Tag Archives: beer

Fate Brewing Company (Tempe, AZ)

As my regular readers know, for the last few years one of our major hobbies here at Offbeat Eats has been backpacking, usually with Fitpacking (review here), with us doing periodic 50 mile hikes through various wilderness areas. This year’s first Fitpacking trip back in March took me back to an old favorite, the Superstition Wilderness Area (you can see a nice photo album over on Flickr) for 50 miles of hiking through some of my favorite canyons. As you could read over on the Fitpacking review, the food on Fitpacking is actually quite good, but I’d be kidding you if said that you don’t have the occasional cravings, and at some point on Day 4 of our hike, someone brought up “Cheeseburgers” as a topic, and I immediately found myself craving a specific item: a green chile cheeseburger (and, once the topic of “green chile” came up, I also found myself craving a green chile beer as well to go with it). While the southern Superstitions are generally no place to score a cheeseburger (although they’ve got a decent chile cheesburger up at Tortilla Flat if you’re by Canyon Lake), I knew just the place we needed to go when we got back into town. It was Fate. Fate Brewing Company, to be specific.

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Fitger’s Brewhouse (Duluth, MN)

As we spent a few extra days around Duluth, one of my goals was revisiting an old favorite: Fitger’s Brewhouse. In this era of “craft beer” and seemingly even small towns sprouting microbreweries, Fitger’s is getting to be one of the venerable Old School places. Originally a 100,000 barrel a beer major regional brewery that opened in 1857, the original Fitger’s Brewing closed in 1972. In 1984, the old brewery complex get reopened as a combined hotel (where we stayed this visit) and shopping center crafted from the old building. In 1995, new owners of the complex, inspired by new craft breweries opening out West, decided to add the Fitger’s Brewhouse and Grille. At the time, the microbrewery thing was still in its infancy, and on various trips to Duluth I’d often enjoying stopping by Fitger’s for a pint of their Big Boat Oatmeal Stout (back in those days, the only other oatmeal stouts I regularly encountered were Samuel Smith’s Oatmeal Stout, and Oil Change Stout from Flat Branch in Columbia, MO.

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Windigo Store (Isle Royal National Park, MI)

Often, a dining experience is contextual. If I think over some of my most enjoyable meals, while the food items themselves were the vast majority of the experience, the other factors of location, history, or shared experience contribute substantially to the experience. That’s what makes comfort food work. It’s what makes historical dining trips to places like Louis Lunch work. And it’s what makes quirky places like Kex (inside a converted biscuit factory), Gite de la Caverne Dufour (dining at 8000′ on the side of the highest mountain in the Indian Ocean), or Quinta do Bomfim (picnicking among the port wine grapes) truly enjoyable. And occasionally, it elevates what otherwise would be unremarkable fare to the next level. In this case, I’m talking about the Windigo Store.

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Vulgar Brewing Company (Franklin, NH)

I’ve always enjoyed Franklin, NH a bit. One of the quirks of New Hampshire is that if you live in the western part of the state, there’s no direct route to the White Mountains or the Lakes region, instead, you end up taking various shortcut routes through Merrimack County, which usually means driving through one of several classic New England “Former Mill Towns”, be it Plymouth, Tilton, Bristol, or Franklin. Franklin has a rather nice downtown, with a nice library, an old majestic theater, and quite a few buildings lining an old-town Main Street. However, Franklin’s economy hasn’t been all the strong over the last few decades, and often, many of the storefronts are closed up and boarded up. But recently there’s been a lot happening in Franklin. The town has long planned Mill City Park, a whitewater park on the Winnepeasaukee River, has actually broken ground, and some new restaurants are starting to show up as well; you can read up on my visit to Broken Spoon early this Spring. But this trip, our destination was a brewery: Vulgar Brewing Company.

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Atwater Detroit Tap House (Detroit, MI)

Halfway through our walk through Detroit, after Mexican Town, Cork Town, Downtown, and the River Front, we came to the halfway point of our walk in Detroit’s Rivertown neighborhood. Also known as the “Rivertown-Warehouse District”, for much of its history that part of Detroit was an industrial area situated between Downtown and the “Gold Coast” neighborhood of residences overlooking the Detroit River, with the Warehouse district anchored by the giant Parke-Davis pharmaceutical building (now “River Place”). Since the nadir of Detroit in the 1980s, that whole section of riverfront has seen a lot of development in fits and starts, including Rivard Plaza (now greatly expanded from recovered brownfields as William G. Milliken State Park and Harbor), Chene Park (now the home of the Aretha Franklin Amphitheater on the banks of the river), and, starting in the late 1990s, a surprisingly vibrant neighborhood of restaurants, clubs, breweries, and warehouses converted to lofts and condos. One of the earlier pioneers opening in this part of town was Atwater Brewing’s Detroit Tap House, and it continues to be a good destination when I’m in the city.

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Lucky’s Coffee Garage (Lebanon, NH)

Back in the summer of 2017, my friend Deb Shinnlinger signed a lease for a recently-closed service station on the green in Lebanon, NH, Roy’s Service Station, with the intent of quickly turning it into a “West-Coast Style Coffee Shop” serving up quality coffee, espresso, and bakery items within a month or two. Well, like a lot of endeavors in food service, the “month or two” turned into several months of drama of permitting and the sort of refurbishment challenges one can expect when turning a tired, old service station into a fresh and welcoming coffee shop, but in December of 2017, Lucky’s Coffee Garage became a reality and opened to the public.

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Surly Brewing Company (Minneapolis, MN)

When I lived in Minneapolis, one of my major activities was playing Ultimate (aka “Ultimate Frisbee”) in the Twin Cities Ultimate League, and I met a lot of interesting people playing in that league (including a future mayor of Minneapolis). One of the people I’d regularly encounter in league play was a pretty talented player named Omar, who really liked beer and brewing. He’d occasionally brought some rather good homebrew, and even commented, somewhat jokingly it seemed, that one day he was going to open a brewery. Fast forward a few years to a visit of mine in 2006, we were visiting Gluek’s (a former brewery that still runs a nice tap room and restaurant), and the bartender urged me to try this new, extra-hoppy (this was 2006, before the great IPA explosion) beer from an upstart brewery called Surly, run by a local guy called Omar Ansari. Yup. He did start. First in Brooklyn Center, growing like crazy, and then in late 2014 opened a $20M flagship brewery in Minneapolis’ Prospect Park, in a former industrial area that, in the 1990s, I would have never in a million years thought would become a “beer destination”.

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Little Brother Burgers (New London, NH)

Sometimes it can be nice to break a curse. We all know them, those “cursed” restaurant locations that, for one reason or another, seem to consistently fail to thrive as a restaurant for one restaurateur after another, until finally either a restaurant manages to break the curse, or the building owner gives up and converts the space to something other than a restaurant. Well, recently I was heading back home from SE New Hampshire, and decided to meet Carol for dinner in New London at Little Brother’s Burger Company for dinner. Looking up the address, 420 Main St (an, ahem, memorable address), I immediately recognized it as New London’s cursed spot. In my 18 years living in the region, that same address has had one failed restaurant after another. Most recently, it was Cataleya’s Caribbean Grill. Before that, the Hole in the Fence Cafe. A tavern before that, and several other places that have since faded into memory (Snyder’s Tavern, College Cafe, …). The track record for places opening here is, quite frankly, dismal. But hey, a new owner, some new ideas, maybe something will catch this time?

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Westow House (London, UK)

Our second to last full day in London involved a trip out to Crystal Palace Park to gaze upon what little remains of the old Victorian era Crystal Palace. Built in Hyde Park for the Great Exhibition of 1851, and later moved to Southeast London on top of a hill, the palace itself burnt down in the 1930s, but bits and pieces of the former wonder still remain: the foundation, the main staircase, some sphinxes, and some curiously outdated but historical dinosaurs. After a nice walk seeing the park, being a Sunday, we decided it would be nice to duck into a pub and score some classic pub food, wandering over to Westow House on the west edge of the park.

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Hop & Grind (Durham, NH)

Several of my online friends recently got into a heated discussion about which fast food places have good burgers, and there was a rather heated discussion that followed about whether or not Five Guys is overrated. For the record, I think 5G is overrated, but that’s a topic for another day, but there were two takeaways from the conversation: one being that I now had an immense hankering for a good burger, and the second that I had gotten a refresher on some of the better options for burgers when I was going to be around the NH seacoast this last week judging a FIRST Robotics competition. One of the places that came out of the discussion (and subsequently recommended by another of the robotics judges, Reif as well) was Hop & Grind, a short walk away from the UNH Durham campus. So, after my judging responsibilities were done, I headed over to check out Hop & Grind.

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