innsbruck the next day for an overnight stay, only 2-3 hours down the road into Austria.
Innsbruck sits in the Austrian Alps, surrounded by mountains and a sense that the winters will be long and snowy. Above is a view of part of the old town square. Again, the receptionists greeted us with a free beer coupon (a tradition I could get used to), which I converted into their well known Austrian Trumer Pils on tap in their modern, comfortable lounge. Later that evening it was a Stiegl beer, a commonly available offering from the Saltzburg area. Both somewhat thin, light, and not particularly special, but adequate for the situation.
The next day we drove into northern Italy, into the Italian Alps, also known as the Dolomites, for a week’s stay. The Dolomites contain many formations of sharp, light colored peaks with spectacular angular rock formations amongst the forested mountains. It is a popular summer destination and winter skiing tourist area, along with having a rich ancient Tyrolean culture of mountain farmers with beautifully ornate chalets and buildings, and their colorful traditional costumes that are displayed in occasional local celebrations and fairs. Cows are omnipresent on the many green fields and pastures, and local cheeses are a specialty. Ubiquitous cowbells add melodies to the meadows. The Dolomites are a beautiful and charming area, and have become one of my favorite places to visit over the years.
I enjoy getting out daily into the mountain towns and trails for explorations and hikes while visiting. The localities all publish local trail maps on free colorful brochures with renderings of the mountains to show you the location of hiking and biking trails, gondola lifts to access higher trails, and give you a sense of the topography and elevation changes of the trails, some of which can be pretty challenging. I typically take some fresh bread with cheese, chocolate, and a beer on each hike, breaking for the refreshment near a halfway point, usually with a nice view.
Below are some photos from my hikes in the region we stayed in the first week.
Signs placed widely out on the trails and in the towns help you find your way on the myriad paths.
Notice how small the people, cows and buildings in this valley appear next to the mountains and rock cliffs, below.
One of the locales for a nearby hike was the reservoir and dam where they filmed a winter scene for the remake of the movie The Italian Job in the early 2000s. You can see that reservoir in this photo below, and the trail up high on the left side. I’m a fairly fast hiker, and use hiking poles, but a local younger farmer was on this trail and left me in the dust. I was impressed by his steady rapid downhill gait over rocky and steep terrain, without any poles to assist. He was also carrying a small rake over his shoulder as he walked. Not to rake the forest, but the hay fields into bales, which you still see them doing on the small family farms in these mountains.
Some of the most spectacular higher trails are more easily accessible from the numerous gondolas and chairlifts operated all summer, and which are probably partly the reason that you regularly see older folks in their late 60s into their 70s and occasionally 80s on the trails. Otherwise, there are some killer climbs to get up there. Below are a few views on trails I took from these gondola lifts.
A nice feature of the Alps is the prevalence of mountain huts, called Refugios in Italy, that offer a resting spot typically with views from dining patios, and sometimes overnight rustic lodging. While I only did day hikes, I stopped in at a few Refugios for Apple Strudels and a brew. Here is a photo of a pretty basic one that I stopped at near my turnaround point that day:
Because the main theme of this blog is the brews, it’s time to break in here for a bit away from the travel scenery to the libations. I posted a comment a few weeks back on my selections during this first week of the trip, so I’ll just repeat the ones I had again here, with a picture of my favorite of the week. Getting my feet wet so to speak with the local beers, I just grabbed a number off the shelves that were available. These included the well known Italian Moretti, Austrian Sonnen Brau, a German Warsteiner and Hofbau Original, an Italian Forst (very common in this area) and a Dolomiti, and a German DAB Dortmunder Export. None of these were as tasty to me as my usual California craft IPAs, but of these, The Dolomiti, Moretti, and Dortmunder were reasonably good. My favorite though was this local rarity in the shapely bottle, which I mentioned a few weeks back, the Aso Alto Intrepida Golden Ale. Richer tasting and better rounded, it’s one I would drink at home:
It’s not all just about the beer though. There are also the local cheeses and chocolates that they’ve developed and improved from centuries of experience. The nice packaging adds to the experience, with another new beer here that I tried, the Pedavena, a light to medium bodied brew similar to many others there, and a local cheese favorite, the Puzzone di Moena. According to some information I read about it, this cheese is ripened in caves with a high level of humidity which increases the fermentation of the paste. Whatever they do, it tasted great to me!
One of the other outstanding features of the Dolomites is the thoughtfulness and care they put into the detailed designs and mountain aesthetic of their small town chalets, churches, and buildings. Here are some of the ones that I found appealing in our walks and drives around the towns. There were many, many more though, of various designs and colors, with intricate wood carvings and flower baskets adorning the exteriors.
This photo below is a street scene from Cortina d’Ampezzo, which will host the 2026 Winter Olympics. We took a day trip over there from our base town in the Val di Fassa. Those Italian mountain roads are winding and curvy like nobody’s business. Lots of tunnels and eye popping road engineering as well.
After a week in the Dolomites, we moved on to a ski resort area above Lake Iseo, one of the large lakes in northern Italy’s lake country between Lake Garda and Lake Maggiore. This area’s mountains are less grandly spectacular than the Dolomites, but still high and steep, with more rounded hilltops thickly filled with dense forests and some rock outcroppings. It was a bit warmer and less busy near the Lake Iseo area, but still the warmth and hospitality of the Italian people comes through. Here I found my first and favorite IPA of the trip, the local Pagus Red IPA shown in the title photo of the diary (along with some fine olive oil and balsamic to give the food a sprinkling).
Following are some scenes around the ski resort area, near Lake Iseo, and hiking trails above it.
There was one particularly good restaurant at the resort, where I found the Pagus Red IPA that I mentioned. The restaurant was perched nicely on a hill with the dining patio overlooking the valley below. Here’s the restaurant with the red and pale yellow patio umbrellas from a distance, one of our tasty Italian meals, and a portion of the patio view.
A few other brews were pretty good during this stay. The Tennent’s Super was an Italian Strong Lager with a 9% ABV, higher than most here, and the Ceres Strong Ale is a Danish export with a 7.7% ABV. Both punched out a nice kick for their size. The Ceres seemed a bit more well rounded to me though.
One day trip that I took away from the lake area went to a nice valley hike up to higher elevation to the north of Lake Iseo. One thing I noticed is that there seems to be a lot of logging throughout the Italian Alps. The forests are very thick, and much of the logging seems to be selective harvesting rather than clearcutting. They seem to use the harvested logs widely in creating roughly hewn fencing and other practical applications that abound and give the construction a rustic mountain element. Here is a town near Valpiana where I hiked, and a section of the trail showing harvested logs and some simple fencing from it. The towns have mountain architecture, but the buildings seem less ornate than in the Dolomites. There was a Refugio along the trail that sold some delicious cheese made from the cows grazing right in their valley. I sat at a picnic table next to a bubbling stream while I ate it and downed my Moretti brew.
On one of my other hikes, the trail went right through what looks like a hunting camp with a camouflage shelter. Apparently hunting season had just started in early September when I was there, but nobody was occupying it that day. I’m no hunter, but read that in Italy they keep birds in cages on site to attract other birds that they hunt. This looks like it may be one of those cages to the left of their shelter.
Apparently you’re never too far from Catholicism in Italy either. This little monument appeared carved into a tree stump at the entrance to the hunting camp. Don’t ask me why, nor to translate the writing.
They also use branches of the trees cut nearby for some cross bar structures attached to trees in their camps, although I’m not sure exactly how they use them. Pretty industrious, it appears. At least they don’t just slash and burn everything. Notice the red and white trail marker on the tree in the middle too. The trail passed right through here. A hint of Fall colors was just beginning.
Well, that’s one slice of the first two weeks of our trip. Pretty idyllic, and the weather generally cooperated. From there, we moved on to Lake Como Italy for an overnight, and then into Switzerland and Bavaria for a few more weeks to finish the trip.
As for everyone else, as esquimaux would say, what are you drinking tonight? Who’s brewing?