The Trappist Punks are explorers of this vast world. We brew beer. We taste beer. We talk about it, drive hours just to find new ones, and try to learn more about this wonderful beverage, how it’s made, and the people who keep the beer world alive. The more we learn the more we find is left to learn. That’s why we’ve decided to share our journey with you, because together we can see further.

Like most things, it all started simply with a series of small, seemingly inconsequential experiences. A brewery tour here, and brewpub there, a failed experiment with a Mr. Beer kit. Over the past five years our interest has turned into a virtual obsession. We seek beer while travelling, from coast to coast, to our neighbors in the north, and even to North Korea. Hogan in particular is becoming frighteningly obsessed with the technical side of brewing and how the magic four ingredients – malt, hops, water, and yeast – can produce such a wide variety of different beers, and the imaginative mad scientists behind the creation process.

We are not beer snobs. I’m not even sure either of us have ever met a beer snob. We are, however, passionate beer people. Sometimes beer people can seem a bit unapproachable to newcomers, like they speak another language. This needn’t be the case; we feel you can geek out on beer without losing everyone else in the room, if you do it right. We also feel that while it is sometimes exciting to hear about strange local customs from around the world or obscure farmhouse breweries, what we all really need is a usable road map to navigate the beer world. That is what we hope to provide. And we look forward to the help of our readers on this one, because after all, we can only draw a usable map for our own little corner of the world, and the few places we’ve been.

So you have a choice. You can go back to the warm embrace of your fizzy yellow corporate masters, or you can look a little deeper and see what else there is for you, a little deeper in the cooler.