Good beer inspires Dairyland quest

by Carol, (a.k.a. marcofrau)

   On a September Saturday morning, my husband and I crossed the border from Illinois into Wisconsin at Beloit. At that moment, both the rain and the tolls stopped. Wisconsin, land of milk and mini-golf, walls of toilets and the world's longest main street, beckoned us with sights and treasures, mostly of the brewed and dairy kind. And the world's ugliest motel.
   We were on a quest for beer, I should make clear, our quarterly trek to Sprecher Brewery outside Milwaukee. We decided to forgo their most excellent tour and post-tour tasting in hopes of catching a tour at Lakefront Brewery in Milwaukee proper. I will digress here and tell you why. Not only had my husband tried their ESB and found it quite good but we learned that a new wine shop in our hometown of Downers Grove, Illinois, carried Lakefront beer and that they obtained the beer from the hands of Lakefront employees who made the two-ish hour trip to our town themselves. There's that old Midwestern work ethic.
   But we had also been online for the past few nights admiring a website that I discovered through my Midcentury Modern list serve called the Institute of Official Cheer. Along with homages to cast off mascots and bad cookbooks, the site contained a shrine to the ugliest motel in the universe, the Gobbler, located somewhere along Interstate 94. We were determined to find it. Using a few clues on the site and Mapquest, we found Johnson Creek,where we suspected it might be. We printed out a zoomed in map of the town, a page from Lakefront's website, and a reminder map for Sprecher (we got lost once. Remember: Port Washington road) and took off up Interstate 90 past Hoffman Estates, Huntley and Rockford.
   At Janesville we exited onto a smaller Wisconsin road that took us through that rolling Dairy State terrain and small towns adorned with golden foliage. We approached Johnson Creek, followed the map through the tiny town to a road that apporached the highway and saw The Gobbler.
   Since this is a beer site, not an ugly-motel site, I will spare you a lot of talk about the motel, which sits atop a hill and is now called The King Arthur Motel. Suffice to say this: brown lannon stone, blue doors, shag rug, the smell of mildew. An adjoining restaurant now closed but reportedly once containing a swinging revolving bar. The authority on this property is
James Lileks and his site is the Institute for Official Cheer. Go, but refrain from eating first.
   After a stop at Hardees for chicken stars (pressed chicken in the shape of stars and the perfect accompaniment to the Brookfield Zoo's dolphin-shaped fries) we pressed on to Milwaukee. We began in the rural exurbs with a stop at the Market Basket in Brookfield. After surveying their large selection and lusting after magnums of Belgian beer, we made careful selections and moved on (mine, Saison de Pipaix, which smells of the old world) to Sprecher. The road into Milwaukee, Hampton Road, has a part that is so bumpy we always get queasy, even if we hadn't had any beer.
Sprecher is located in a strange light-industrial residential area in Glendale. We dive-bombed the gift shop and bought a case containing Octoberfest, Pub Brown Ale, Milwaukee Pilsner and Special Amber, along with their ginger ale, which produces a lovely lip-smacking bite. Then we used our map to navigate our way to Lakefront, no small feat since we've been lost in Milwaukee before (those damn one-way streets). But we found it at its new location, a former electric car warehouse under a bridge on the Milwaukee River. We climbed the stairs and were greeted by a cheerful blonde man in the gift shop who invited us on a tour, gave us glasses and told us to help ourselves to beer while we waited for the tour to begin. Well, OK.
There were four taps along the wall of a cavernous room with exposed brick and looming windows. We tried the pumpkin beer, the Eastside Dark beer and the double but came back, and back again, for the Stein Beer, which had an intriguing aroma and a nice full taste.We all soon toted our beers down to the brewery part of the building, where co-founder Jim Klisch pointed things out and presented a primer on beer. He's an easygoing guy with a slight upper Midwestern accent. I bet his seven employees experience about zippo stress in the course of a work week. At the bottling line he put a glove on a bottle and started the line, a la Laverne and Shirley. The guests from Finland looked puzzled.
   We were back up in the gift shop and I was promising my husband a mas krug for Christmas when we overheard Klisch talk about the fact that Downers Grove's main street was just re-opened. We looked at each other -- we knew this, as downtown has been ripped up for most of the year. Turns out Jim drives the beer down himself. Not wanting to interrupt, we left. (Postscript: later that night my husband went online and e-mailed the brewery, thanking Jim for the tour and telling him where we live. Not an hour later he wrote back, saying if he had known that, he would have had us drive some beer down for him.)
   We ended the day at the Brat Stop in Kenosha, gorging on fried cheese. I do believe we almost died. Next visit north, I will sneak some hummus over the border. Colorado and California have grabbed much of the microbrew attention in the past decade, Michigan is emerging and Chicago's Goose Island, justifiably, makes a lot of noise. But with typical Midwestern understatedness, Wisconsin might be the true brewing mecca, what with its immigrant roots, history of big breweries and new crop of small ones. And six months of winter to get through. I saw a sign on the west side of Milwaukee that said "Is your car ready for 20 degrees below?" No, but I know where to get the beer.

Send comments and suggestions to: marc@marcobrau.com