It’s 9,047 miles from Cabramatta, New South Wales, to Minnesota. The trip took Warwick Tyler 21 travel hours. The airline lost his bag. He didn’t sleep for 50 hours, but when he arrived from Australia, Tyler found his beer nirvana.
Since 2017, Tyler has been a member of the Minnesota-based Facebook group Beer People—an exacting society of nearly 16,000 local beer fans that’s become notorious in the craft scene. Before joining, his only knowledge of Minnesota came from a character on Beverly Hills, 90210. Tyler frequently posts pictures of his hauls from the local bottle shop, but he’s never been to Minnesota in his two previous trips to the U.S. He’s long vowed to visit his peers in Beer People, and on August 21, he made good on that vow.
“I belong to a couple Austrialian groups, but I find that people are trolls, it’s not about the beer,” Tyler says. “Australians, we’re like the Klingons of the Western world. We all want to kill each other. I’ve found that Americans are more polite, seriously more polite. I looked at what some of the guys were posting, and I just thought, ‘This is a really, really good beer scene.’”
Read the full City Pages article here.