Laura Zastrow
The pan-seared salmon comes crisp, skin side and all. And the Dark Order schwartzbier is a joy.
It wasn’t that long ago that a brewery could open in the United States without needing to have a taproom open to the public. There were brewpubs for that. Or bars. Now, though, not only is the taproom a must, there almost needs to be some sort of kitchen — or at the least, a curated relationship with a handful of food carts. These days, few are willing to risk skipping this.
Full Mile Beer Company is one of two new breweries (both with taprooms) to open within the last year in Sun Prairie. To its credit, Full Mile didn’t just get a toaster oven or serve pretzels and cheese boards (I love pretzels and cheese boards, don’t mistake). A lot of money clearly went into the space and to create a proper kitchen with an impressively broad menu. And of course, there’s the beer.
I want to start with the beer because it was the best part of my time at Full Mile. A brewery should specialize in its own beer, but it can be easy to lose sight of the basics in pursuit of flashier added value. Full Mile’s schwarzbier, Dark Order, is a joy. It’s clean-finishing, roasty and sweet, with a casual heft that makes a proper pint an enjoyable endeavor. The Countermoves zwickel and Danger Close rye lager are further evidence that the heartier Germanic styles are among this brewery’s specialties.
The food at Full Mile has been, so far, uneven. The conventional wisdom is that bars — and thus breweries, it stands to reason — serve salty snacks to inspire the patrons to order more beer. Beer nuts do appear on the Full Mile menu, as well as chicken wings and cheese curds and deep-fried pickles. However, these items don’t quite fulfill the old “salty food” chestnut. I can’t think of another kitchen that is as unable to season its food properly.
The cheese curds featured terrific puffy clouds of fried beer batter, but were almost flavorless. (The herbed ranch dipping sauce, aggressively salty, balanced it out.) The hand-cut fries were under-salted. The beer cheese soup seemed to get its seasoning only from the bits of crumbled bacon sprinkled atop.
My cheeseburger was cooked to a juicy pink medium, yet bore no indication that the patty had been seasoned. The Full Mile burger, which comes with bacon and beer cheese among the toppings, might mitigate that absence, but a burger shouldn’t require that kind of mitigation.
The pizza is a quality inclusion, and the wood-fired oven in the kitchen is echoed by the big hearth in the bar area. I enjoyed the topping lineup on the Wild Child in particular. But while a white pie can be a thing of delicate beauty, goodness, the crust was bland.
A kitchen’s light touch with salt can leave the diner thinking, “Well, better under-salted than over!” but there’s a point where that thought transforms to “I have to wonder if the cooks know what’s an appropriate amount of salt for a recipe.”
A lot of these dishes would be good-to-great with proper seasoning. The pan-seared salmon was cooked exceptionally well, crisp skin side and all, but could have used a little extra zip. The fried perch sandwich had potential, and its recipe has been tweaked since my visits, so I am hopeful.
The kitchen kindly offered to split the loaded wedge salad to become a shared starter, and it was loaded indeed; fans of blue cheese and mushrooms will be thrilled. Steak tacos were hefty and, in a change of pace, seasoned with an aggressive Southeast Asian culinary bent. The herb roasted pork loin sandwich needed a bit more garlic in its garlic aioli, but the pork was tender and subtly smoky.
Full Mile should be a successful addition to the downtown Sun Prairie scene if for no other reason than it provides a cozy central community space. Everything at Full Mile is so close. The scale is impressive and it has style in spades — the substance is bound to catch up.
Full Mile Beer Company
132 Market St., Sun Prairie; 608-318-2074; fullmilebeercompany.com
11 am-midnight Tue.-Thurs., 11 am-1 am Fri.-Sat., 11 am-11 pm Sun.; $4-$17
