Traverse City, MI Self-Made Walking Tour

This summer trip had its origins of wanting to visit the Shorts Brewery in Bellaire.  I convinced some friends to come in from out of state, so we started off with an overnight stay in Traverse City, with the airport there.  I’d had a couple Traverse City brewery beers at the Michigan Beer Festivals, so I had 2 points on my map to hit.  With some very basic research, I came up with a nice, easy walking tour that hit several good stops.

Right Brain Brewery.  This was in a large industrial building off to the side of a residential area.  A nice, easy 20 minute walk from our hotel downtown.  The building looked pretty new and was nicely painted and done up inside.  It was a large space, and made the bar at the far end look almost under-sized for such a large building inside.  Interesting art hanging around added to the atmosphere.  I had an IPA that was quite good, but didn’t get a chance for another or to try something different, as one of my travelling buddies was jumpy to get to the AT&T store to try to repair his iPhone that mysteriously had stopped working.

 Brewery Ferment.  This was back into the downtown business area, on the edge as we left the residential area.  Although this was directly on our walking path, it was not a planned stop.  However, the inviting old fashioned storefront feel to it was alluring, and when we found out the AT&T store was across the street, that sealed the deal.  The brewery is pretty new (couple months, if memory serves me correctly), and their freshly opened building clearly showed the
newness with the bright, light-colored wood flooring.  At the small bar, they only had a couple options, and I of course had the “most IPA-like” thing they had.  It had a fresh, raw, taste to it that actually
complemented the fresh, woody feel of the décor coupled with historic pictures on the wall of Traverse City in the olden days.  This was the same beer I had at the Summer Beer Festival and gave it 2 out of 5 stars.  In the brewery, I say it was up in the 3.5 – 4 stars out of 5 range.  Fresh beer tastes great, almost no matter what kind it is, and an attractive environment helps tweak your brain’s experience as well.

  North Peak Brewing.  I’ve had several of these beers in the past at beer festivals and they were always high quality, plus they have a good distribution in the state, so I’ve bought several at my local party store.  They had a big footprint, with a large space inside an old historic looking brick building that had lots of warm wood colors on the floors, tables, and chairs.  We sat outside in a sort of beer garden layout with a lattice overhead structure and open-air walls.  There was a band playing at the far end, and we had a good meal outside while enjoying some beers.  The scenery wasn’t all that special as the beer garden sat between the large parking lot and the main road.  But the good beer and food allowed us to overlook that.

Workshop Brewing.  This place got added to our list during the tour.  Right Brain had a handy little “breweries of Traverse City” pamphlet that showed the in-town breweries, and at another stop someone pointed out The Workshop Brewing Company was brand new, having only opened a couple days prior.  So we stopped off there and found a
brightly-lit industrial type building with lot of use of the color red and silver.  The place was fairly empty, still being new.  And they only had 2 beers on tap so far.  The beer was good, and they seemed to have an interesting menu for food, so hopefully they do well.  We had an interesting conversation with the owner about his glassware.  He said he only wanted to stock 1 type of glass, not manage different glassware for each style.  So he picked the glass that would best showcase his beers, which was the tulip glass.  We had been having a discussion earlier that evening of the tapered-in cone at the top of the glass and how that made IPAs taste great (funnels the hop aromas to make a more concentrated cone directed right at your nose).  I, of course felt vindicated that my opinion was vetted by the owner’s selection of glassware.

 7 Monks Taproom.  This was our last stop of the night, as it completed the natural loop progression of our tour before hitting the hotel.  It was in the heart of the downtown business area.  I’d heard lots of good things about the place, and as we walked in, I saw that many other people had, too.  It was filled with many a beer reveler, enjoying various on-tap beers.  I believe they have a minor specialization in Belgian beers, as you would assume by the name.  But knowing my dislike of the yeasty flavors there, I steered toward my usual IPA selection.  They had a few, and of course would give you tasters- as any good beer bar should.  I had the Griffin Claw IPA, which was awesome.  I don’t know if being the last beer on the beer tour sets you up to be the best of the night, or the most non-memorable.  But I now have this new brewery added to my list of favorites and will seek it out at the next Michigan Beer Festival, or if it shows up in the store.  The atmosphere inside the place wasn’t all that special.  You definitely go there for the beer.  The inside was rather non-descript collection of tables and booths, lightly colored, low lighting and high “industrial-like” ceiling.  It didn’t feel very “monkly”, but the beer overshadowed the décor.

 Michigan Brewers Guild Summer Beer Festival, July 26th, 2013

Riverside Park (Ypsilanti), MI

I hadn’t been to one of the Michigan Brewers Guild’s beer festivals in what seemed like a very long time.  Kevin & I are regular attendees at their festivals.  The Winter festival is a blast being outdoors in the
   winter enjoying beer, followed by a great Grand Rapids nightlife.  The Summer festival is also a blast but for enjoying the outdoors in the exact opposite season.  And the Fall festival sort of bridges the gap between the Winter and Summer festivals.  We’d missed the Fall festival the previous year, and the Winter festival, so the Summer festival would be 1 full year without hitting one of these awesome events of spending a relaxing afternoon around so much good beer.

This year’s festival didn’t disappoint, either.  We went to the Friday evening session (5pm – 9pm), since we didn’t get our plans together until a couple weeks prior and all of the Saturday tickets were sold out.  It was a nice sunny summer afternoon, and as usual, the weather was perfect.  We had good “long Michigan summer daylight hours” providing sun for great atmosphere, but being far enough away to not melt us while we meandered about the park sampling beers.  The venue had expanded.  Each year it seemed it got a little bit bigger with another tent here, or another offshoot serving area there.

This year, the back corner along the river went back even deeper into the park.  Far enough that they had to put in 2 music areas.  The main shelter had a good band playing near the entrance, but as you moved to the back area, you couldn’t really hear/enjoy the music so they put a girl with a guitar and a microphone to provide live music to the rest of the area.  In addition to the new bigger area, and 2nd live music artist, we noticed there were a ton of new breweries.  It seemed like most of the breweries were ones we hadn’t heard of before.  Of course I knew about the ever-growing Michigan brewery list, and the newbies seemed to be well represented.  So we still hit our known favorites, but we also sampled a lot of new breweries.  Some good, some not so much.  But it added some new places to my list of breweries to visit on future road trips.  Which its always good to have a list like that when travelling around the state with the family…  “What?  There’s a brewery in this town?  I had no idea.  I guess we can go eat there.”  My ratings below…

5 Stars

• 51 North, Kraken Kolsch
• Founders Brewing, Centennial IPA

4.5 Stars

• Witch’s Hat, Big Doedish
• Cellar Brewing, Monkey Wrench IPA

4 Stars

• Odd Side Ales, Dark Citra Pale Ale
• Sherwood Brewing, MonoHop Mouteka 2IPA
• Hopcat, Fish Ladder IPA
• Saugatuck Brewing, Cluster Fuggle
• Short’s Brewing, Hopstache

3.5 Stars

• Frankenmuth Brewing, Batch 69
• Dark Horse Brewing, Edacsac Dekoorc Eert
• Eaglemonk Pub & Brewery, Annie’s IPA
• Cranker’s Brewing, Professor IPA
• Bell’s, Roundhouse IRA

3 Stars

• Bell’s, Two Hearted IPA
• New Holland, Dragon’s Milk Cask
• Paw Paw Brewing, 2Paws IPA
• Kuhnhenn Brewing, Loonie Kuhnie

2.5 Stars

• Atwater Brewing, WRIF Lager

2 Stars

• Brewery Ferment, 45th Parallale

Trip to Bell’s and downtown Kalamazoo, MI

Having sadly missed the Michigan Winter Beer Festival, we decided to plan a “make-up” trip.  We needed something to substitute the overnight stay out of town combined with craft beer.  Having visited Bells before on a brewery bus tour, and of course loving my favorite Bells beers, I thought a trip to Kalamazoo would be good.  There was also an interesting beer bar I had read about a while back and had been wanting to try.  After checking into our Residence Inn hotel on the edge of town, we were trying to get them to call us a cab when we found that they had a hotel shuttle which would be glad to run us into town- for free.  Needing to kill a half hour before the shuttle driver came on shift at 4:00, we naturally decided we should have a beer.  Luckily, I had brought a couple along in a small cooler just in case.  “Always be prepared”, I learned in the Boy Scouts.  And I’m certain that was exactly the type of scenarios the slogan creators had in mind when they came up with it.  After all, what goes more naturally with camping in the woods than drinking beer?  Of course we weren’t camping in the woods, but I was using the Boy Scout slogan there, so I felt I should try to draw some loose kind of connection…  Anyway, the shuttle driver came on shift and we caught a ride downtown.

First stop was the Kalamazoo Beer Exchange.  The premise of the place sounded much cooler than it was in practice.  They had about 30 beers on tap at the bar on the lower level.  On the upper level was their restaurant seating.  We of course sat at the long bar downstairs.  It was a good beer menu.  The gimmick was the prices of the beers went up or down based on stock-market-like principles that whatever was in high demand and being bought, the price would go up.  Whatever was not being bought, would drop in price.  It sounded like a fun drinking game built into a bar.  That’s what lured me here.  Of their extensive beer menu, there was only a couple that I really wanted, so when we found the stock ticker didn’t start running until 6:00, I realized I had made a planning mistake.  We’d have to drink beers for about 2 hours until the stock ticker started.  And then the prices didn’t adjust continually in real time, but adjusted every half hour.  Since this was the whole premise of why we came to this spot, we had to sit it out through at least one price change.  So from a planning perspective, I wished I had planned to start at Bells first.  So we sat there watching the clock, waiting for the exchange to start in a fairly quiet time on Saturday afternoon, wasting my BAC on average beers, when I really wanted to be over at Bells trying all their experimental IPAs.  But we made it through, then made the short walk over to Bells.

After stopping at their logo wear store first, and scoring some good gear, we went to the Eccentric Café (what they call their brewery bar).  The inside was busy and full, so we headed to the outside garden area.  They had 2 quite large areas with picnic tables and the like outside, with the far end of one of those areas looking like it had an outdoor concert stage.  We had sandwiches and a couple of beers (that of course were delicious) while sitting outside.  As it drew later, we saw they had another room inside that was like a small concert hall.  They had a band playing and they were charging something like a $10 cover.  We didn’t want to pay the cover, but wondered if we could just walk in like we were supposed to be there.  Didn’t work, and the guys at the door saw through what was probably a very common tactic and shut us down.  At that point we had already left our seats outside and the place was getting more crowded, so we decided to wander.

First stop was at a place called Shakespeare’s Pub.  They had an upstairs and downstairs in a long building.  We hit the basement first as there was a band playing- for free.  They were pretty good, playing kind of 80’s punk rock/alternative.  They had a few decent offerings on tap.  The music was really loud, so we left after our beer and headed upstairs.  Upstairs had many tables and booths with an interesting old diner type of décor.  There was a massively long bar running through the middle of the place, and they had tons of taps.  Maybe something like 40 taps.  They also had a large outdoor patio seating area with picnic tables.  The tap list was really good, and I was lamenting again all that wasted BAC at the Kalamazoo Beer Exchange that even if I hadn’t been soaking up Bells Experimental IPA batches, I could have been at this place which had several very good beers I was interested in.  Oh well, such is life.

Sitting outside on the patio, we could see this ~10 – 15 story office
building a couple blocks away that had an alluring blue-ish neon glow from its rooftop where you could also see this white canopy tent top.  Since my ability to sit and drink and enjoy a great tap list had left me about an hour ago, we decided we’d go check this building out.  It turned out to be an interesting bar complex, with 3 or 4 different themes on various floors.  We went to the top via the elevator and ordered some drinks while enjoying the rooftop atmosphere.  It started to sprinkle so we huddled with the others underneath the massive white cool-whip-looking tent top.  As the rain picked up in intensity, people by the hordes started to crown the elevator bank to bail on their rooftop adventure.  That turned out to be good for us because as the wind picked up a bit, the rain started to angle in under the edges of the tent so we needed to mover more towards the center.  We had a good table and some comfy chairs, and pretty much our own personal bartender since everyone had mostly cleared out.  So we sat up there for awhile before deciding to explore the other levels.  One of the levels I think was closed, but we hit the “red room” which everything was red or hot pink in color and was playing rap music.  The place was packed.  We did a bit of people watching, then went to the other area which was the “normal bar” area where you came into the place through.  We were able to get a seat at the bar and figured we’d have another drink, listening to the music.

When ready to go, we pulled out the phone number to call the trusty hotel shuttle.  The college kid who drove us there was quite friendly and said that his shift ended at midnight.  But since he lived about a block from the hotel, if we were out later, we could just call him on his personal cell phone and he could walk over to the hotel, get the minivan, and come pick us up.  Very cool we thought.  Kevin & Ivan both independently thought, “I’ll give this guy a good tip to make sure he’s available to come pick us up later.”  So when he dropped us off at the Kalmazoo Beer Exchange, they both produced $10 at the same time.  So the guy got $20.  Surely locking in our after-midnight call for a ride back.  Not so.  No answer at the hotel shuttle phone number, or his personal cell he gave us.  So our great find of a free hotel shuttle turned out to be a $20 taxi ride into town.  And we had to call a taxi to take us back to the hotel in the end- that cost us less than $20.  So in the end, I learned several things I would do the same, and some I’d do different for my next Kalamazoo beer overnight trip.

Beer Kegerator Purchase, March 13th, 2013

In college I wanted a kegerator.  But at that time, that meant a full-size fridge that could fit a full-sized keg (OK, technically it’s called a half keg) and had a tap running out of it.  At that time, the idea was party, party, party.  A big giant barrel full of beer that was always cold, and ready to go meant that surely a party could break out at any
moment for even the slightest of reasons.  I remember many a night of boring, frustrating homework sets being ended with a call to the fraternity house and finding out there was beer on tap downstairs.  That usually got us motivated for about 30 minutes longer of work then hurrying down the fastest path from the dorm to the house.

Fast forward to adulthood, and being a grown, responsible parent.  Somehow at some point, some ad caught my eye that had a little dorm-sized fridge with a tap head coming out the top and 2 spouts on it.  That image stuck in my mind.  Several weeks later, I got a bonus check of sorts from work and was feeling like I deserved spending it on myself for something.  I don’t normally treat myself with presents, as it seems my money is constantly going to boring things like food, utility bills, groceries, dance lessons for the kids, etc.  So I had these 2 thoughts bouncing around in my head simultaneously, unbeknownst to me.  After a few days, the 2 ended up on the same bounce trajectory and I came up with the idea of spending some of the bonus money on buying myself that kegerator with 2 taps.  I searched the internet to find those pictures again and saw that the kegerators I was looking at held 2 smaller 1/6 barrel kegs.  That’s 5.16 gallons of beer, or roughly (60) 12 oz. servings- but if you’re drinking from a keg, why constrain yourself to artificial limits imposed by the lesser vessels of cans & bottles?

Anyway, with the smaller size of the kegs, I wouldn’t feel like I had gobs of beer hanging over my head needing to be “taken care of”.  And some brief internet research said that once tapped, and kept on CO2, the beer will last for several months.  With the dual taps, I decided I could get one keg and use for homebrew (possibly resurrecting my meager homebrew career), and the other I could buy 1/6 barrels of good craft beer.  I could just buy the good stuff that I already had and wouldn’t need to experiment with 6-pack roulette constantly.  I’d always have a supply of something really good on tap, and then in bottle I could have the new/random stuff to cycle through and try out.  With the side benefit of re-inspiring my homebrewing, it sounded like it couldn’t lose.

I bought from an online store that let me configure the fittings of each tap connection so I could have one for the homebrew kegs, and one for the commercial kegs.  It arrived and I excitedly set out to put it together.  It came with 2 sets of instructions on assembly.  One from the manufacturer, and one from the retailer that I bought it from.  I meticulously read both sets of instructions, wanting to be sure to not put this special piece of equipment incorrectly.  So I slowly started off in the assembly sequence.  About half way through, I started getting stuck.  One set of instructions said to specifically assemble in one order, and the other said to do it in another order.  Both gave reasons as to why it was important.  I was stressed.  Which one was right?  After bouncing between the 2 back and forth, I suddenly realized this was making it all too complicated.  It was only a few plastic hoses with fittings and screw clamps.  I didn’t need instructions on how to put those together.  So when I stopped trying to read and just put it together, it went much quicker and I was done.

After a couple commercial kegs and one homebrew keg, I can tell you it’s a success.  It’s working out exactly as planned.  I haven’t fully cleared the backlog of my leftover 6-pack experimental purchases gone wrong yet, but knowing I have a good trustworthy beer on tap, I don’t feel obligated to buy a 6-pack or two every time I come across a good beer selection in a store.  So in a round about way, I guess it’s probably saving me money.  The 1/6 barrel of craft beer is roughly the same price for that same beer buying by the 6-pack in bottles, so you don’t get a direct savings like you would if you had a full ½ barrel of a high volume beer like Labatt’s or something.  But I never bought it with the intention of saving money, it was just to add some fun, cool variety to my beer at home.  And I’m a happy camper.