Carpano Manhattan

One of the toughest common cocktail ingredients for the typical red-blooded beer-drinking Wisconsinite to get through is vermouth. Vermouth is just fortified wine (wine with a distilled spirit like brandy added) to bring the proof up to around 30-34 in most cases and also aromatized. Aromatization is the flavoring of wine with various botanicals like roots, barks, flowers, seeds, herbs, and spices.

Bell’s Brewery Beers

Bell's Brewery Porter and
Bell's Brewery Kalamazoo Stout

One good thing about a big warehouse liquor store like Woodman’s is that you can readily buy great beers a bottle at a time without the fear that your 99 rated porter smells and tastes like a skunk’s butt because it has been sitting on the shelf since 1987. Woodman’s also pulls out some of the highest-rated brews especially for impulse buying; it works because we occasionally snag some of these brews to see what the fuss is about.

Salem, Massachusetts

A morning full of witch shop window-shopping and 18th century cemetery crawls in Salem, Massachusetts, can sure make a guy pretty darn thirsty, so I wandered ever deeper into the bowels of Witch City to partake in some home-grown witches’ brews. Off Derby Street, I found Salem Beer Works. There are actually six Beer Works locations in Massachusetts- one at Fenway Park, one in Boston’s Bullfinch Triangle, one in Lowell, one in Hingham, one in Framingham. Besides the Beer Works at Fenway, the Salem location is the oldest, pouring suds since 1996.