For a middle-of-nowhere place,
Central Waters Brewing Company in Amherst, Wisconsin, is pretty fantastic. As with a lot of Wisconsin breweries most of their offerings are pretty standard -- "Nothing too extreme; we emulate the Minnesotans that way yah" -- but solid. Their space itself is really nice, with a decent-sized tap room that draws a very loyal local crowd as well as a fair share of travelers. They also draw some of their heating and electrical power from
their solar array, which is a big plus by me.
In 2014 I attended their sixteenth anniversary party, and have attempted to do so every year since. It's a ticketed event, and in just the past five years tickets have gone from lasting online for hours to literally seconds -- in fact, I missed last year's party because my phone was too slow over a restaurant's wifi for me to score. The party sees the release of their annual beer, a thick, viscous imperial stout that sees plenty of time in bourbon barrels. (Oftentimes they're actually a blend of BA stouts, but we won't go down that rabbit hole. For an overview of these and their other rare beers,
click here.)
They also tap a bunch of CW beers rare and familiar, allow bottle shares, offer food vendors and CW merch (except for tacker signs, due to their sharp edges -- someday I'll get up there to buy one!), and generally make with the merry. The party wraps in the early evening, and at that point all of the pleasures of the greater Stevens Point area are available to you. (The first time I attended with my wife we had some awesome tapas. She kind of hates beer events so now I typically try to find a bottle share after, typically at whatever cut-rate hotel I'm staying at.)
This year's party took place on January 27. A trio of my best drinking buds were attending but I drove solo in order to undertake some side quests (
a bud's butcher shop in East Troy, a few stops at different bottle shops, food of my choice) and enjoy some time on the open road with my podcasts (Norm MacDonald and Marc Maron, mainly) and music. I took a leisurely pace that got me into the Amherst area about five and a half hours after leaving the house and opted to check in at my hotel and hit a few bottle shops first in hopes that the line would dissipate before I arrived at Central Waters.
The party began at 3, and I was parked and in line around 4. As you can see below, my "no line" strategy worked brilliantly!
Hot damn, a line! As a Chicagoan I fucking love lines!
The line actually moved really well, and 15 minutes later I was inside and ready to enter another line. Except when the bar is something like 60 feet wide (obstensibly divided into three different types of pours), the "line" is more of a filthy scrum of people forming a quarter-circle slowly pushing forward for service from perhaps 20 harried volunteers. My buds were near the back of this scrum and some kind souls were all "go ahead, we're never going to get beers anyway so go be with your friends," and sure as shootin' we were in a line. Twenty minutes of that and we'd moved maybe five feet forward, but got word that the part of the serving area that was marked "boring AF year-round pours" was actually serving everything, so off we went and maybe five minutes and three clumsy drunk spills (this would become a theme; glad I wore a polyester coat) later I had a pour of the rum barrel aged coconut porter and the bourbon barrel aged vanilla stout. (The former is scheduled for bottling this year; the latter was a one-off treat.)
Unfortunately, the two beers I finally had 45 minutes into my time at the fest were decidedly "meh." Hopefully there's time to improve the coconut porter before it's bottled, because the consensus in-person and on Untappd is that it's fakey, tasting of white rum (you know, the stuff that isn't actually barrel aged) and artificial coconut. The vanilla stout was better but not great; I'm pretty sure the base for this beer is the basic Brewer's Reserve BA Stout that CW makes, and while that was a personal favorite around 2010 when I started getting heavily into beer I have since come to prefer stouts with more body than this offers. The flavor was pretty good, though.
I ran into several groups of buds on my way over to the separate area where the anniversary stout, CW XX, was being poured so I got to try a few random pours from their bottle shares. I also got spilled on a few more times; a densely packed warehouse full of drunken people leads to that kind of thing. Also, every bottle sharer ended up taking the space of two people, as there were many circles of folks surrounding their bags full of bottles. So yeah...crowded with clumsy drunks, CW was.
A CW XX crowd shot I stole from Facebook
As always, the anniversary stout did not disappoint. I don't have extensive tasting notes, as it was served pretty cold and I didn't nurse it for the half hour it would've taken to bring it to a nice 50 degrees or so to really open it up. (I'm planning to crack a bottle tonight with a few folk, and may post more about it after.)
So after maybe an hour and a half, my small crew opted to buy our bottles and head over to nearby
O'so, which has the distinction of being one of the few breweries that scaled up and entered the Chicago market only to pull out a few years later. (Maybe they'll be back? It
looks like they have a big expansion planned as part of a move from Plover to Stevens Point.)
The bottle line moved quickly (they've improved this tremendously since the fiasco that was CW16), and off I went to my car. Unfortunately, my assumption that the sunny mid-40s daytime temps meant it would be an easy walk through the dark fields to my car proved unfounded, as I took a big-time spill flat on my back on some unexpected ice. My night ended with a trip to a drive-through, mass quantities of ibuprofen and fitful, pained sleep (at one point it took me five tries to lie down in bed due to severe pain in the back of my left ribcage, but fortunately nothing is broken) rather than O'so, pizza and a hotel bottle share. And none of my bottles broke, so I have that going for me.
Social media was full of all manner of opinions as to the success of the party, with 60 percent of the commentariat saying too many people were overserved (there were reports of copious amounts of vomit and someone pulling a line out of a brewing vessel, among other travesties) and 40 percent being all "eh, it's beer, what do you expect?" One exec from CW posted that bottle sharing probably won't be allowed next year, which makes some sense -- it's CW's party, so shouldn't their beer be the focus?
In any case, I had fun at CW XX despite the sloppy folk and my own clumsiness. The scuttlebutt says that they really want to make a big deal out of next year's 21st anniversary party, as people born the year Central Waters was opened will finally be of age and able to attend. Hopefully, I'll be there!
