Iowa Craft Beers & Breweries

Tag: Des Moines breweries

Iowa Beer Bike Jerseys

Aren’t you just loving this weather?! Ok, not this weather, but the weather before Monday. And *hopefully* this weekend.  I DEFINITELY am.  For me, gorgeous weather = biking.  I put my bike away for the winter the first week of December and had it back out my the first week of March.  That’s a long enough hiatus.  If you’re a biker, you know the excitement of a new bike jersey.  It’s another way for us to express ourselves within our bike cult.  So it should come as no surprise that my first jersey was one from a brewery: Exile Brewing in Des Moines.  We stopped in for dinner one night and saw them on display and just had to have them.  This year, the Easter Bunny left a pretty new one from SingleSpeed in my Easter basket.  Good bunny. Continue reading

Brewery of the Week: 515 Brewing Company

Don’t you just love those first warm, sunny Sundays of Spring?  Where the temperature pushes 70 degrees and the breeze is just right and its absolutely gorgeous out and you remember why you suffer through Iowa winters?  I do.  And that’s exactly what I got last week, a work-free, homework-free, gorgeous Sunday with nothing planned.  It was just too good not to get the road bikes out and take that first long ride of the season.  So we hopped on the trail and rode 7.2 miles worth of trails from West Des Moines to 515 Brewing.  Breweries on bike trails are the best breweries, and when we arrived we discovered several others agreed with us.  Great minds think alike.

bikes

515When we walked in, the place was packed I could tell everyone else was in that same happy, Spring Fever mood.  Seriously the best.  In the name of research, we order a couple flights so we could try all 8 of 515’s current offerings. Continue reading

Brewery of the Week: Exile Brewing Company!

exile front

It is finally time to pay homage to the first brewery I ever visited: Exile Brewing Company in downtown Des Moines.  My other half took me there for our first Valentine’s Day a couple years ago.  Clearly this was the way to my heart.  And I have loved the place since!

IMG_5868

 

On my most recent trip, I had just come off a long, hectic Friday.  I had travelled from Cedar Falls, to Ankeny, to the Des Moines airprot, then West Des Moines, followed by Perry, Woodward, Perry again, Ames, and back to Des Moines.  By 5 pm.  I was MORE than ready to a beverage to decompress. I joined the rest of the Friday After Work Crowd who was pouring in the door.  As usual, Exile didn’t disappoint.  My first beer that night was the Praha Dark Czech lager.  This beer is almost inky black in color but soooo insanely smooth.  I absolutely loved it.  With dinner I ordered a Night Fall Porter.  The description promised vanilla and velvety chocolate, and “the perfect pairing for the final stretch of winter.” It was also good, but not as good as the Czech.

Continue reading

BREWERY OF THE WEEK: Madhouse Brewing!

I am hoping that if I promise to give you TWO Brewery of the Week posts this week, you will all forgive me for shorting you last week.  I will try not to let you down again.  I will spare you the list of excuses, but in truth this post was incredibly hard to write.  I have been torn up about how to best approach this subject.  I would never want to paint an Iowa brewery in bad light because I seriously believe in the greatness of all the options we have here and the potential we have to be a hotspot in the brewing world.  However, I am also an overly honest person by nature and could never lie to my readers.  Continue reading

Brewery of the Week: Firetrucker Brewery!

I’m not going to lie, before my first trip to Firetrucker, I was a little skeptic.  I have this inherent fear of theme restaurants, as most of them spend so much time investing in their “theme” and not nearly enough time investing in their menus and service.  So while I can always appreciate something that pays homage to our brave firefighters, I was a little leery that this would be all firetrucks and dalmatians and no good beer.  I could not have been more wrong. Continue reading

© 2024 IOWA BREWTIFUL

Theme by Anders NorenUp ↑