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True brew

A beer-lover's tour of southern Wisconsin taps into Old World flavors.

Fat Squirrel. Spotted Cow. Lazy Mutt. Uff-da.

Uff-da? In Wisconsin, say that and you get a great glass of beer. Anywhere else you get . . . a funny look.

Wisconsin may be full of cheeseheads. It may be a party state. But boy, are they drinking a lot of good beer there.

Its days as the nation's beer capital are over — Schlitz, Pabst and Heileman are gone — though you still can tour Miller in Milwaukee and sample 10 American-style pilseners with different names.

Or you could go to New Glarus for a Belgian Red, a delectable cherry beer that has won New Glarus Brewing Co. a boatload of prizes. Or to Middleton for a Blonde Doppelbock from Capital Brewing, which the Beverage Testing Institute in Chicago has called the nation's No. 1 brewery.

In fact, you could try quite a lot of good beers.

That's what a girlfriend and I did on a tour of southern Wisconsin, where the state's first brewery was built in 1835 — not in fledgling Milwaukee, but in Mineral Point. That's where we stayed, at a brewery that's also an inn, and shopped, at an old brewery that's now a pottery studio.

We listened to music at a brewpub in Mount Horeb, and toured the breweries in Middleton and New Glarus as well as one in Janesville.

It was Germans and Englishmen who brewed, but the Swiss also added to the melting pot. In New Glarus, we bought Linzer bars and nut horns at one of the best and oldest bakeries in the Midwest. In Monroe, the capital of cheese country, we stopped at Wisconsin's oldest cheese shop.

We didn't have the notorious Limburger-and-onion sandwich. But other than that, we didn't shrink from new flavors.

"Beer people and cheese people have a lot in common,'' says Deborah Carey of New Glarus Brewing. "If all you'd ever had was Velveeta, and one day you had Cheddar, you might be grossed out — or you might fall in love with it. But you'd definitely know there were different flavors out there.''

Ben Franklin and Frank Zappa

Behind the 1892 walnut bar at Capital Brewing in Middleton, manager Tom Westfall was quoting Benjamin Franklin.

" 'Beer is living proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy,' '' he says. He leads us into the brew house, past fermenting tanks named for Frank Zappa songs — Redunzel, Magdalena, Heavy Duty Judy — and hands out kernels of malted barley to chew on; they taste just like Grape-Nuts. Then he lets us smell the hops, which grow on vines.

''Anyone know what its closest relative is?'' he asked. ``Yep — a slight little change in the genome and you're smoking wacky tobacky. So you're either smoking dope or drinking beer.''

Capital Brewing, he says, was started in 1984 by four servicemen who'd been stationed in Germany and, once back in the States, yearned for good beer. They're no longer involved, but their brewery has taken off.

''We were rated No. 1 brewery in the U.S. by the Beverage Testing Institute, and No. 4 in the world,'' Westfall says. ``Not bad for Madison, Wis.'' He poured a sample of Capital 1900, from an old Schlitz recipe. ``Give 'em a glass of this, and I guarantee they'll never go back to Bud or Miller.''

In the Bier Garten, picnickers are sitting at tables, with occasional visits to the open-air bar, adorned with a mural of Alpine mountains. There's a bandshell, too, for the musicians who play on Friday and Saturday nights.

Heading west

It's tempting to hang out — a guitarist is noodling with some blues tunes — but we head west to Mount Horeb, a Norwegian town whose Main Street is lined with carved wood trolls. Half a block off the Trollway, we find the Grumpy Troll brewpub in a restored 1916 creamery.

On the airy second floor, we listen to the jazzy quartet Harmonious Wail and order beer. A five-glass sampler is on the beer list, but only four beers are available, so we have glasses of Liberty Pole ale and the Norwegian Wood, an India pale ale that's packed with hops — enough, by tradition, to preserve ale on voyages from Britain to colonial India.

Our inn is in nearby Mineral Point, to which Cornish miners came in the 1830s after the discovery of lead. They were expert stonemasons, which explains the town's lovely limestone cottages, many now used by artists, and warehouses, including the 1854 Brewery Creek Inn.

The inn's pub and restaurant are closed Sunday nights, so we eat elsewhere. But we return to the cozy pub to draw our own beers — a Kölsch-style blonde ale, a porter from a 1750 recipe and a Schwartzbier. Proprietor and brewmaster Jeff Donaghue eventually joins us, offering pickled eggs, which we politely decline.

"I call this English pub meets Wisconsin frontier,'' he says, waving at the wood-beamed ceiling and paneling from behind the columned oak back bar, taken from a clothing store near his former home in a Minneapolis suburb.

And the rooms are simple and elegant, with walls of glowing limestone, tiled gas fireplaces, gleaming antiques and Arts and Crafts accents. We throw lavender salts into the double whirlpool and have a soak, emerging to wrap ourselves in fluffy robes. In the morning, I'm already sipping coffee in the book-lined sitting room when Deborah Donaghue arrives to set out a buffet breakfast.

Past Pendarvis, a state historic site where costumed interpreters give tours of restored miner's cottages, we find Brewery Pottery Studio, in a huge 1850 stone brewery where Mineral Springs beer was made from 1852 to 1961.

Potters Tom and Diana Johnston live and work here, and Diana Johnston gives us a tour, including the fermenting room, now a basketball court, and a series of caverns dug into the hillside.

''They definitely brewed beer here during Prohibition,'' she says. ''The story is that when the feds came, the people would climb a ladder to the ventilation shaft and scatter.''

Drinking with the Swiss

It's a bucolic drive through rolling farmland to New Glarus, settled in 1845 by colonists from the impoverished Swiss canton of Glarus, and still a town in which the local German dialect often is heard.

It's a great town in which to drink beer — at the 1853 New Glarus Hotel,  the wood-beamed Glarner Stube and the 1893 Puempl's, with its 1913 murals of Napoleonic scenes and dollar bills stuck to 18-foot ceilings. The beer? New Glarus, of course.

''Everybody in town feels a distinct personal ownership in our beer,'' says Dan Carey, a master brewer who opened New Glarus Brewing in 1993 with Deb, his wife. ''We have 2,000 people selling for us.''

Carey worked for a small brewery near Munich and for Anheuser-Busch in Fort Collins, Colo., before returning to Wisconsin with Deb, a Milwaukee native. Each of its beers — from the popular Spotted Cow to such limited-edition Unplugged brews as Smoke on the Porter  — is made from a completely different recipe.

''I don't think there's another brewery in the world that does that,'' says Deb Carey.

We stock up on its beer, since it's sold only in Wisconsin. Then we head to Monroe, where Huber Brewing was started in 1845. Mountain Crest Brewing of Calgary, Alberta, bought the brewery in 2006 and renamed it Minhas Craft Brewery, but it's still the second-oldest continually operating brewery in the nation.

Now it's making such craft beers as Lazy Mutt Farmhouse Ale, but it also still makes its trademark Berghoff beer.

We had some with bratwurst and barbecued beef at Baumgartner's, an atmospheric tavern and cheese shop opposite Monroe's beautiful Romanesque courthouse.  Bartender John Stratton points out the old-timers playing the Swiss card game Jass in the corner. ''They play for 15 cents a game,'' he says. ''It's blood money.''

All in the family

Janesville isn't far away. That's where, in 1854, Irish immigrant Joshua Gray started bottling soda and beer. Gray's stopped brewing beer during Prohibition, but when the bottling works burned down in 1993, great-great-grandson Fred Gray rebuilt it to make both beer and gourmet sodas.

Today, it's the nation's oldest family-owned bottling company.

"I saw a niche for a good ale brewery,'' Fred Gray says. "We just consider ourselves a brewery — I don't really like the word ''micro''; it's too trendy.'' Gray's biggest sellers are his Gray's Honey Ale and Old Mill Stout, and his connoisseur's beer is the Oatmeal Stout.

''I'm pretty passionate about my beer,'' Gray says.

We didn't go on to Milwaukee, since I've already toured Miller and  Sprecher, which was the first brewery to start up in Milwaukee since Prohibition and produces beers with real heft — Black Bavarian, Irish Stout, Generation Porter.

Besides, our trunk already was full of six-packs. We hoped they'd last a while. Like craft brewers, we're followers of a slogan adapted from an old German wine adage: ''Life is too short to drink cheap beer.''

Trip Tips: Wisconsin beer tour

Beer festivals: See Best brew fests.

Capital Brewery in Middleton: Tours are at 3:30 p.m. Friday, 1:30 and 3:30 p.m. Saturday. The Bier Garten is open May through September, and starting Memorial Day weekend, there's live music from 6 p.m. Fridays and Saturdays, with food catered by local restaurants. 608-836-7100.

To get there, take I-94 to Madison and continue on I-90 to U.S 12-18 west. Continue on 12-14 and exit at Greenway Boulevard. Turn right (north) onto High Point Road. Brewery is at corner of High Point and Terrace Avenue.

New Glarus Brewing Co.: With a new $21 million brewery, the Careys can nearly double production, but they still distribute only in Wisconsin. Self-guided audio tours are available Monday-Sunday from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Tastings are $3.50 and include a glass. 608-527-5850. For more about New Glarus, see Swiss at heart.

Gray Brewing Co. in Janesville: Tours are given at 1 p.m. on first and third Saturday of each month or by appointment, $3. 608-752-3552.

The restaurant also owns Gray's Tied House (a British term for a public house that serves beer from just one brewery) in Verona, just southwest of Madison. 608-845-2337.

Minhas Craft Brewery in Monroe: The young brother-sister team of Rajinder and Manjit Minhas has spent $4 million expanding the brewery. Tours are offered on weekdays. Cost is $10 for those 13 and older and includes a gift pack of beers and Blumer sodas. There's also a museum to visit. Call 608-325-3191 to reserve.

For more about Monroe, see Cheese country.

Brewery Creek Inn in Mineral Point: The renovated 1854 limestone warehouse has five rooms, four with sleeper sofas, gas fireplaces and double whirlpools; ask about off-season and midweek specials.  On Shake Rag Street, it rents Miners' Cottage and two Springside Cottage suites . The brewpub restaurant is closed Sunday nights and Mondays, in winter Sunday through Wednesday.

For more about Mineral Point, see Mining for art in Mineral Point.

Milwaukee: Tours of Sprecher vary, but generally there are at least two tours on weekday afternoons and more from Friday through Sunday; check the schedule. Call the week of the tour to make a reservations, 414-964-2739.

Free tours of Miller are given Monday-Saturday, 10:30 a.m.-3:30 p.m.  in winter and until 4:30 in summer. Call for exact times, 414-931-2337 or 800-944-5483.

Tours of Lakefront Brewery vary, but generally they're held Monday through Saturday afternoons and on Friday until 8 p.m. A Sunday tour may be scheduled in summer. Tours often sell out; arrive early. 414-372-8800.

For more about Milwaukee brewery tours, see Mad about brew.

For more about Milwaukee in summer, see Party in Milwaukee.

Madison beer festivals: Capital holds its annual Bockfest on the last Saturday of February to celebrate the release of its Blonde Doppelbock, which received its third platinum medal in 2007 at the Beverage Tasting Institute's World Beer Championships.

The annual Great Taste of the Midwest beer festival, with more than 100 Midwest breweries serving samples of 500 beers, is held the second Saturday of August at Olin-Turville Park in Madison. Tickets are $30 and sell out quickly.

They're available by mail order (must be postmarked May 1) and in person, starting the first Sunday in May.

Brewing in a nutshell

Each brewery gives a different tour. But basically, this is how beer is brewed: In the mash tun — often, a big copper kettle — grain is steeped in hot water. After the grain is strained out, the resulting wort is boiled and hops added. It’s cooled and sent to fermenting tanks, where yeast is added. After fermentation, the beer is cooled and stored.

But the brewmaster can tinker with the beer at many points. The many types of barley malts, when roasted, give beer color and flavor — of nuts, coffee or chocolate, for example. The type of hops used gives it aroma, and its bitterness balances the sweetness of the malt; a beer with extra hops is more bitter.

The strain of yeast also is important; those that rise to the top of the brew, or "top-fermenting'' yeasts, are used to produce old-style ales, porters, stouts and wheat beers. Bottom yeasts, which ferment at cooler temperatures, are used to make the lighter lagers.

And, as in any recipe, the proportion of ingredients, the cooking and cooling times and the temperatures all affect the result.

Other grains, such as corn and rice, are used by national breweries, such as Miller. At craft breweries, extra ingredients are used only as flavorings: in honey ales, for example, or spicy wheat beers, often called Weizen (in German, wheat) or Weiss (white).

Last updated on March 25, 2011