You can find it anywhere.

Place:  close to Newberry, Eastern Upper Peninsula of Michigan.  Pickelman’s gas & truck stop & subway & eatery.  

These days, with all the miles we’re traveling, The Happy Hour Guys make a regular practice of scoping out beer coolers in local truck and gas stops.  Most of the time it’s a disappointing exercise, a macro-beer and wine mess featuring nothing local or interesting. 

But things seem to be changing.  

In a truck stop in the Eastern U.P., Jimmy wanders back toward the beer cooler and finds a veritable cornucopia of local and small craft brews on display and ready for purchase.  Great Lakes Brewing out of Cleveland, Arcadia from Maine of all places, Dogfish Head, and a new big favorite of ours, Founders Brewing out of Grand Rapids, Michigan.   In an earlier entry we found an incredible stock of New Glarus products at a small gas station in the middle of Nowhere Wisconsin.   

So what does this mean?  Truly, the craft beer movement in the US has reached a kind of critical mass if owners of small mom and pop gas and go places find it profitable to feature these kinds of brews.  There is a market for them, an audience!  

Have you seen great craft beer in unexpected places?  Email us and let us know!

Great craft/local beer:  IT’S NOT JUST FOR BEER GEEKS ANYMORE.  Woo Hoo!

Video #95: Boulder Beer; Ah, the Paddy-Oh!

One of the things The Happy Hour Guys are always striving to do is find the places you'll tell your friends about. The Boulder Beer company is one of those places - not only for the fantastic beers the produce, but also for the lively pub that is attached to the Brewery; and what's out back? Well, join us and see. Cheers!

Museums, pizza and BEER.

In keeping with our heavy diet of ROAD INFO, we’ll continue with a quick stop in the great state of GEORGIA!  We rolled through Atlanta for a little less than a week, and while our schedule was too crazy to get any video, we did spend some museum time one day, (the Georgia Aquarium, which is truly jaw-dropping) and what’s gotta be the best many-millions ‘o dollars marketing pitch of all time, theWorld of Coca-Cola, or the Coke museum.  Wow.  But the best part of the whole day was our introduction to theMellow Mushroom Pizza chain!  Mellow Mushroom started in Atlanta, specializing, in their words, in “the two food groups known as pizza and beer”. 

 

The pizza was - in a word - mind-blowing (a hyphenated word, but whatever).  They are franchising now, and our spies tell us that they make a special effort to feature LOCAL BREWS in each of their restaurants.  Go Mellow Mushroom!  We’ll be back, and we’ll be ordering whatever’s local.  In this case it was several brews from Atlanta’s ownSweetwater Brewing Company - we loved their Georgia Brown Ale, of course their IPA, and were struck by the fruityness and rewarding finish of the ‘Motorboat’ ESB.  Keep an eye out for these brews, AND the Mellow Mushroom!

 

Cheers!

Video #94: The Guys and Captain Earthman at Breckenridge Ballpark Pub!

In honor of the World Series, Mark and Jimmy make another stop in Denver at the Breckenridge Ballpark Pub, the original Denver brewing space of the Breckenridge Brewery - obviously these guys started up in the mountains of Colorado, but once they arrived in Denver in 1992, this place was home - until the Taj Mahal of Colorado baseball went up across the street. Now, it's an amazing Palace of Beer featuring all of Breckenridge's fantastic brews, baseball fans, amazing food, and great folks like our new friend Todd Thibault and of course the one and only Captain Earthman. Join Mark and Jimmy for a thrill-ride through the connection between: BEER and BASEBALL! Cheers! - Special thanks to Breckenridge and Todd Thibault for their incredible hospitality. You guys are the best!

On a bus ride through Wisconsin.

These days, it’s unlike us to do a spot without an accompanying video, but this was so unexpected and cool we just had to put it up as soon as possible.  As some you know, Jimmy is on tour at the moment with the National Broadway company of 101 Dalmatians - recently we pulled up stakes in Minneapolis (where we had a great time and did an episode aboutMackenzie, The Bar Next Door) and headed for a week’s playing in Appleton Wisconsin at the Fox Performing Arts Center.  We don’t usually take busses from place to place (most of the time we fly) but this was a short enough jaunt that we rolled through across the prairie from one great American city to another.  What a way to see this country.

We stopped for a quick lunch at a gas station/subway store in the middle of the western prairie in Wisconsin.  Now, Jimmy is always on the lookout for Local Brews, and there, in the cooler of the Quickie Mart (or whatever the place was) a completely unexpected boon; a sampler of New Glarus Brewing’s finest.  SCORE!  

So, as any good Happy Hour Guy would, Jimmy climbed back on the bus and shared the delights of this fine Brewery with the rest of the company on the way to Appleton.  Sad to say, Appleton is a little too far north of New Glarus to get down there for a video shoot in the short week that we have before we head to Atlanta, but we now understand why New Glarus is rising very quickly into the brewing stratosphere.  We found their brews to be extremely well-crafted and individual, with a style all their own that harkens back to the rich brewing history of Wisconsin, a state that was once a mecca of beer for the entire US, if not the world.  

So a big thank you to New Glarus for making a very pretty monday trip across the plains even prettier.  And a specially big shout-out to their Stone Soup and  Coffee Stout brews, that made the sun just a big more bright and the grass a tad more lush.  

We’ll see you guys next time.  Cheers!