MI beer tour: Day 2

Day two of the tour was yesterday. Same people with me, different set of victims.

We went to Mt. Pleasant yesterday. While researching this trip, I was surprised that MP had two breweries. The first was Mt. Pleasant Brewing Company. Walked in, grabbed a sampler and chatted with the poor brewer who was working the bar. The tasting room and brewery were beautiful. This was another one of those warehouse district breweries, which I love, but they have significantly higher production than I'm used to. The brewery is actually owned by the same guy as Mt. Town Station (the other MP brewery), which disappointed me a little bit, but the brewery shows what happens when you start with essentially unlimited capital. It started as a 15 bbl setup, but when they started distributing bottles across the state they had to put in a 30 bbl setup to keep up with demand. Very clean brewhouse.

As for the beers, they had 8 standard beers, and the brew masters special. The standards were a Hefe, pale ale, raspberry wheat, blackberry ale, red, brown, Stout and IPA. The stout, brown, hefe and IPA were all good for the style. I personally don't get their pale, it was too whimpy on the malts to be an English, and too whimpy on the hops to be an American. It basically was just there to be unoffensive, which always results in a beer that does nothing. The Red was fantastic. I'm not a red fan, and actually the others with me (who were red fans) didn't like it that much, so maybe I liked it because it's a bit too big for a red. The malt flavors were very complex, with lots of nice roasted flavors. This beer was hopped perfectly for the style, giving it just a nice clean, dry finish that encourages you to have another drink.

Now, for the fruit beers and the special. The raspberry wheat was fantastic. Something about raspberries make for a great beer. The tartness and sweetness just play well with a light wheat base. The blackberry ale wasn't as good. Blackberries are a little more aggressive, so they were pared with a slightly darker base beer. This led to a little bit of flavor confusion as the fruit flavors fought to keep up with the maltiness of a brown ale.

The special was a "Gruit" beer which uses spices instead of hops. It was an interesting beast, with a nice light body and a hint of jager on the finish. I liked it, but I can see how others would avoid it.

Like I said, the "other" brewery was actually the same person, thus the same beers with the exception of a decent pils. After that was a good night at the dirt track (a good ole American Friday night there). I've pushed the GR trip back to tomorrow, and today I'm going to a good beer store today to grab some beers from the MI breweries I won't make it to.

-J