Brewed with oyster mushrooms, black walnuts, and tart cherries
What makes a beer Midwestern? First, it’s important to acknowledge that, for more than a century, the majority of beers consumed anywhere in the U.S. were pale lagers from either St. Louis or Milwaukee. So for years, it could be fairly said that American beer was Midwestern, simply because so much of it came from the Midwest.
A beer can be Midwestern in spirit. You can taste the region’s German roots in its lagers, from pilsner to schwarzbier, and the contributions of a more recent wave of immigrants in the product of new Latinx-owned cervecerias in Chicago. AB InBev’s Naturdays, a strawberry-lemonade concoction, is pure Midwestern backlash to perceived coastal snobbery in a pink, flamingo-dotted can.
While the craft beer boom has given smaller Midwestern brewers a platform for self- expression, it has also provided ample opportunity to showcase the region’s natural attributes. Craft beer’s marriage of innovation, experimentation, and locally-sourced ingredients means it’s now possible to find styles and variants brewed with the flavors of the heartland, with brewers in each state giving their own local twists to traditional styles.
So without further ado, here are our picks—not necessarily the best beers in each state—but the brews that best embody the parts of the Midwest in which they were made.
Scratch is a farmhouse brewery making beers that taste like southern Illinois. That includes everything from a dry-hopped sour wheat brewed with sassafras leaves to an amber lager infused with roasted burdock root and oak heartwood. The award-winning Oyster Weiss is a treasure, brewed with homegrown turmeric and the oyster mushrooms that grow wild on stumps and logs in the woods around the brewery.
Sweet, orange wild persimmons go into puddings, pies, and jams in southern Indiana. So it’s no surprise that one of the state’s oldest craft breweries decided to drop the fruit into their sour brown ale base. Sweet, tart, a little bit nutty, and intentionally resembling “your grandmother’s persimmon pudding,” the resulting beer is a complex tribute to generations of tradition.
Smoke isn’t just for the South. We Midwesterners love smoked meats and fire pits, and thanks to our strong German heritage, we know how to make smoked beer. Leave it to the Iowans to do it with the appropriate measure of modesty. This nutty and slightly caramel-y ale uses just the right amount of cherry-wood-smoked malt for a subtle smoky flavor that won’t leave you feeling like you just fell into a pile of campfire ash.
Too often, when people think of Kansas beer, they think of Kansas City, Missouri, and Boulevard, a craft beer titan. But there’s plenty of good grain—and malt—in the nation’s breadbasket. This wheat beer, brewed with Kansas-grown soft red winter wheat, is a clean homage to the state’s agricultural bounty, topped off with a dollop of Kansas honey.
Is this beer brimming with native Michigan ingredients? No. The signature Centennial hops come from the Pacific Northwest. Is it at least indicative of a uniquely Midwestern style? Of course not—it’s an IPA. But it’s named for a river in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula and, more importantly, it’s consistently stellar and available all over the country. For more than a decade, this beer has announced to the world that the Midwest knows how to brew more than just light lagers.
This is not a knock on Minnesota’s craft beer scene, which is one of the best in the Midwest. (See Surly, Bent Paddle, Fair State, and Summit, among others.) Nor is this is an admitted beer snob trying to be ironic, like the hipsters who got Pabst Blue Ribbon tattoos in the 2000s. Even the most discerning drinker has to admit that there are times, like when you’re fishing, canoeing, or just finished mowing the lawn, when nothing will do but a cold, crisp, straw-colored lager. Unlike PBR or Old Style, this one is still owned by a family brewery, the August Schell Brewing Company, which rescued the 110-year-old brand from bankruptcy in 2002.
When you grow up in the Ozarks (as I did), money literally falls from trees in the late summer and early fall. It used to be that a young boy could make a small fortune picking up walnuts, piling them in a gallon bucket, and loading them into his father’s truck bed. The black stains left on your hands would last longer than the money. This American-style dark wheat, with the richness of hand-picked black walnuts, tastes and smells like childhood to me. And I don’t even have to scrub my hands when I’m done.
It’s one thing to build a beer around a single local ingredient. It’s quite another to source every element—from water to malt to hops—from within one zip code. Especially when that patch of plains is Atkinson, Nebraska, which only has 1,200 people living on it.
You can’t make beer without barley. The Peace Garden State was once the national leader in barley production, and it’s still in the top three, behind Montana and Idaho. For some of the freshest flavor on tap in the Midwest, try this easy-drinking four-percenter, made with grain that traveled just twelve minutes from Two Track Malting.
For decades, much of America’s malt has come from farms in the Pacific Northwest. But prior to Prohibition, Ohio produced 350,000 acres of barley that was processed in hundreds of local malt houses. Now that climate change is putting a pinch on domestic barley production, farmers and brewers in the Buckeye State are trying to restart the local malt industry. This light kvass-inspired sour features Ohio-grown pilsner malt, mashed with over 100 pounds of house-baked bread, and fermented with a sourdough culture from a nearby bakery. The result is extremely crushable—and hopefully indicative of a burgeoning Midwestern malt industry.
If there’s a single Midwestern brewing maxim, it’s that, when it comes down to it, you can make booze out of damn near anything. Tree bark, beets, allegedly even orchid roots. If you’re stranded in the Badlands, you could even make a beer out of the cactus sprouting from the rough terrain. Or you could skip the thorns and call an Uber to take you to Hill City, where you can order a pint of this dry, bitter, and refreshing prickly pear lager, made from fruit picked in the wilds of Cactus Flats.
New Glarus’s famous Spotted Cow seems like the trendiest and most omnipresent craft beer in the state, but its Wisconsinness is trumped by this lush ruby sibling. Brewed with local wheat and a pound of lip-twistingly tart Montmorency cherries from Door County in each bottle, the Belgian Red is practically a fine wine—good alongside dinner, alone for dessert, or over a flaming grill of brats at a Miller Park tailgate.
