This is Foaming at the Mouth, Joshua M. Bernstein’s hopped-up adventures in the ever-expanding universe of beer. And yes, he would like another round, please.

Once a month, usually on a Friday, my daughter’s daycare shutters for teacher education. While Violet’s caregivers expand their instructional toolbox, I take the day off work and try to answer this question: How can I entertain a 20-month-old?

Time ticks slowly, maddeningly so, when tending to toddlers, especially our perpetual-motion pipsqueak. From sunrise to sunset she climbs and tumbles, ransacks drawers and demands you read Curious George for the seventeenth time.

That monkey’s escapades can make anyone drink. Which is when I stroller Violet to Brooklyn’s Threes Brewing. While she plays with the backyard’s seashells, I sip the latest fragrant pale ale, both of us finding our happy place.

Before I had a tiny human, I considered drinking and kids as ketchup and hot dogs, two things that should never mix. But as a beer journalist, I spend my waking minutes sipping citrusy IPAs and salty sours, crisscrossing America seeking the latest, greatest breweries. Violet often accompanies, the little lady visiting more breweries before her second birthday than most folks in a lifetime.

Violet, hanging out at 7th Settlement Joshua Bernstein

At Denver’s Prost, I drank unfiltered pilsner while she gnawed pretzels, and Southeast Ohio’s Rockmill saw me sip saisons as Violet clambered on couches. I crushed hoppy lagers at Portland, Maine’s Bunker while my wife read our daughter books, and we all recently shared brunch at Dover, New Hampshire’s 7th Settlement. In particular, the brewery’s helles lager and crayon selection were excellent.

As America’s brewery count swells, so do the breweries that welcome children, a pleasant boomerang to societal norm. In Germany, beer gardens have historically been community hubs, pleasure realms where parents and kids mingled. During the nineteenth century, German immigrants brought along lager-making know-how and a hankering to hold onto heritage, leading to beer gardens’ ascension in the latter part of the century. (In large part, notes Ambitious Brew author Maureen Ogle, because Germans were no fans of the dim, dingy places where many Americans got drunk.)

However, the temperance movement, combined with German xenophobia in light of World War I, led to beer gardens’ demise. Post-Prohibition, beer never reclaimed its family-friendly veneer. It was a beverage assigned to dark bars, far from the impressionable eyes of children, lest they become diminutive dipsomaniacs. Or so ingrained mores led us to believe.