Ongoing
Midwest Microbrew
A craft beer discovery site and YouTube channel telling the stories behind the independent breweries of the American Midwest.
Overview
Midwest Microbrew is a site and channel my brother in law Henry and I run together. Henry founded it after years of road trips through Iowa, Wisconsin, and Minnesota, where he noticed the best conversations always happened in the taproom and nobody was writing any of it down.
Plenty of sites will give you a list of breweries and a rating out of five. We wanted the other thing: why someone left a stable job for a mash tun, what the first batch tasted like, how a town ended up rallying around a brewery on a side street. That is the part that does not show up in a rating.
What we cover
Brewmaster interviews. We sit down with the people who actually make the beer and talk about their first homebrew, their biggest problems, and how they think about the craft.
Brewery spotlights. The history, the equipment, and the feel of the place. What makes a specific brewery matter to the town it sits in.
Beer chronicles. The story behind one beer. Where an IPA came from, or the mistake that turned into a stout people drive across the state for.
The interviews
The interviews are the center of it. Our most recent feature is a long conversation with Dan Carey, co founder and brewmaster of New Glarus Brewing Company, covering the history of Spotted Cow, the Only in Wisconsin strategy that keeps their beer inside state lines, and where the brewery goes next. We have also sat down with Waldmann, Lakefront, Titletown, and Big Grove.
Explore by state
Everything is organized by state so you can find what is near you: Illinois, Iowa, Michigan, Minnesota, Ohio, and Wisconsin. The Midwest is one of the best brewing regions in the country and most of it is still local by design, so where you are standing changes what you can get.
My role
I handle a lot of the social media side: building the audience, cutting the interviews down into clips that work on short form, and figuring out what actually gets people to watch a full conversation with a brewer instead of scrolling past it. I also help with the interviews and the site itself.
It is a different kind of problem than anything in my engineering work, and that is most of why I like it. The constraint is attention rather than load or tolerance, but you still iterate the same way: try something, look at what the numbers say, change one thing, run it again.
Where to find it
Everything lives at midwestmicrobrew.com, and the full interviews are on YouTube. If you run a Midwest brewery and want to talk, the contact page is the fastest way to reach us.