Brewing up a storm in Milwaukee
When you find yourself chanting “Beer! Beer! Beer!” along with a group of merry strangers next to a bubbling vat of beer on a Saturday morning, clutching an overflowing plastic glass of 9% seasonal brew, you know you’re on to a winner.
From Colorado, we headed north to chilly Wisconsin. My lovely friend Hannah (big up Harris!) and her husband Brian kindly offered to host us in Milwaukee for a few days before we headed to Chicago and back down to Denver.
I’m the first to admit that I was completely ignorant about Milwaukee, and what exactly happens there. Luckily, Hannah was on hand to introduce me to two of the region’s finest attractions: beer and cheese. Really, what more does anyone need?
Burger bar AJ Bombers was our first stop. It’s the kind of place where pure enjoyment and taste are prioritised way above any kind of airs or graces – the walls are scrawled with mostly illegible graffiti and the floor is carpeted with crunching peanut shells. Customers are invited to help themselves from enormous chutes delivering peanuts to tables, before discarding the rubbish wherever the hell they like. As a result, AJ Bombers has an adorably haphazard and laidback feel.
We let our native friends do the ordering, and as a result, we started out with a heaving platter of sticky, spicy buffalo wings and a towering heap of golden, breaded balls – the infamous Wisconsin cheese curds. Crispy and salty on the surface and hot, molten and gooey on the inside, we relished dipping them into creamy blue cheese dressing with our fingers and polishing off a whole plate. When in Rome, right? This is also the place I shall forever remember as introducing me to the concept of a peanut butter bacon burger. Just trust me. I wouldn’t be lying if I said it might have changed my life a teeny weeny bit.
Sleepy, cold and full, we drove on through roads lined with indigenous cream brick buildings to Lakefront Brewery on Commercial Street, just one of Milwaukee’s many craft breweries. Beer is a massive deal here, and not just the hipster, small batch type with names like Dirty Old Man and The Devil Made Me Do It. It’s also the home of Miller, with a huge village dedicated solely to the product and employees.
Entering the warm, loud beer hall of Lakefront Brewery was a sharp and sudden contrast to Milwaukee’s wintery city streets. For just $10, we were handed four beer tokens and let loose on a bar featuring a mouth-watering selection of craft brews, from hoppy IPAs to quirky ginger and pumpkin infused varieties. The cavernous beer hall bubbled and popped with chatter and laughter as a hoard of beer lovers sampled the brewery wares. Before you can say “hops” we were scooped up by our energetic tour guide and ushered down to the business end of the brewery. I won’t ruin the ins and outs of the tour, just on the off chance you ever get to experience it, but let me just say that it was filled with copious amounts of beer, a lot of shouting, and many definitely-un-politically-correct jokes. We learnt not only about the quirky history of Lakefront, but its many products and also its future. The fact that its beers are sold nationwide, yet the brewery spends nothing on advertising, is perhaps testament to the quality and iconic nature of its exports. You can’t help but leave Lakefront feeling like Milwaukee really is the centre of something special.
We encountered this kind of energy and dynamism, as well as a healthy dollop of friendly hospitality, everywhere we went in Milwaukee. We went exploring North Avenue on foot on our last day, shuffling like penguins and clutching each other’s hands so as not to go flying on the thick hunks of ice plastering the pavements. Eventually the cold got the better of us, and we decided to thaw out in the inconspicuous-looking Cosmos café. Wrapping our fingers around steaming filter coffee, we ended up spending at least an hour and a half in deep conversation with the owner, Tina, about everything from UK and US cultural differences to her home country of Greece. She recommended places for us to go, invited us back down to the city for Summer Fest, and ended up giving us coffees on the house. It’s the kind of warm, open-hearted hospitality I’ve come to associate with the states, from the simple kindness of Tina at Cosmos Café to the people who’ve opened their homes to us over the last few weeks. It’s definitely something I want to carry with me as we continue our journey.
If we were hoping to warm up as we left the icy air of Milwaukee, we had another thing coming. Chicago, with it’s Gotham-esque cityscape and subzero temperatures, lay waiting for us just a Greyhound bus away.
