Florida couple’s Belgian beer tour a finalist for travel award. It’s about to get sweeter
A South Florida couple is showing that it is never too late to turn a passion into a career, even one involving drinking beer.
Since 2010, Ruth Berman and Mike Arra have organized yearly tours for small groups of Americans and others in Belgium featuring food and beer pairings. Now they are about to introduce their newest itinerary.
Bon Beer Voyage, their tour company, will run The Beer and Chocolate Lover’s Belgium Beercation Cruise from October 8 to October 15. It starts and ends in Bruges, Belgium.
The couple’s tours were recognized on Wednesday when Bon Beer Voyage was named a finalist in the 2023 Global Culinary Awards in the category of Best Beverage Experience for Culinary Travelers. The winners, given out by The World FoodTravel Association, will be named on Sept. 15.
While Belgian beers are now growing in popularity in the United States, they were little known when Berman and Arra started their company. Similarly, the Lake Worth couple were not much known in the travel industry.
Arra, 65, and Berman, 59, were both chiropractors and together ran a practice in Boynton Beach for about 30 years. Arra is a former Palm Beach Chiropractic Society’s Chiropractor of the Year. Berman had a successful career too.
But they had passions outside of work. Arra loved drinking Belgian beers and explaining them too. Berman’s interest initially was in travel and curating trips for people.
They both sensed an opportunity back then.
“People go to Napa, they go to France, they go all over the world and have these beautiful vacations with wine and food,” she recalled thinking then. “I was like ‘why is there nothing like that for Belgian beer?’”
But both also saw this as a cultural experience and a way to learn about people and a region, rather than simply getting a group of people sloshed.
“We’re at an age where we’re not looking to get drunk. I want to experience the culture of a country but a beer-centered culture,” she said. “I’m not looking to have a frat party.”
Even while working as a chiropractor, Berman thought about travel. She often planned trips for her friends, voluntarily. She became licensed as a travel agent and did that work on nights and weekends while putting in 35 hours at her clinic.
One important moment occurred in 2006 when she struck up a conversation with someone who had left the corporate world due to burnout and went into the travel sector.
“A lightbulb went on in my head, and I said that’s what I need to do be doing,” she recounted. “I need to be taking people on tours.”
She then told her husband she wants to go back to school. And about two weeks later, she flew to the San Francisco Bay Area to take courses at the International Tour Management Institute and become licensed as a tour director.
Berman and Arra say the real breakthrough moment took place in 2009.
They were traveling in Dordogne, France, still tourists themselves, and had signed up for a bikes and barge wine tour. They arrived a few days early, staying in a hotel and renting a car.
The morning of the cruise, Berman visited a nearby market while Arra packed the car. She hoped to find souvenirs to bring home.
She came across a man selling Belgian-styled craft beers. Malts were laid out on his table.
“At the time, I was not really that into beer,” she recounted. All she wanted to do was bring back her husband a small bottle.
The beermaker though asked her to try some. She did. ‘What the heck. I’m on vacation. So, what if it’s 8 AM,” she recalls thinking. It was the earliest she ever drank alcohol. She tasted all three and then bought 750 ml of three different types, all Belgian-style brews.
The organizers of the trip they were on let them refrigerate the beers. And on their daily lunch stops, they shared the beers with the rest of their group.
“Mike poured it out and passed it around to everybody,” in plastic cups, she recalled.
As the tour continued, Arra conducted informal tastings with his fellow travelers, imparting his knowledge of beer. Meanwhile, Berman stopped their tour guide multiple times when coming across an interesting establishment and said, “why don’t we go over here?”
Some bars were not yet open, but on at least one occasion, she said she banged on the door until someone opened it.
“It was great,” she said. “We had a good time.”
On this tour, Berman said she looked at Arra at one point and said, “we can do this better. And we can do it with beer.”
On the upcoming Beer and Chocolate trip in October, attendees will also go to Brussels and Antwerp, visit the Chocolate Nation Museum, the largest Belgian chocolate museum in the world, and spend time at brewery Brouwerij Het Anker, founded in 1471.
Pete Slosberg, creator of Pete’s Wicked Ale, founder of Pete’s Brewing Company, and a friend of Berman and Arra will be a special guest onboard. After having been a pioneer in the craft beer industry, Slosberg has since started a chocolate company called Cocoa Pete’s Chocolate Adventures.
These tours are not cheap. Prices for individuals are $3960 for double person occupancy or $4960 for single person occupancy. That does not include airfare to Bruges. Passport or visa fees, tips, or costs for any necessary Covid-19 testing are not included.
But the tours are meant to be intimate and memorable – each one has a maximum of 22 persons. A private chef is on the barge the whole trip, and all meals are provided. Dietary restrictions can be honored if requested in advance. Details are on the company’s website.
The ships typically used are barges, allowing guests to reach shallow inland waterways.
Bon Beer Voyage has its two other regular tours slated for October. The Beer Vacation Cruise starts in Amsterdam on October 1 and ends in Bruges on October 8. Their Belgium and France Beer-cation Cruise runs from October 15 to 22.
