Author: Natalie

The Explorium Brewpub, Greendale

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So many things in life have become a spiral of disappointment: the current geo-political climate, the economy, the emo revival hitting it’s peak and My Chemical Romance still insisting on sitting this one out. But the one thing I refuse to let become a disappointment is Daze of Beer. While in recent weeks I have discovered my friends that I once assumed to mostly exist in a suspended state until I call upon them to fill my waking hours with amusement and inspiration actually all seem to maintain a social calendar that rivals that of the Duchess of Cambridge, I refuse to let the concept of Daze of Beer become another bullet point on the list of disappointments.

 That is why Ashley and I decided, after failing to round up friends to attend Cuban Fest with us this past Sunday, to try a dry run of Daze of Beer. It was something of a beta-test, I supposed. We opted to visit a new brewpub that opened at Southridge Mall a few months back that is brewing it’s own in house beers. Technically it fits the definition of a brewery, even if it is in a shopping mall that hasn’t been relevant since Mall Rats came out. And while an argument could be made that drinking mall beer is a far cry from the hip and trendy nature of a microbrewery, I can assure you, Daze of Beer was never meant to be hip nor trendy. It is mostly meant to be a way to fill our weekends with more excuses to not go outside.
More than just an excuse to day drink the afternoon away on a Sunday, it was also our choice for lunch. The Explorium Brewpub opened at Southridge in January and since I hate malls, I did not discover it existed until the end of April when Ashley and I decided to hit up the Sephora at JCP location while killing some time during the NFL draft. This past Sunday, a chilly, rainy day at peak lunchtime when Ashely decided to finally visit, it was dead. More than dead. It was depressing.
There was one large family drinking beer and being jovial, but other than that, there wasn’t many signs of a life. During our meal, another couple came in, insisted on a booth, then both sipped waters and had two cups of soup, before leaving. But it was pretty bleak. The interior was clearly intended to appeal to a generation of Pinterest-ers who are into shabby chic designs and rustic barn weddings. Barrels were used as decorations and the walls had fake distressed wood. In general, it played into my well-worn rant about the desire to have “authentic experiences” and how people are trying too hard to manufacture and recreate experiences which results in them “lacking heart.” I understand how this sounds. I also refuse to budge from this opinion. Anyways, The Explorium felt inauthentic.
The beer didn’t help the situation much. Ashley, my girl, my main, my friend bubble bitch, was such a trooper and when I was like “let’s get two flights and sample all eight beers on this menu” she was like “OF COURSE” and so comes the actual beer part of Daze of Beer. Now, let me start off with the same disclaimer I have in the “about” page. We are not beer experts. We actually know remarkably little about beer. Our opinions and reviews usually range from “wow, this is good” to “eck, get that away from me.” I could not tell you if something tastes oaky or if they used two different kinds of hops (which allegedly Explorium does with their IPA). All I know is that I either like it or I don’t, same goes for Ashley.

So, the beer. As you can see in the picture above, you can read the descriptions of each beer (we drank all of them), the type of beer they are, and the alcohol by volume. I’m honestly not sure if ABV actually matters in a beer outside of just wanting to drink whatever will get you drunk the fastest. I won’t bore you with the details and impressions of all eight beers. My overview is that the porter and stout tasted remarkably similar, which is to be expected as I don’t like dark beers and anything I can’t see through usually just tastes bitter to me. But even the little bits of flavors I did pick out, they both seemed to have coffee flavors and the stout was a little more earthy. I believe I preferred the porter though, whereas Ashley preferred the stout.
Ashley and I both really liked the barleywine, though. It was the kind of beer that would be easy to accidentally ruin your night on. It goes down easily and it has a wicked ABV for a beer that tastes so good. My favorite beer, though, was the Doc Rae Scotch Ale, whereas Ashley did not like it at all. I believe her favorite was the Patagonian Hitchhiker Lager. But both of those were to be expected based on our existing tastes. Overall, the beers felt very generic and undefined. But this was a good starting point for Daze of Beer, though. I think we know how this is going to go in the future. There is going to be a lot of beer and a lot of beer jokes.
Jake thinks that we should record our conversations and launch a podcast as this adventure continues, and while I don’t think that’s the easiest idea, it could be fun. It’d be more conversational than the blogging. But to be completely honest, who has that kind of time? Anyways, the beta test went well. I look forward to all future Daze of Beer endeavors.

A Introduction.

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I know two things for certain:

  1. The only people who may even briefly peruse this blog are going to be my friends at my Barney Stinson like urging. These same people will also already know and be partially, or wholly, involved in Daze of Beer hands on, making this entire blog fairly redundant.
  2. Daze of Beer will be my legacy because I do not have anything else going for me in this life, or even the next.

But, I still feel the need to take the advice so many boomers like to push on unsuspecting millennials like myself about how to advance in life. “Dress for the job you want, not the job you have.” And while I’m not going to be wearing my pajamas and oversized tattered hoodies to work every day while aspiring to be a professional napper with a part-time job in Netflix viewing, I have decided to blog for the audience I want, not the audience I have. So my current audience is, maybe my friends but probably nobody, but I want my audience to be like, my cousin Patrick who possesses some of the most advanced and encyclopedic knowledge of most Midwest based beers and breweries and maybe like six people who laugh at how stupid this endeavor is. I also would not be opposed to my friends actually reading this but beggars cannot be choosers, as those boomers also are inclined to say.

So, let me begin with a proper, longer introduction than what you may find in the “about” page. Daze of Beer started as me sitting at my desk at work, bored, and thinking about how we live in Milwaukee, and what do we know about it? There’s a lake under the Northwest Mutual building and Pabst “came home” last year, although they aren’t actually brewing PBR in the city. But the city is famous for it’s brewing history and I have not, at all, done anything to appreciate that fact. I have never done a Miller Brewing tour nor could I tell you definitively what local brews to get when you’re at some dive. I don’t know anything. I know what I like, New Glarius Spotted Cow and Moon Man, Third Space Happy Place, Leinenkuegel’s Cranberry Ginger in the winters and Summer Shandy in the summers, and Landshark (not even a Wisconsin beer).

Anyways, the idea came to me in a floating, dreamy haze. What if we (my friends, you guys) tried to visit and sample every local brewery. And then this dream came crashing down when, upon closer inspection, I discovered 20 different breweries in Milwaukee, another 10+ in the immediate suburbs, and then the miscellaneous ones spread across the state. So our plan for “Day of Beer” became “Two Days of Beer” to “Four Days of Beer” to the broader term “Days of Beers” to give us more freedom. Then, finally, Daze of Beer, as coined by Ashley when we were discussing the logistics of the project. And she’s right, there is a very real possibility that this will just become a daze of pilsners and stouts and porters and IPAs. This project could crash and fail. We could find out that beer isn’t even something someone should care about. We could discover that maybe alcohol itself truly is the devil and the legislators of the fine state of Utah are maybe correct in their incredibly restrictive liquor sales and consumption laws. But until we try, we’ll never know.

I’d like to finish this first entry with a welcome. Welcome to the blog. Welcome to the lifestyle. Hopefully you’ll stick with this, and hopefully we’ll stick with this. Maybe, someday, this project will have proven to be worth the investment. But until that day, I guess we’ll just have to keep drinking until we find the answer to all the problems.