This Week On Tap: Warped Wing’s Mr. Mean

For one day, whether we’re out on a lake with cousins we see maybe once a year, firing up grills for hours upon hours of cooking meats over open flame, cracking open some cold ones with friends and neighbors in our back yards, or enjoying the looks on our kids’ faces as they take in fireworks, we can actually sit back and enjoy the aspects of our country worth enjoying. It’s a day to acknowledge that ultimately we are all in on this shared American Experience together, that we all have a hand in keeping this place moving forward, as well as a responsibility to make sure we all get our fair shake from it. It’s a time to celebrate our greatness while simultaneously acknowledging we can and will continue to do better.

Boiled down to its simplest form, the Fourth of July is pretty damn great.

It’s a time to celebrate every last nook and cranny of America, from the highest peaks to the lowest valleys, from the skyscrapers of Manhattan to the vast corn fields of Morgan County, IN. So this week, This Week On Tap is stepping outside of our normal boundaries to do just that. This week, we’re celebrating the fruits of our neighbor to the east’s labor and talking about Mr. Mean, a big, hoppy, flavorful imperial IPA from Dayton, OH’s Warped Wing Brewery.

I’ve been fortunate of late to have access to Warped Wing’s fine offerings thanks to Tina Pennock, a college friend originally from the Dayton area who now lives in Richmond, IN and frequents the Indianapolis area, setting up trades of whatever we both have to offer at the moment (I’m still somewhat regretting passing off a can of Coconoats, but it went to a good home). Ohio has tons of amazing craft beer to offer up, so much so that I challenge to find better beer in a region than what Ohio, Indiana, and Michigan are doing right now. But recently I had limited my scope of late to what’s coming out of Cincinnati and Cleveland, completely neglecting everything coming from any other part of the great Buckeye State.

Do you know how stupid that seems to me upon reading? If someone told me, “New Albanian and 18th Street are amazing Indiana breweries, but whatever to anything in between those cities,” I’d be in jail because of my reaction. It’s insane to completely rule all of that space out! Some of the country’s best beer is being made in that space! And it’s the same in every damn state between the coasts! (Cue shared outrage over being labeled “flyover country”) I’m a lesser man for that, I admit, because Warped Wing is making absolutely amazing beer. I’ve recently had both their Self Starter session IPA and their Flyin’ Rye IPA and I’d put them up there with some of the better beers I’ve had this year.