Got up at 5 and climbed a fence to get these images. I’m happier getting up early every day as I age!
Thankfully sunrise is at 6:42AM at the moment, so I can practically sleep in. When we did a similar early shoot in Austria about a month ago, we had to get up at 4AM. Can’t wait until the foliage changes a little bit more so I can go back!
A long-overdue review of this great little beer place in the Italian Alps. It was so welcoming and became our home brewery for six weeks when we lived in Cogolo this summer.
This is truly a family owned and operated brewery. Often when we visited, Marco and Angela would be manning the brewery or the taproom (and most of the time, both!) while their children played. The grandparents also help out and the family even brings their new baby to work. It’s such a welcoming atmosphere.
“It would be a shame not to make beer with this water.” – Translated from the Birra Pejo website.
Cogolo is home to Acqua Pejo, a famous mineral water distribution centre which bottles from the source at 1400m altitude. We spent more than a month exploring the valley which is home to Birra Pejo and found more waterfalls than almost anywhere we’ve ever travelled. It’s second only to Iceland in this regard.
I love to imagine the waterfalls filling the water with great energy and sending it bubbling downstream to the towns, and being made into excellent beers.
The styles that they produce at Birra Pejo are classic, but often with a twist. For example, their Alpina (named for the Stella Alpina, AKA Edelweiss flowers that are on the high alpine tracks nearby) features pink pepper in the brewing process. The Aquila belgian ale is our favourite of their brews, with a balanced malt profile and clean taste. They brew regularly and often make seasonal ales that are in very limited quantity. All the prices are quite the steal if one takes into account the handmade quality of the beer.
This brewery is one of our favourites that we’ve found in all our beery travels. We hope to come back to visit some day soon.
We’re doing Workaway in the Austrian Alps at the moment, and the place that we’re staying is really great. I’ll post some photos that I’ve taken in addition to these, but I wanted to post the ones from our amazing Dolomites self tour as well.
I’ve been really lazy about Lightroom in the meantime, so here are a couple of the shots from a (very) long day of sunrise, sunset, and astro photography. All of these images as panoramas, shot with my tripod and stitched together to make the final image.
And here are the promised shots of our current life here in the Raxalpes.
If anyone is interested, I’d love to write about Workaway and how it works as a travel amplifier.
