By Brenda

Tim and I took a short break from brewery adventuring to plan a wedding. It took place in June right here in Belle City (Racine), and included all of the things we love about the place we chose to call home. Of course, it wouldn’t be a Tim and Brenda wedding if we didn’t find a few ways to incorporate some of our favorite beers.

Instead of an usher, we asked Tim’s brother-in-law to be our official Beer Baron, which meant rather than show our guests to their seats, he served them our Flagship beers, either a Point Amber (Bride) or ice-cold Hamms (Groom) to be enjoyed before, during, and/or after our ceremony. Tim and I did all three.

One of our favorite breweries, Torzala, owned and operated by two families who have become friends of ours through our Wisconsin Brewery Adventures, fulfilled a special request to have their beer available at our reception. Polish Victory Lap (pilsner) and Grave Digga Killa Kolsch were enjoyed to the last drop.

What started as a sort of silly idea (visiting as many breweries as we could) has woven itself into our lives, being the source of so many friends, unique treasures, and fond memories. We’re so excited to keep going!

By Tim

In 2008 I lived in Chicago. My friend Bill lived down the block and at least once a week one of us would text the other: 

“Beer?” 

It was understood that meant “want to go over to the neighborhood pub and hang out?” It was also understood by the bartender at that pub that he should open two Miller Lites the second he saw us walk through the door and likely have his trigger finger on two more. And then some.

This habit was beer as thing you hold and mindlessly sip on while you talk about life. This MORE than has its place and is possibly beer’s most important societal function. It was however before I experienced beer and brewery culture as a thing to discuss in and of itself. A hobby all its own. That’s what this post, and moreover this blog, is really about.

Beer as something to be legitimately enjoyed and fussed over the way people always have over wine wasn’t something I discovered until some years later. I had been developing a taste for things beyond the yellow for sometime when I met my first real brewery fandom in Central Waters.

I first started buying Central Waters at my neighborhood grocery store, after I had moved back to Milwaukee. It was one of the few places around me that reliably had a great selection of craft beers and I’d look forward to bopping in there on Friday afternoons to see what was new. I was introduced to Central Waters via their bourbon barrel aged beers, which I absolutely adore and cannot recommend highly enough. But I think it was when they released Illumination, their first and MY first double IPA, that I decided this was my new favorite brewery.

Wow. Cool, Tim. You like their beer. So what?

I’ll tell you: Since those first few four and six packs from the corner store, Central Waters has been a regular fixture in my personal and occasionally professional life and it’s a great illustration of why brewery culture is worth caring about.

My love of Central Waters led me to one of their beer dinners at a restaurant in Milwaukee. I hassled CW on Facebook to bring their new pumpkin beer (Headless Heron) and one of CW’s owners, Anello Mollica, did. That’s cool but I didn’t know at the time that years later I’d end up working for Great Northern Distilling in Plover, WI, which was just a few miles from CW’s headquarters in Amherst. As a result, I ended up hosting events with him just like that one more than once.

At the same time, one of my oldest friends became the high school football coach in Amherst and a regular at the brewery. (He still only drinks Honey Blonde.) That resulted in a bunch of visits to the brewery with our high school buddies and eventually a private tour from CW’s other owner Paul Graham. Those visits netted me all kinds of fancy barreled beers that I’d turn around and share with my brother who had also become a big Central Waters fan.

Do you see where I’m going with this?

And that’s not close to everything. My friend Jack occasionally works in Marshfield so he’ll take Central Water orders from me when he’s up there that we then share. My friend Aaron was my partner in REALLY getting into craft brewing and he and I would ditch work on Friday afternoons to go to Burnheart’s where Central Waters is a staple. They host MittenFest – also a CW event and where I had my first date after I got divorced. An early and memorable date for Brenda and I was at the Central Waters Brewery in Milwaukee. And possibly the craziest connection of all is Brenda, the girl I’m going to marry, grew up in Junction City. THE LITTLE TOWN WHERE CENTRAL WATERS WAS FOUNDED. Crazy, right?

All this isn’t just a love letter to a great brewery. I mean it is a little bit, but really this is kind of my thesis statement for everything else I plan to write here. Part of why Brenda and I do this is because we’re DINKs and super-fun but it’s also because brewery culture can actually be really important to building communities, memories, friendships and sometimes a whole lot more.

We hope you like the posts to come and like talking about brewery culture as much as we do. And go find yourself a Central Waters Cherry Stout if you can. It’s still my favorite beer.

Cheers.

By Brenda

Well, kind of. Back towards the end of January, we decided to take a trip up to Milwaukee on one fine frigid Sunday to a favorite brewery of ours, Torzala. While we were there we noticed quite the ruckus going on in the back brew room and asked Renee (one of the owners) what was up. She told us about Pink Boots Collaboration Brew Day, a movement that celebrates women and non-binary individuals in the brew and alcoholic beverage industry and raises money to support professional development opportunities. Renee and her sister Trish (her co-owner) opened up their brewery to women in the community to collaborate on an elderflower golden ale entitled ”Secret Hero” to be debuted on International Women’s Day. Their hope was, and is, to encourage more women to become interested in the brewing process, which – like many fields – remains a male-dominated industry.

Even though I had not signed up for the event and the day was already half spent, they invited me to come back and join in on the fray. The group of gals who had already invested much of their time and efforts were happy to make room for me and were able to squeeze in a few ingredients for me to add to the brew. It was SO much fun, not just to be a part of the brew process but to get to know these ladies and Trish and Renee who are always so wonderfully welcoming and friendly to us every time we visit. We could not have picked a better day to drop in.

We were invited back to the release party, and gang…Secret Hero is DAMN DELICIOUS. Am I saying that because I had the tiniest part in brewing it? No. Should I be surprised that it was so good considering I’ve never had a beer I didn’t immensely enjoy from Torzala? Also no. Should you try to get your hands on some if you have the chance? Also no, because I want it all. But I want to take a second to talk about this Secret Hero the beer is named after because she’s a total badass.

Her name is Mildred Fish-Harnack, and she was a ANTI-NAZI SPY from Milwaukee. She studied English at UW-Madison where she met a German student who would become her husband in 1926. She hyphened her name because she was a progressive independent lady even though it probably caused most of her peers to clutch their pearls in horror. She and her husband (Arvid) relocated to his home country in 1929 where she worked on her DOCTORATE and also taught American and English Literature. During the rise of the Nazi regime, she and Arvid joined the Red Orchestra, a small resistance group that relayed secrets of the Nazis back to the U.S. and Soviet Union, as well as helped Jews escape Germany. She doubtless saved hundreds if not thousands of lives. Mildred and Arvid were unfortunately discovered and put to death, Mildred being the only American woman to die by direct order of F*off Hitler¹.

Clearly a woman worthy of having a beer named after her.

The description of Torzala’s Secret Hero brew is as follows: “Secret Hero, an Elderflower Golden Ale, designed to honor all the women in our lives and to raise a glass to those that continue to demand better. The backbone of this beer is a clean malt bill, hopped exclusively with this year’s Pink Boots blend, and elderflower (also known as a secret hero in folklore). Fun Fact: the beer name applauds Mildred Fish-Harnack, a Milwaukee native, who was known as Germany’s Secret Hero.”

I’m so honored to have been included in this project by the women of Torzala, and looking forward to the next Pink Boots Collaboration Day next January. And when the Secret Hero runs dry this season we luckily have all the rest of Torzala’s amazing beer to hold us over until next March. My personal fav is the NaZdrowie, but you literally cannot make a bad choice.

Happy Women’s History Month! (And screw the Nazis).

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mildred_Harnack ↩︎

We are a couple from Belle City who love craft beer. At the beginning of 2023 we embarked on a challenge to visit 100 Wisconsin Breweries in one year. Well we crushed that challenge (you can see our journey on our Instagram) and decided we had only just begun our Wisconsin Brewery Adventures. We created this blog to share what we’ve learned, the places we’ve loved, the beer that was excellent, and whatever else our adventures taught and continue to teach us.

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