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!