Wisconsin Dells, Wisconsin
Booze Rating: D
Crusin’ Rating: B-
This week, we are continuing on to explore a spot in the Wisconsin Dells and hitting up a brewery that we’ve been aware of for some time, but just recently got first hand experience with the Beers & Buoys Bar Crawl around Lake Wisconsin. This bar crawl allowed us to try ample samples from this week’s review subject, all while enjoying warm fall evenings on the water - one of Hannah’s favorite pastimes. The entire bar crawl was centered around ordering beer from Bevy Brewery and Winery, our imbibery of the week!
Bevy Brewery and Winery opened its tasting room in May of 2023 and bought out the former Port Huron Brewing Company. Bevy is now making use of some of the equipment and even one of the recipes to honor the former brewery by still producing the Honey Blonde - which we hear was quite popular when Port Huron was still in business.
Located just east of downtown Wisconsin Dells, Bevy occupies a squat, pole barn-like building in a business park. The building is clad with metal siding and a large parking lot - we pulled up to Bevy on a rainy day hoping that the interior was a bit more cozy than the exterior looked. Walking inside, we were met with the smell of buttered popcorn and the low murmur of conversation. To our right was a room with outdoor picnic tables for extra seating and a fun little photo spot. To our left, the main tasting room that included a bar with plenty of wine bottles behind it, and a wall that featured many self-pour taps with display screens above.
The set up is kinda neat. Like a lot of self-pour spots, you give Bevy a credit card and you get something back - a pay card, a bracelet, or tokens, and then you get to use that currency to pour as much of your chosen imbibements as you want. Bevy takes it a step farther and lets you choose from several shelves of glassware, including flight glasses. We thought that was
a really nice touch. A small basket of popcorn was brought to our table while Hannah and I selected our beers to review. We sat at the end of a long, high table and took stock of the other seating which allowed for around 30. The walls had varying decoration and signage on them and were painted a familiar green and black color scheme that seems to be the most popular color scheme around Wisconsin breweries - Ooga, Karben 4, and Hop & Barrel all share the same color scheme.
We counted them up and Bevy offers 11 wines, 15 beers, and 4 ciders which is an impressive amount to have on tap. Hannah and I are taking bets on when they move into producing spirits as well, what do you think?
We did get a chance to speak with the brewer, Nick, and lo and behold, he used to work at the Cider Farm! He was an absolutely wonderful host and let us taste a lot of samples of items in progress.
With plenty of samples to choose from, Hannah and I opted to keep it to a simple four for our review, but know that we chose those that we didn’t try on the bar crawl and we tried still more during our review. Since you pay per ounce, you can make the flight and experience as affordable as you want to. We also chose to forgo wine on this trip as we didn’t want to imbibe too much in one sitting.
The Bees Trees Cyser (8.0% ABV) - First up, a Cyser is a style we are very familiar with. The one we are most familiar with uses organic Dabinett apples from the cider farm. This cider poured champagne gold and had aromas of honey,and green apple skin. With a little tartness up front that quickly fades into sweetness that borders on apple juice with barely perceptible tannins. Hannah mentioned that it goes down easy but I think this was not as subtle as other cysers we’ve had that really misses out on some of those delicate apple characteristics.
Sour Revival (5.2% ABV) - This sour with lemon and peach puree oddly, had an aroma of citrus mixed with peanut butter - almost like a sour jelly along with some cereal graininess. Whie tasting there was lots of lemon, pineapple, and tartness on the middle of your tongue, followed by a nutty and grainy finish. Mind you, this was not a peanut-butter and jelly sour like Hannah and I have seen here and there. After some research, we found that a nutty flavor can from Diacetyl or perhaps Autolysis (wherein yeast starts to eat itself!). We weren’t sure of the source, but it was definitely not for us.
Barrel-Aged Kong w/Cherry (9.0% ABV) - This Stout was brewed with 100 pounds of cherry in the barrel and poured a dark brown with just a touch of red tint when held to the light. This beer had an aroma of rum-chocolate-covered cherries. With flavors of dark sugar-macerated cherries in syrup and then a sharp, bitter finish of dark coffee Hannah and I both thought that this stout was heavily on the bitter side and could have used some complexity of flavor such as vanilla or maybe some oatmeal to temper the bitterness. It ended up tasting closer to using Luxardo cherry syrup as your morning coffee sweetener and not in a good way.
Weis’n Skulk Oktoberfest (5.6% ABV) - This Marzen was a seasonal taproom special and poured the color of fallen leaves with an off-white head. With an initial note of toffee and sweet dough on the nose, this beer tasted buttery - rather than toffee, with minerality notes and finished with some caramel and a little hop presence. This beer left us underwhelmed and scratching our heads.
The reason we were scratching our heads was that, throughout our tasting at Bevy and other instances at bars around Madison we noticed something was usually “off” with the beer. So much so that we didn’t finish some of our beers on the Beers and Buoys bar crawl prior to this tasting. It wasn’t just us either - we spoke with locals at each stop and at least 3 out of those five stops found that the locals weren’t a fan of the beers either.
Some of dislike can be due to the fact that the locals have their go to beers, which tend to be cheap, non craft beer. But when we asked, we weren’t the only ones noticing some off-flavors and general unpleasantness when tasting - and this is coming from Busch Lite Connoisseurs - the king of all flavorful beers! The point is - there is just something that we are finding, more often than not, and confirmed not to just be our beer snobbery, that is off-putting about a majority of the stuff coming out of Bevy. Now, maybe it’s because kinks are still getting worked out and there’s some experience to be gained by the brewers, which is really a shame since the brewer is such a nice guy. But, when we started this blog we promised that we’d give our honest impression. We’d skip this one if I were you and avoid it on tap.
Better luck next time.
Until then, keep on crusin’, don’t stop boozin’!
To learn more about Bevy Brewery and Winery, please visit their website at: drinkwithbevy.com or on Facebok: @Bevy.WI or on Instagram: @Bevy.WI