Just a Small Town Ride

Strangers cycling,

Sipping on some Boulevard

Their wheels spinning in the night

Streetlights, people, living just to find cold beer

Riding somewhere in the night

**To the tune of Journey's "Don't Stop Believing"**

Thursday was the second installment of the Tour de Brew LNK ride, hosted by Cycle Works & Moran's Liquor Works featuring beer from Boulevard Brewing Company with all proceeds benefiting the great folks at the Lincoln Bike Kitchen. We missed the first event last month because we were preparing to leave for Minnesota to do some Fat Biking on the river bottoms, missing the first ride seems to be a pattern for us as we seem to have missed the first ride of each year it seems. Might be something we will need to change next year, these rides are such a great time it's a shame to miss them. 

New this year is a chance to win this Surly Pugsley single speed Fat Bike in  the awesome Grape Soda colorway, all it takes is buying the winning $20 raffle ticket but you better hurry because they are limiting the number of tickets to only 240. Once the tickets are all sold the bike will be raffled off, so one lucky person is going to get a really sweet $1,900 bike for only $20 and it could be you, personally I like the 1 in 240 odds.

Also new for this ride were cookies from Kitchen Sink Cookie Company and they were delicious. 

We tried the Mexican Hot Chocolate (top) which is cinnamon, cayenne, chocolate and toasty mallow and the Tokyo-Whitman-Tokyo which is ginger, chocolate, miso and black sesame, if you love cookies, sweats or both, I highly recommend stopping by the Kitchen Sink Cookie Company and picking up a few. 

As is usually the case for these events, there was a really good turn out of cyclists and beer drinkers a like. 

The Lincoln Bike Kitchen was out in full force for the ride, we joined up with their group and headed off to the Railyard to search for more beer and good food. 

Pretty big group of us riding down to the Railyard, the pictures really don't do Ed's orange shirt justice that sucker was blinding bright and really messed with the exposure on the camera, lots of tweaking was necessary to get the other parts of the pictures not to look so dark. On the bright side (pun intended) Ed shouldn't have to worry about a motorist not seeing him... from the moon. 

Longwells  was having some food and drink specials so we decided to head down there to eat, we lucked out and were seated in the enclosed room at the front of the restaurant and had a fairly decent view for dinner. 

We even became "the view" for a few passersby, Gary's Fat Bike garnered a few onlookers while we were dinning. 

Just happened upon Jaime and her husband, Mark, coming out of Mellow Mushroom as we were locking up our bikes and talked them into coming in for some dessert and adult beverages. We can't forget Mary, our waitress for the evening, she was pretty awesome and handled our large group really well. 

Even managed a selfie of sorts for this ride, I don't make it into too many of the blogs... and that's probably not a bad thing. 

The Rule G burger (pulled pork, cheddar cheese, slaw and barbecue drizzle on top of a hamburger patty) was pretty messy but it was also pretty phenomenal, as was the Founders KBS, which is Founders breakfast stout aged in whiskey barrels. You got both the burger and the beer for just $15, it was a ton of food as I couldn't even manage to finish the fries but I'm guessing the heavy stout didn't help with the matter either. 

Empyrean tap rooms, game room?

Also new this year is that all of the rides end at the Empyrean Brewing Co. taproom, pretty cool space next to the brewery and Lazlo's restaurant. Even with such an abundant space we managed to fill it up quite well, I believe the total number of riders was close to 200 with around $1700 being raised for the Bike Kitchen. If these rides continue to grow I suspect even this space will one day become too small to contain all of us. 

Bring on the beer, I opted for the Carpe Brewem Belgian Dark; really loving the whole Carpe Brewem line up that they are brewing up, the mango variety being my personal favorite. 

A few of the other offerings from Empyrean. 

Mr. Kirk Bahm guarding the prizes and a few cases of the always tasty Burning Skye Scottish Ale. 

I bike Lincoln, do you?

Tickets were very patriotic for this nights ride, would they yield a payout or be a bust for me again tonight?

It wasn't too long after we got there that it was everyone's favorite time of the ride... bring on the prizes!

As the saying goes, even the sun shines on a dog's ass some days and today I was that, um... dog's ass... so to speak and won on two different tickets! I walked away with a hat, 2 stickers (one Moran's and one Cycle Works), a water bottle, bicycle tube patch kit and a discount coupon to Cycle Works. 

Once the prizes were all doled out, the crowd rapidly dissipated as well, bringing an end to another successful Tour de Brew LNK ride. 

Can't wait until May 14th when the next ride kicks off with beers from Lagunitas Brewing Company. Until then here is a chart to help refine your beer snobbishness and I say that in the nicest way possible and as one beer snob to another. Cheers.