Growing a sense of community, one beer garden at a time

Nighttime falls on Central Machine Works Brewery in Austin.

Stay has participated in Hershey’s weekly outdoor market, Market on Chocolate, pretty much every summer Saturday for the past four years. Our fifth year begins June 4.

I’ll tell anyone who will listen how I would improve the market, from expanding weekly hours to extending the schedule (currently June through September) deeper into the fall to promoting it more.

But most of all, I would add a beer garden.

I’m even more enamored of the idea in the wake of visiting family in Austin, Texas. Great beer abounds in that capital city, and the climate is such that outdoor eating and drinking are year-round options.

In fact, Scholz Garten, established in 1866, is the oldest operating business in Texas and the oldest beer garden in the United States. That was our Wednesday stop; we also were outside Monday at Easy Tiger, Tuesday at Lazarus Brewing, and Thursday at what turned out to be our favorite, Central Machine Works Brewery.

Beer and pretzel at Scholz Garten, the oldest beer garden in America.

“Forged from the bones of a former machine shop,” as one website described it, Central Machine looks like a rusted old airplane hangar but has a neighborhood warmth about it. The four of us sat outside at a picnic table with our American Lager and Kolsch brews and ate most of a couple of Machinist pizzas (pepperoni, peppers, pickled red onion).

Honey and Rosie

These are politically polarized times, but we have to keep working toward common ground with one another. Buying American-made products is one way to unite us because it ultimately creates jobs and boosts our local economies.

Craft breweries (and coffee shops) have proliferated in American towns large and small in the past 20 years, often breathing new life into disused buildings and neighborhoods and bringing us together socially.

My wife, Sara, struck up a conversation with a threesome while inspecting the misting fans at Lazarus. A family next to us at Scholz Garten asked my son, Jack, to take their picture. At Central Machine, we met dogs named Honey and Rosie (we didn’t get their humans’ names).

Here in central Pennsylvania, we may not have a year-round outdoor climate, but we can build on what we have and create more outdoor environments that connect people, even casually.

Troegs brewery in Hershey, Millworks in Harrisburg and Ever Grain Brewing in Camp Hill offer beer gardens, for instance. But community spaces can come in all sizes: In downtown Lancaster, the Prince Street Pop-Up Park transformed a 2,300-square-foot surface lot into a mini-beer garden (doors were used as table tops).

Besides Market on Chocolate, in downtown Hershey I envision a shady beer garden in the courtyard between Iron Hill Brewery & Restaurant and Primanti Bros., where two giant planters now inhibit human interaction.

We’d replace these planters with picnic tables to create a beer garden in downtown Hershey.

I hope that one of the constructive lessons we learned from the Covid pandemic is how beneficial human contact is to our mental well-being.

It’s that much better when you’re sitting outdoors at a picnic table, a cold beer at hand.