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SCENE & STORY

There are about fifteen breweries in Saint Louis, home of The Big One, but Schlafly (pronounced schlaugh-lee) is the best. Built in an atmospheric old wood and brick building on the National Historic Register, it has gloriously worn-in floors befitting the original microbrewer in the state, the first to set up shop after Prohibition. It’s a short walk away from both The Gateway Arch and City Museum, home of a massive, interactive monkey bars installation and the world’s largest No. 2 pencil (citymuseum.org), and makes a great stop for unwinding after both.

In 2003 Schlafly took over the former home of an old grocery store to create Bottleworks, which boasts a cool little brewing history museum with historic cans and breweriana, a selection of beers to go in coolers, movie nights in a meeting room, and a farmer’s market on occasion in the lot. There are twelve taps and a good little pub for eats, as well.

Tours (of Bottleworks) are free every Friday through Sunday from 12 to 5 p.m., and there’s also a third Schlafly pub in Lambert International Airport if you’d just like a chance to try the beers en route to or from St. Louis.

PHILOSOPHY

Good local beer for good folks. To give you an idea of their scale, consider that The Big One (Anheuser-Busch) produces well over 100 million barrels of beer a year. The Bottleworks location produces just 40,000 (1.2 million gallons), making it 1/100th the size, and the Tap Room brewery is even smaller.

KEY BEER

Try the 4.8% ABV Pilsner for a taste of the style of beer Anheuser-Busch might have been making a hundred years ago. Also excellent: the 5.9% ABV Dry Hopped APA, or American Pale Ale, grainy and reminiscent of citrus and honey.

BEST of the REST: MISSOURI

INTERNATIONAL TAP HOUSE

1711 S. 9th St. • St. Louis, MO 63104 • (314) 621-4333 • internationaltaphouse.com

A mile and a half south of Busch Stadium (home of the Saint Louis Cardinals) “iTap” (as this sleek beer bar is known) has a spacious patio with Christmas lights hanging in draped rows outside and a long row of black captain’s chairs inside facing the main event: coolers and forty-four taps totaling five hundred selections inside, with a world-class selection of craft brews, not a macro in sight. It’s a long narrow space with exposed brick, low lighting, and frequent live acoustic music. Tuesdays feature Missouri brews, with extra rarities from Boulevard, Schlafly, and other local brews. There’s a second location in Chesterfield, about twenty-two miles west—conveniently close to the Spirit of Saint Louis International Airport.

BRIDGE TAP HOUSE & WINE BAR

1004 Locust St. • St. Louis, MO 63101 • (314) 241-8141 • thebridgestl.com

With arty chandeliers, heavily framed black-and-white photos, polished wood, and a leaning library ladder behind the bar, this downtown St. Louis bar draws a young, casual crowd. Open every night until 1 a.m. (midnight on Sundays), it’s the best place in the city to grab dinner from the chef-driven menu or just a bite of local and house-cured charcuterie, duck, pickles, and whole raw cheeses. In addition to a comprehensive wine and farm-to-table menu, there are fifty-five taps and more than two hundred bottled beers, with a full complement of Boulevard and a half dozen Founders taps, including Goose Island’s food-friendly Sofie, oak-aged Belgian-style farmhouse ale aged with orange peel (6.5% ABV).

LITTLE YEOMAN BREWING CO.

12581 Dallas Ln. • Cabool, MO 65689 • 417-926-9185 • No website

An hour-and-a-half drive south of Springfield on a leafy farm in the Ozarks, Little Yeoman is a little eighty-gallon brewery with big dreams. For now, the only way to try the beers—ranging from cream ale to APA, IPA, porter, stout, and on up the intensity ladder to barley wine—is to drive out to the middle of the Mark Twain National Forest, look for a converted keg mailbox, and pay a visit. There, in a modest two-room barn, Chad Frederick (who commutes to work via a short walk in the woods and says he hopes