Factory by Beer Tree, Johnson City NY

Summer Trip 2022, Day 28

This is now my go-to stopping point on the way back home since I discovered it last summer. Beer Tree had two locations, Farm and Factory, and now I see they have a new one in Binghamton itself. But Factory was the one that was open when I needed it to be, so there I went.

They have a large space; this photo doesn’t do it justice at all because between the indoors and outdoors, there’s probably ten times the seating you can see here. There’s also a downstairs area with a separate bar that’s not yet in use, no doubt because customer counts have been down due to Covid. But they do have a sizable tap list leaning quite heavily to IPAs:

I started with a flight and I’ll describe them right-to-left:

Animal Style – This West Coast style IPA was good, but much more hoppy than the others in the flight. It went down much easier once the food arrived.

Citra Grove – I generally like New England IPAs and I definitely like Citra hops, but this brew was a bit sweeter than I would have preferred on this particular day.

Friends from Other Places #4 – I have no idea where that name came from but there’s probably a good story behind it! This NEIPA was just excellent, exactly what I was looking for.

Color Trees – Here we have another NEIPA that’s just a touch on the sweeter side, but not as far there as the Citra Grove. I did really like it, but there’s a limit to how much I can drink and eat in one 90-minute time slot these days!

This location does a lot of pizzas – and their crust is great – so I decided to try their pizza special for the day, a Taco Pizza.

OK, that was interesting! But I hadn’t had tacos anytime on this trip so it was a pretty tasty choice. If I could have tweaked it, I’d have used a bit less sour cream and perhaps added the lettuce after the sour cream as the lettuce tended to fall off really easily.

And all of this was followed by two pints. The tulip glass is the Friends from Other Places #4 and the taller glass is their Hugh Hefe (pronounced “Hugh Hef” as in you-know-who).

I hadn’t heard of a “NY-Style Hefeweizen” before, but it was very, very good. If I hadn’t wanted more of the Friends, I could easily have gone with a second pint of the Hugh Hefe.

With that, I added a 4-pack each of those last two beers to my tab and headed out the door.

My final tally for this summer’s adventure was 32 locations and 172 different beers. Not bad at all!