25 Apr The Beer RUn (Part 2): Indiana City Brewing Co. and the freedom to drink
An Indiana On Tap Original by Donovan Wheeler
This is the second of a multi-part entry 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.
History’s Echoes
Almost a hundred years after it was ratified, Prohibition still lingers in our society. Any American with even an iota of historical awareness can feel it haunting a darkened, basement bar on a Friday night stirring something as simple as a sense of appreciation because we have the freedom to enjoy an evening drink with our dates and share a conversation without fear of the Temperance Squad busting down the door and hauling us off to the station. We can also appreciate Prohibition’s specter as we collectively debate modern battles for individual freedom sorting out everything from marijuana legalization to gay and lesbian rights.
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In the case of something such as pot, history has millions of pages to write before we fully understand who stands on the right side, but as far as Prohibition goes? Yeah, just about everyone agrees. It was a very bad idea.
Indiana City Brewery
When Jim and I stepped into the
Indiana City Brewery on Shelby Street, we had no idea we were walking into one of those convergences where the past meets the present and the two seem to blur together. Indiana City operates in what used to be the bottling and distribution warehouse for the now-defunct Home Brewery, an operation that dominated the city’s beer market in the years prior to the Eighteenth Amendment. When we walked past the door, I obliviously ambled right under the stenciled quote on the wall above me, a fist-shaking declaration from Home Brewing in 1917 claiming that, one day, liberty would return and man would once again be able to raise a glass and live in a free nation. Fully ignorant of the history surrounding me, all I saw was a very old building that had been very stylistically renovated. When we had left Greencastle for this trip, sitting in a haunt like this was probably the most common daydream that flickered in my head, and Indiana City Brewery’s pub room looked exactly like that scenario I’d imagined.
“This is cool,” I said to Jim. Shakespeare was right: we “had eyes to wonder,” but we “lacked tongues to praise.”
Punctuated by the row of narrow garage-door bays across the front, the dimly-lit taproom swallows you as you enter. The high ceilings disappearing into shadows above and the concrete floor underneath meet the century-old brick walls to create the effect you’d get walking into a trendy, four-star downtown restaurant. While small light bulbs hovered overhead, they actually put out more heat than light. Nearly all of the latter came in the natural form, through the entryway’s glass doors and the small windows above them. The rest emanated from strings of miniature, clear Christmas lights strategically hung throughout the taproom. Seated at the stone bar, Indiana City advertised its brews on the chalk-wall facing us, wrapping themselves around a stainless steel tap arrangement.
In the Home Brewery Days, workers would load bottles of beer onto horse wagons at these bay doors for distribution around the Circle City.
We started with a four-set flight of samples of the brewery’s house beers. Jim picked the
IPAPI double IPA and a very good pale ale dubbed Tribute, while I opted for the Irish Hill red ale and an extremely tasty sample of Shadow Boxer oatmeal stout. We took our time with the samples, enjoying both them and the company of the young lady working the taps. It was from her that I learned the storied history of the building.
“An old brewery? Really?” I said.
“Well,” she corrected me politely (and I’m pretty sure she was repeating it because I didn’t listen when she told us the first time), “this is the bottling building. The actual brewery was behind us, and that’s been torn down for some time.”
Jim enjoys his pint of Tribute Pale Ale.
I learned a lot about brewery life during that visit. I didn’t consider that brewers spend inordinately more time cleaning and sterilizing than than they actually do making beer, but once our hostess had pointed that out, I realized that the brewer’s life can be just as unglamorous as all the other unique careers we tend to romanticize. Jim and I further learned that she and two brew masters do all the work, but they get a great deal of aesthetic help from artists and musicians.
But as I already observed at Cutters, I also witnessed here how much pride brew-masters take in their work. The day we were there, one of the brewers was visited by family, and was showing them the bourbon barrel concoction he was about to release: an oatmeal stout called Haymaker. Brewed in limited supply and released after our visit, it reminded me that some of the best beers out there are ones we miss out on by either geography or timing.
After finishing the flight, I insisted we each have a pint. We’d only had a few samples at Cutters, and we both knew we would be limited to samples at Sun King, so if we were going to be able to sit in front of a full glass, this was going to be it. In a moment of backwards impulse, I ignored my obvious choice (the stout) and went for the Irish Hill. Don’t get me wrong, it’s a damn good beer. It struck me as a tad hoppier than the 14 IBU rating on the chalkboard, but it was delicious and full-bodied, especially for a red ale. But even as I nursed my way through it, my eyes crept up the board to the Shadow Boxer.
Jim’s selection, Tribute pale ale, is a perfect entry beer for someone making the shift from the bland, rice-brewed “light” crap to real beer. It’s mellow and enters the palate easily. Furthermore, it’s hoppy enough to stand out as a craft beer, but strong on taste and character. Clearly, all the brews at Indiana City are phenomenal and well-crafted, but what I loved the most about my time there was the experience of sitting among people who made beer for the sake of making good beer. And I very much appreciated additional the efforts Indiana City went to create a complete craft beer experience.
As we left, I finally took the time to read the Home Brewery quote on the wall: “The day will dawn again in Indiana, when a man can drink what he wants, when personal liberty will again be a citizen’s right.” As I read the words, I thought about what it must have been like for those Prohibition-era patrons to have to surreptitiously enjoy something as simple as pint of lager, and then I thought about the product options my dad’s generation had when they turned of age in the early 1970′s. This moment of clarity, when I realized that many Americans lived without beer altogether or lived with mass-processed pond-scum in the years that followed…that visit made me appreciate how exciting these days are and how lucky I am to share them with my son.
Original kegs from Indiana City’s Home Brewery past.
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