MI beer tour: Day 1

This concludes day 1 of the MI beer tour.

Brewery #1 was Midland Brewing company (which still seems weird to me). They have definitely come a long way in a year. The beers no longer have as much of that "MBC witch" to them. Their pale ale recently won gold at the world beer expo in Frankenmuth in the english pale category. Now, their pale is very very good...but I wouldn't call it an english pale by a long shot. Maybe they used a different recipe in the competition.

The Hefe and Pils were both good for their style, but nothing really stood out with them.

The nut brown was perhaps the most surprising beer. This is a very hard style to get right, as are most of the malt centric varieties. Not only do you have to try to get the amount of malt right, but the different malts used are where these beers acquire their flavor. Then, of course, you have to give it just enough hops to sharpen up the finish (so it's not syrupy), but not enough to interfere with the flavors. This beer did that, very very well. It was the only one of the beers that made me step back and say Wow.

After this, we went to BARTS in bay city for food and beer. This is really a restaurant that somehow had a 15 bbl brewhouse incorporated someday. But my, do they put out. Three of us ordered the sampler platter, to figure out what pints to move on to. Uhhh....no pints were had. The sampler platter wasn't some whimpy little tray, it was a full waiters tray with 11 five ounce beers. That's 55 oz. That's a crapload of beer. I didn't take my note pad to write them all down, but i'll try to come up with them all. Light, Pils, Kolsch, English Pale, Red, Amber, Dopplebock, Dubbel (10%!!!!), IPA, Stout....uhhh....and something else.

I did not like the Red, so that was redistributed. The stout too was handed off since it took so long to get to it, and it tasted like boiled rat crap when warm.

The beer that really stood out was the Dubbel. It had all of the right flavors in the right spots, but then hit you with the overwhelming, untempered warmth of the 10% ABV. I got into a lively discussion with some bloke about how you can't call a dubbel a tripel or quad just because of the ABV. The styles are brewed in completely different manners, and thus have very different flavors. For example, a true quad wouldn't have the alcohol flavors, since they'd be mellowed under the additional malts.

Well, today it's the two Mt. Pleasant breweries, and finishing the night at the racetrack.

-James