The Great American Ale Trail - Christian DeBenedetti [100]
PHILOSOPHY
The vinyl booths may be cheap, but there’s no skimping on the beer, and the two-tiered tap row is a thing of organizational beauty. Neither college clown show nor meat market, this is a bar to love for one reason above all: almost everyone’s here for the beer.
KEY BEER
This would be the perfect place to drink Boulevard’s Long Strange Trip, a 9% ABV tripel that has a heady sweetness and a puff of delicate noble hop character.
BEST of the REST: IOWA
THE ROYAL MILE
210 4th St. • Des Moines, IA 50309 • (515) 280-3771 • royalmilebar.com
A glorious array of weathered old wood tables, English breweriana, stained glass, a Union Jack, and London Underground signs help make this the unofficial “living room” of Des Moines, an ideal place for storytelling among old friends. Along with a stream of special firkin nights from top craft brewers like Colorado’s Left Hand and New Belgium, regulars gather inside (and out on a quaint brick patio) for hearty bites like English pork pie and bangers and mash, washed down with rare beers, including the delicately hoppy and refreshing Coniston Bluebird Bitter (4.2% ABV) from Cumbria, England.
Michigan
Ann Arbor
JOLLY PUMPKIN CAFÉ & BREWERY
311 S. Main St. • Ann Arbor, 48104 • (734) 913-2730 jollypumpkin.com • Established: 2004
SCENE & STORY
Ron Jeffries speaks softly but carries a big stick. Across the country American craft brewers have followed his quiet but confident lead, embracing tricky, Belgian-influenced techniques like the use of oak barrels and wild yeast strains that are lethal to beer in the wrong hands. He started his odyssey toward becoming one of the nation’s best brewers of Belgian-style ales around 1991 with the goal of opening his own brewery. By 1995 he had made a name for himself in Michigan’s emerging scene, and by 2004 he was ready to unleash his vision: a brewery dedicated to wood-aged artisanal beers. Trouble was, he hadn’t settled on a name.
On a warm early spring afternoon with snow on the ground and ample heat in the air, Jeffries, who is tall and thin with the quiet, placid demeanor of a lit professor, thought of a name that encompassed everything he intended to do: Jolly Pumpkin Artisan Ales, a mishmash of concepts encompassing Halloween, pirates, his low-key, slow-paced Hawaii, and the kind of beer he wanted to make. He and his wife laughed. It grew on her. Jolly Pumpkin it was.
Today, Jeffries oversees operations of the original Dexter, Michigan, location (where a new pub was under way in 2011), a brewpub in Traverse City, and a brewpub in Ann Arbor, which has a lovely bar, roof deck, and full menu of beer-friendly cuisine. Both the Ann Arbor and Traverse City locations have Jeffries’ beers on tap or in bottles, and both allow growler and bottle sales to go.
The beer that Jeffries has been brewing from the start is some of the most interesting and innovative in the country. These days it’s relatively common to hear about wood-aging experiments, sour beers, bourbon barrels, and the like, but Jeffries is the only brewer to be fermenting all of his beer in huge wood fermenters from the start, which is incredibly risky—one runaway infection in a barrel and tens of thousands of dollars worth of beer can turn into something resembling vinegar. It’s not easy to grapple with wild yeasts, which can bore into wood with the force of gamma rays and wreak havoc in a brew house, nor to bottle-condition the beer as if it were Champagne, but Jeffries doesn’t going around crowing about it. He doesn’t have to. The beers—complex, flavorful, original, by turns elegant and edgy—speak for themselves.
PHILOSOPHY
Traditional, small-scale production