The Beer RUN (Part 1):  Two Days in the circle city searching for great craft brews

An Indiana On Tap Original by Donovan Wheeler

This is the first of a multi-part series detailing my journey around Indianapolis with my son, a few weeks after his 21st birthday.  See below for a list/links to all stops on our two day craft beer odyssey.

                       The Greatest Milestone
When my son, Jim, was born I was not even three years past the legal drinking age. In other words, I was still a kid myself. But when you’re 23, married, a newly-minted father, and the master of your professional universe as well (in my case…in my mind, that is…an up-and-coming wunderkind teacher) you don’t think of yourself as a fully grown child. Nope, you’re the perfect mixture of man and Superman. You’re convinced that you’ve got the moves and raw talent of a Luke Skywalker, the panache of a couple Han Solos, and the wisdom of seven Yodas (minus that mind-numbing inverted syntax). That’s how hubris works. It sneaks up on you while you’re too busy easily meeting all those entry-level expectations the world throws at you when you’re barely out of college. Thus, while you’re going along convincing yourself that failure will never be the clichéd option in your own life, you’re also scratching out the game plan for your son’s model life packed with Mr. Basketball awards, newspaper headlines, and the scholarships to Harvard and/or Princeton. Indeed, those first dozen years of fatherhood are loaded with a sort of paternal seduction.

Any father of a 20-something knows how the story goes from there. It turns out that kids have this nasty tendency to lay their own paths, and sooner rather than later, we learn that we have to accept them on their terms. Meanwhile, all those easy challenges we breezed through when we were those young, superstar parents–changing diapers, coaching little league, and refereeing slip-n-slide contests–have turned into herculean endeavors–sex talks, driving lessons, and curfew arguments–the kind of moments that always end up convincing our kids that they were raised by idiots.

The funny thing is—and this I think is common for all dads—is that just when you think your kid is nothing like you, you abruptly realize he’s actually a hell of lot like you after all. For one, Jim was always a great golfer, and he’s also become a voracious reader as well.

But something that’s really connected us lately is his almost immediate love for good craft beer.

In celebration of his recent 21st birthday, Jim and I spent an unseasonably cold Indiana spring break (although I think by now sub-40 is pretty much “seasonable”) traveling around the Circle City in search of the best brews and coolest pubs we could find. We didn’t hit them, all. About four of them didn’t even make the initial list, and we flat-out forgot two of them…the stuff that happens when you don’t keep your eye on your list. What we did discover, however, made for a great two days in Indy.

Cutters Brewery: Avon, IN

Jim and I had both sampled a pint or two of Cutters’ heralded Floyd’s Folly Scottish Ale in Terre Haute, and as we rolled east on US 36, our anticipation mushroomed. I had been looking forward to this trip since Christmas, no…Thanksgiving, and I knew after my first sip of Floyd’s in a Bagger Dave’s at the Honey Creek Mall that I was going to make this stop. I suppose, however, that my mind was hypnotized by all those brew pub photo galleries I saw on the web.  So as we traveled, I envisioned a somewhat roomy bar area with a little touch of Midwestern, quasi-urban chic in the suburbs: an echoing room, a bar with a marble slab counter, dark walnut trim disappearing into corner shadows, and genuine Cutter’s bottle artwork all over the walls. I could already imagine myself sitting at the bar working over a flight of samples or a settling in for my first pint of the trip while a Miles Davis track played in the background.

But, by the time we reached brewery’s parking lot and still couldn’t find the place…? Yeah, scratch the walnut trim.

“Where the hell is this place?” my tone and vocabulary gets a smidge terse when I’m driving and I don’t know where I’m supposed to be going.

“Relax, Dad,” Jim replied thumbing through Yelp. Then came the hesitation, followed by his soft, frustrated “Jesus…”

“Here,” Jim announced reading a Yelp post aloud. “Park in the Mears Company parking lot…” Mears sold/manufactured/didwhatever with electrical/plumbing/ferrets…who knows? My attention-to-detail meter wasn’t switched to Holmes position at that moment.

“Once you’ve parked,” Jim continued, “walk past the fence and take the first door on the right.”

As we walked past the aforementioned fence, we couldn’t see any door right of anything, but we did see the small mountain of empty kegs stacked next to a steel shed. 

They were simple silver containers with a black band across the top announcing that they recently held “Hard Working Beer.” Just at the moment when we finally noticed that indeed, there was a door on the right, a young man appeared from our left: tattooed arm, tight t-shirts, worn jeans, a tight painters cap, a wisp of a beard, and a beaming smile on his face that said, “I work for no one but myself, and I love what I do every day. Envy that!”

I did. I do.

“I think we’re at the right place,” Jim hesitantly said to the stranger approaching us.

His smile growing, he responded, “If you like beer you are.”

The door led inside the same shed the kegs had half-hidden. The entire east side of the building housed a row of stainless steel vats, all of them doing their work. Instead of dark walls and custom trim were bright steel, ribbed wall panels bordered by intermittent bolt-heads.  Substituting for smooth jazz in the background was the rhythmic hum of refrigeration, and in place of the marble topped bar was a plastic fold-out long table, and one metal folding chair. Behind that a chest-fridge holding almost a dozen one-sixth-barrels of the some of the best beer we would drink on the trip. Jim and I both expected we’d hit a couple bare bones joints; we just didn’t think they’d be this bare bones, and we didn’t think we’d land at one on stop number one. But it all made sense. The brewery was named after the stone workers who made Bloomington, Indiana one of the limestone capitals of the world. The very name was lauded for its “kiss my ass” celebration of wanton rebellion. It only made sense that, here, window dressing and fancy furniture was a pretentious waste of time and effort. Cutters is unapologetically a production brewery, and like their blue-collar namesakes, all that matters is the quality of the work.

We started the samples immediately, and the Floyds delivered as expected: A sweet start with a mellow finish. Had we downed pints instead of 4-ounce tasters, we’d no doubt have felt the 8% alcohol kick in about two-thirds the way through. In fact, all the numbers next to each brand of brew screamed high-octane. Jim fell hard for the Half Court IPA, while I sampled from a batch of Pentagon Porter, their Redline Amber, and the Knobstone pale as well.  Of all the beers we tried on the trip, Cutters stood out for its smoothness and mellow entry into the palate.  They were brewed not only to satisfy the experienced drinker, they were also crafted to woo the novice.  Had this been our last stop we no doubt would have filled a couple growlers each and been thankful for opportunity. Alas, our road trip had only begun. We thanked the young man (a gracious, patient, passionate host who never dropped that near-giddy grin) as we tossed our empty plastic cups into the banana-yellow plastic 50-gallon drums and stepped back outside, our eyes set for Indy.

Next Stop: Indiana City Brewing Co.