If you define Midwestern beer as beer that most people associate with the Midwest, the region’s most essential brewery might be Anheuser-Busch. If you define it as beer that tastes like the Midwest, my front-runner is Scratch Brewing, located on seventy-five wooded acres outside Ava, Illinois, just an hour and a half from Busch headquarters in St. Louis.

Scratch bottles time and place. They don’t make flagships, but they do repeat seasonal favorites, including the Spring Tonic, flavored with dandelions, carrot tops, clover, and ginger, and a tart, woodsy infusion of hickory leaves, nuts, hulls, and toasted bark that they call Single-Tree Hickory. Their herbs and vegetables come from their garden and their cedar branches and sassafras leaves come from their woods. They order malt from Indiana. Their hops all grow in Illinois. Even the house fermentation culture is a taste of place, as co-founder Marika Josephson shared with us in May.

I first came across Scratch at North Carolina’s State of Origin beer festival in 2015. The brewery was one of just a few from out of state at that celebration of local flavor, but the brewers got my attention with a crisp, clean oak and turmeric gruit that brought back memories I didn’t know I had, of cool fall afternoons in my native southern Ohio. I was living in coastal South Carolina then, and that was one of the experiences that pointed me back toward the Midwest. In the years since, Scratch has continued to shape how I see the region where I grew up and influence my hopes for Midwesterner.

In 2016, Marika and co-founders Aaron Kleidon and Ryan Tockstein put out a book, The Homebrewer’s Almanac. I didn’t brew at the time, but I spent hours with it, learning how they used green tomatoes, wild grapevine, native persimmon, and spicebush to make beers that tasted like home. It’s a book I’d share with anyone interested in local flavor, aspiring brewer or not. Where else can you find insight on the ideal time of day to harvest elderflower blossoms, the best tree-bark decoctions, or the subtle differences between beer brewed with water and beer brewed with tree saps? The landscapes that I’d explored all my life took on new meaning as I read, from forest-floor scrub up to the crowns of our tall oaks and hickories. The book gave me new ways of understanding the overlooked landscapes of the lower Midwest.

That same year, they bottled their first beer, a mushroom-infused farmhouse ale simply named Chanterelle Bière de Garde. Mushroom beer may surprise you, even in a craft beer era defined by funky and fruited rebukes to fizzy-yellow-lager tradition. If so, consider that the chanterelle’s most resonant flavors—apricot, earth, and black pepper—are flavors that you might already associate with a saison. It’s one of my favorite beers. So last summer, my first as a full-time Ohioan since I left a decade and a half ago, I put my entire chanterelle harvest into the recipe in The Homebrewer’s Almanac.

If you’re finding more chanterelles than I did last year (and I hope you are), consider this a use for the tattered and slightly dirty mushrooms in your basket. Looks and texture don’t matter here. This is a recipe for homebrewers, and it might look intimidating, but you should be able to find everything but the mushrooms at your local homebrew shop, and it follows the same basic steps as any other beer recipe. It’s worth some research and a few hours of work. The bottles I filled around this time last year still carry the flavor of a few lucky afternoons in the woods last July and August.