It’s no secret. Madison and Milwaukee are not neighbor cities. They’re not sister cities. They’re not any kind of sibling cities. They’re more like cousin cities. Cousins who get along all right at holidays but otherwise live the rest of their lives confused and annoyed by the other’s Facebook posts.
There’s a lot of stuff that the two cities do differently, and those differences tend to be what people talk about when they talk about Madison and Milwaukee. Isthmus did a whole cover story a few years ago about that sense of a divide. I’ve been wondering if beer is the thing that best bridges the divide.
When you first think about Milwaukee beer, other than its storied past, Milwaukee makes you think Lakefront, right? Lakefront does pretty good in Madison. I think the My Turn series of employee-created recipes goes over well here, and I’d be surprised if Madison beer drinkers aren’t typically excited any time Black Friday (Lakefront’s annual barrel-aged imperial stout) makes a tap appearance.
In the other direction, from what I can ascertain online, Karben4 does great business at Milwaukee venues like Ray’s Growler Gallery, with both its packaged and draft beers selling well. Certainly there was a lot of clamor for the first run of bottled Fantasy Factory in the Cream City.
And then there are the beers Milwaukee and Madison share in a more fundamental way. MobCraft moved its base of operations from Page Buchanan’s figurative basement at House of Brews to its own shiny new brewery and taproom in Milwaukee’s Walker’s Point neighborhood, near Milwaukee Brewing Company and Brenner Brewing. At the end of 2014, a stone’s throw from the BMO Harris Bradley Center, Ale Asylum Riverhouse opened — basically a tied house serving the beers of Madison’s biggest brewery, but independently owned.
But then there are moments when the east/west barrier goes right back up, sneakily and unexpectedly. Shortly after I started working on this column, I got into a conversation on Twitter (Jake, your tweets are creepily prescient as always, man) about what constitutes the Wisconsin IPA. My friend posited Lakefront’s eponymous IPA, and after he rattled off a couple other breweries, I asked how he could leave off both Ale Asylum and Karben4.
The fact that he’d thought about Karben4 but forgot to type it out — and completely omitted Ale Asylum’s Bedlam — represented, he said, “the Milwaukee-Madison disconnect continu[ing]!”
I visited Milwaukee for an afternoon the next day, and made sure to check out Company Brewing in the very happening Riverwest ’hood. It had been mentioned in the Wisconsin IPA conversation, and I’d been meaning to try its beers. Of course, it never touches Madison glasses, so no one here knew what I was talking about. I mean, I’d never tasted the beers, so I barely knew myself.
The hoppy recipes were great, whether a bitingly juicy rye IPA called Day Rye’d, or the tropical and citric Double Azacca imperial IPA. The Company Brewing space was palatial, industrial — like a closed factory about to be overgrown by climbing vines. It was exactly what I’d picture a young Milwaukee taproom to look like. A hip reclamation.
So I guess I don’t, at the end of my day trip to Milwaukee and the end of this column, really know for sure if a river of beer is what touches the two disparate shores of our city and theirs. Do they look forward to checking out One Barrel as much as I did Company? Do attendees of the Black Friday bottle release get excited for Capital Brewing’s Bockfest?
It’s probably a testament to at least a little bit of a blind spot — even through beer goggles — that when it comes to Milwaukee’s perspective on Madison, I’ve hardly got a clue. Personally, I think we both pay more attention to Chicago.
