4/14/12 MICRO-BREWERY MEMORIES

Saturday, 8:30 AM.  Wind SW, moderate with stronger gusts.  The sky is clear, with some haze over the lake.  The barometer predicts rain, which we had trace amounts of yesterday afternoon.  We need some rainy weather!
    The aspens are leafing out in earnest now, bright green young leaves contrasting with white-gray bark, waking up the woods.
    Yesterday we had errands to run in Ashland; pick up the lawnmower from Axel’s where it had received its annual tune-up and sharpening; go to the bank and drugstore, etc.  As is often the case, our trip encompassed lunch hour and we stopped at The South Shore Brewery and restaurant.  South Shore is a micro-brewery, serving a number of specialty brews and very good food.
    I am not that much of a beer drinker anymore but growing up in Milwaukee gave me a taste for the real thing, and small breweries bring back many Old Milwaukee memories.  In the years after the Second World War and on into the 1950’s there were many breweries in the Milwaukee area and throughout the small towns of Wisconsin. 
    In fact, before the ascent of the brand name mega-breweries like Miller, Pabst and Schlitz, virtually every community had its own home-town brew,  many were as distinctive as the offerings of micro-breweries today, and each produced a spring bock beer, and a holiday beer, and so on.  My father was a salesman by nature and profession, and was always “on the road,” going from one customer to another in his “territory.”  He was also a beer drinker, in the Germanic and Milwaukee tradition; he could discuss the niceties of individual brews the way a Frenchman might discuss varietal wines.  And in those days no one would have thought it unseemly if a salesman had beer on his breath after lunch (perhaps along with the sharp odor of raw beef and onions).
    Some of the home town brews were so distinctive that once introduced to them they were very memorable, not only in taste but in fragrance.  My mother, who never drank beer, claimed she could tell where my father had been on his daily perambulations by the fragrance of the beer on his breath when he arrived home.  These variations in the perfumes of the different brews were the result of the different mixes of ingredients, and most particularly of the fragrance of the yeasts used in brewing.  Yeast cultures were very distinctive and as I recall, closely guarded. Even as a young boy (and I can remember clearly now, sixty five or more years later) I could tell the taste and yeasty aroma of the Fox Head 400 beer, bottled in a little brewery in Waukesha, Wisconsin, twenty miles or so west of Milwaukee. 

LOTS OF BEER

C'''MON IN

PLEASANT ATMOSPHERE

NO MUSTACHE ON THE BARTENDER THESE DAYS

ASPENS WAKING UP T HE WOODS

    South Shore brews a number of beers, and even bottles some for regional consumption.  I particularly like their darker varieties, most of all their Rhoads Scholar Stout, which I think is just as good as Guinness. It is said, “history repeats itself,” and usually in a bad way.  But in the case of the micro-breweries, I think in a good way indeed.  But I don’t drink beer at lunch.  It makes me too sleepy to tour my “territory”