To their RV friends, they’re known as the “craft beer people.” To their craft beer friends, they’re known as “the travelers.”
But online, you might know Brian Devine and Maria Scarpello better as the duo behind The Roaming Pint, a blog chronicling their RV travels to craft beer destinations. As Gerard Walen reports in the September issue of All About Beer Magazine, the couple (along with their two dogs) has traveled to more than 300 breweries aboard their 1999 Jayco RV, named Stanley.
While the issue is on newsstands, we thought it would be fun to let Scarpello and Devine take over our Instagram account for a few days and give us a peek into their life on the road.
Devine answered questions over email from South Lake Tahoe, CA, before the couple prepared for a trip through Northern California.
All About Beer: How do you typically decide where you’re going next?
BD: We try to only schedule a couple engagements each year that we commit to and those form the basis of our travels while still giving us room to improvise. This year we have a wedding, a couple international travels, and a Northwest visit planned. We use personal recommendations and BreweryMap a lot to help pick out what breweries to visit.
How often do you wake up parked at one brewery thinking you’re at a brewery in a different state?
I would say the odds of this happening were more likely early in our trip when we were moving rather quickly and travel through several states in a week. Now that we have been doing this for a while we take our time in a state and makes it easier to keep track of where we are waking up.
It looks like you had a non-beer focused blog before you started The Roaming Pint but while you were already on the road. Tell us about your decision to focus on traveling to beer destinations. Was there some kind of a-ha moment? Or did it happen over time?
We spent so much time renovating the RV and selling all our stuff that when we actually hit the road we didn’t really have a plan. The first state we visited was Colorado and we knew they had a lot of breweries so we figured let’s go check some out. We hit up Bristol Brewing in Colorado Springs and the bartenders and patrons were all really nice and gave us a bunch local tips on what we should visit and what we should avoid. It was the perfect visitors center, so we made a point to seek out local breweries on our travels. Craft beer people tend to share similar interests to us and like Sam Calagione said it’s “95% asshole free.”
We have enjoyed our beer travels so much that we thought we should share our adventures and the resources we have found with other beer lovers and thus The Roaming Pint was born.
Do you both share writing/Tweeting/Instagramming/blogging duties?
Maria runs The Roaming Pint Instagram account while I have an Instagram as well that acts kind of as an extension of that account. Maria does a good job of capturing our travels as a whole while I focus mainly on our beer exploits.
Maria did most of the work setting it up the blog and did most of the initial writing. Now that she is working full-time I have taken over as the primary writer and social media guy.
What’s a brewery you haven’t been to yet that you’d love to visit?
The best part of traveling to breweries is that you get to experience the area as well as the beer. With that in mind I would list Telluride Brewing Co. and Alaskan Brewing Co. as two places we would like to visit for the combination of the beer and the location.
Do you ever think about settling down in one place? If so, where?
Nope. We initially hit the road thinking it would be a good way to explore the country and find a new place to settle down. However, the longer we traveled the more the idea of staying in one place seems crazy to us. The lifestyle we are living now allows us to see new and amazing parts of the is country and visit friends we would rarely see otherwise.
