Heritage Brew

A craft beer revival for Michigan’s oldest brewery

 

- Tim Tebeau

Step through the door and the space smells like beer. Bready yeast esters, burnt sugar malt wafts and piney citrus peel hop perfumes escape like zephyrs from foaming spigots and surf the air currents around Petoskey Brewing’s taproom. Backlit by burnished industrial fixtures glowing beside exposed brick, the bar crew hustles to fill pints for a crowd of late summer cyclists and thirsty weekend beer geeks. A towering chalkboard above the tap handles advertises the brewery’s mainstay beers, and more than a dozen ephemeral small-batch potions, like Morning Fog Mochajava Stout or Love Grenade India Pale Lager. Platters of gargantuan cheeseburgers and doughy pretzel sticks land amidst the slosh at a corner table of Mug Club members smugly sipping Gym Selfie American Strong Ale from clay flagons turned in a local pottery studio.

Past the bar and the bustle of service, a glass wall peeks in on the guts of the brewery. A shiny mash tun fills with crushed grain augured via chute from a mill behind the far wall. Story-high stainless steel bright tanks and 40-barrel fermenters silently burble as they convert alchemies of grain, water, hops and yeast into pilsners and pale ales. Head brewer Brad Bergman and his lieutenants scuttle between switchboards and a serpentine maze of hoses that ensure optimal temperatures and chemistries for today’s batch of brew.

Launched in September of 2012, as Michigan’s craft beer zeitgeist was hitting its second surge, the new Petoskey

Brewing has enjoyed a meteoric rise in the Michigan market as both a destination for craft beer pilgrims and an increasingly ubiquitous draught presence on tap in nearly every corner of the Mitten. While its present buzz is a testament to savvy entrepreneurship and skilled brewing, Petoskey Brewing’s original story starts in 1896 on a dirt track at the back of Little Traverse Bay.