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Celebrating Wisconsin's Beer Bests
A Quick History
(ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED: SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2005)
It's a safe bet the following sentence has never been uttered in the history of Packers tailgating: "I've got the face paint, the grill, some brats and a nice, buttery Chardonnay."
Sure, wine's an oddity at most typical tailgates. But in Wisconsin, you get the sense there could actually be a law against it. Beer's a state icon here, right up there with the badger, cheese and Lambeau Field. The experience of sipping a cold one under a cloudless fall sky is not just popular in Wisconsin. It's tradition.
Trace it back to the many Germans who settled here in the mid-1800s and their taste for-and knowledge of-beer. Small breweries sprung up around the state. When fondness for American beer grew, breweries in Milwaukee stepped up, becoming the country's, then the world's, largest suppliers. So fused the words Wisconsin and beer.
Brands around during that heyday still exist, and many others join them. The state produces mass-market light lagers; hand-crafted, coffee-flavored stouts; and everything in between. Combine today's volume and diversity with history, and suddenly it's perfectly acceptable to plan a Wisconsin vacation around beer.
We have three ways to do just that: a festival, a historic-brewery tour and Milwaukee, from its beer-baron past to its brewpub future.
Have fun and be safe. Cheers!
