I Mitten You!

As many of you already know, some sectors of the Ohio population love to hate Michigan. And it’s not just OSU alums against Wolverines; it’s everything. They hate all Michigan sports teams, Michiganders in general, American-made cars, Motown, and the way Michigan is shaped like a cute little mitten. I think what we all can agree on, though, is that they make a damn fine beer.

Who has the energy for this?!

Last weekend I went with my husband and my parents to Ann Arbor (home of dreaded U of M) to celebrate my father’s birthday. Needless to say this involved visiting EVERY brewery in the town we could get to. Because Ann Arbor is a college town and an especially cool one, at that, this involved a lot of drinking. For those of you not fortunate enough to go out drinking with my father on a semi-regular basis, during these outings he is remarkably both funnier and more embarrassing at the same time.

Ann Arbor is a beer town, and not just because there are nearly 44-thousand newly-legal drinkers there; rather, they have a population that is hip and well-off enough to support at least five microbreweries or brewpubs in the radius of a few blocks. Each of them has their own thing going: premium lagers, unique styles, hooting sorority girls, and more. The first one my father wheeled into specialized in farmhouse ales.

A damn fine beer

The Jolly Pumpkin was an encouragingly crowded, multi-leveled bar and restaurant with fancy-pants local and sustainable American food and spectacular farmhouse ales. Farmhouse is the style from which the Belgian saison originated. Saisons were traditionally brewed in the winter for summer consumption, but I’m here to tell you that farmhouse ales are year-round beers. Every good farmhouse I’ve had has been extremely complex: earthy, tart (sometimes quite a bit), and dry with just a little bitterness. Maybe there’s a reason we get along so well. I tried their flagship beer, the Bam Biere, which was delightfully sour and refreshing.

Woot-woot!

Dinner and two beers later, my mother shooed us into another brewpub while she went off to do something sober. She was already not finding us as amusing as we really were. We tried Arbor Brewing next, a rather generic looking bar with ambitious brews on the menu. My father, my husband, and I carved out a tight circle in which we huddled against the growing crowd of undergrads taking over our prime position in the front window. Were a passer-by to look in they would have seen three noticeably out-of-place tourists shrinking into the corner, dutifully finishing their pale ales so as to escape the woot-wooting.

It looked just like this, but with more eye-rolling

We walked into Grizzly Peak the next night, having worked up quite a thirst getting on each other’s nerves. I am an only child and thus the onus of irritation used to fall squarely on my shoulders. Generally I was up to the task. Now that I’ve grown and left home they seem to each have taken up some of the slack. So, sitting in a row at the bar, I talked to Ben, father shouted “what?!” mother rolled her eyes and then back again until mother was commenting on the facial hair of baseball players on TV and my dad was rolling his eyes and Ben and I were hastily finishing our beers. The County Cork Irish Stout was delightful if not rather small given the circumstances.

No photographic evidence of the frozen bar exists

We hit Blue Tractor Brewery after dinner. Their beers were great, innovative and balanced–I had a rye saison, which works way better than you may suppose, and an IPA that rightfully won a gold medal at the World Beer Championship in 2011. More importantly, though, they had a strip of refrigerated metal that ran the length of the bar, upon which you could set your beer, were you one who enjoys her beer tasteless and icy. I pointed it out to my father and he reached out to touch the frosty surface tentatively, like a cat approaching water. He was flabbergasted. Later my mother dismissed us with a wave of her hand; we were intoxicated and not to be trusted.

The moral of the story is to try as many Michigan beers as you can and to take your father out drinking every now and again when you need a free beer and someone to laugh at your bad puns.

More Michigan breweries to check out, whose beer we brought home with us:
Arcadia
Bell’s
Clown Shoes
Dark Horse Brewing
Founders Brewing