Bucks/Lehigh Valley Beer and Wine Trail

We had so much fun at last year's South Side Bethlehem Brew Pub Crawl, that we're going to return this year to once again celebrate the best of South Side craft brew culture.

This year's crawl will be somewhat different than last year's. We'll hit some new stops but keep things concentrated in the South Side Historic District, close to Steel Stacks. This year's crawl will also feature cider and mead in addition to beer.

We'll start things off at Country Club Brewing on Pierce Street. Oddly enough, this brewery opened its doors right around the same time I started this meetup group, late in 2022. The Burger Shack food truck is there if you want to get lunch. Or order in or bring food to any of the other stops on the tour.

We'll head to the South Bethlehem Greenway from there, adding a new stop this year at the Five Maidens Cider Company on Polk Street. If you don't want to show cider a little love, they pour some local microbrews as well.

From there, we'll head back to the Greenway and down to Bonn Place Brewing on Taylor Street, where the motto is Nice Beers for Nice People. It's on the small side, but it's hip and cool and the beer's pretty good too.

We'll return to East 3rd for the fourth stop on this year's tour: the Colony Meadery. This is a new stop as well. The specialty is mead--alcohol made from honey--but they also pour eight different Weyerbacher draughts.

It'll be dinner time once we're done there so that brings us to the fifth and final stop: The F&A Grog House, a beer bar with 52 different beers on tap. And South Bethlehem Restaurant Week specials!

If you feel really ambitious, you can continue on to Seven Sirens Brewing Company on Broadway, arguably Bethlehem's most famous and largest brewery and the Lehigh Valley's only brewery with beer hall. But that's optional. You'll still get at least four stamps in your Lehigh Valley Brewers Guild passport. That's 1/6th of the total. You'll have a chance to get your Seven Sirens stamp in Easton later this summer, stay tuned for more on that.

And there are free concerts at Steel Stacks and Artsquest if you want to keep the party going into the evening.

Plan to join us for all or part of the afternoon for this day-long celebration of our local craft brew culture.

See you there!

We're going to have an encore presentation of one of our most popular meetups of last summer when we return to Easton to walk the Karl Stirner Arts Trail and sample the beer and wine offerings at the Simon Silk Mill complex.

So join us bright and early Saturday morning to kick off the festivities with a 3 1/2-mile walk on the Karl Stirner Arts Trail, from the Simon Silk Mill to the foot of College Hill and the Lafayette College campus, and back. The roundtrip should take about an hour and a half.

Lunch and drinks will follow at the Simon Silk Mill's newest tenant, the brand new Ranch City Brewing, which is in the former Boser Geist Brewing space. From there, we'll move on to the Easton Wine Project urban winery, followed by Seven Sirens' Brewing Co.'s Blendery space.

As for the silk mill itself, brothers Herbert and Robert Simon opened the silk mill in 1883 on 13th Street along the Bushmill Creek in Easton. In its heyday, it employed more than 1200 workers and had more than 1500 pieces of machinery in operation. It was one of 75 silk mills in the Lehigh Valley alone and 300 in the state of Pennsylvania. But cheaper foreign competition pretty much destroyed the local silk industry and by the 1960s, the mill shuttered, falling into disrepair over the decades.

In the early 2000s, plans were made to level most of the complex and turn it into ballfields and a community center. Easton's Redevelopment Authority bought the old mill in 2006. But instead of tearing it down, it worked to redevelop the property. Four years later, VM Development Group was hired to turn the old mill into a mixed-use development with apartments, warehouses and retail space. The first businesses opened there in 2016.

Fast-forward to 2025 and we now have two breweries and a winery at the old mill. And a walking trail with public art spaces along the way.

So again, we'll meet at the trail head at 13th Street by 11:30. There's a parking lot there as well as other options for parking. If you're not up for the walk, meet us at Ranch City around 1. Or join us at another stop on the crawl.

See you there!

In keeping with the theme this month, we're going to schedule another trail walk and brewery event, this time heading to Whitehall to walk the 5-mile Ironton Rail Trail loop, then reward ourselves with beer and lunch at the Hawk Mountain Brewery.

Hawk Mountain opened its tap room in Whitehall just about a year ago, though it had been brewing beer at its production facility in New Tripoli for nearly five years before that. Current beers on tap include various IPAs, a honey saison, a hefeweizen, a white wine/beer hybrid known as AlpenGlow, coffee stout, Czech-style pilsner, hard seltzer, and regular and light lagers. They also have a cocktail menu, plus wines from Weathered Vineyards and the Easton Wine Project. The onsite kitchen makes hot and cold sandwiches, hot dogs, wings, fries, pierogies, nachos and more.

Join us for the walk if you're feeling really ambitious in the morning. Otherwise, just meet at the tap room by 1ish for drinks and food. Should be fun either way. See you there!