Beer and Brewing in South Bend and Elsewhere

Ok…

Been living in South Bend since August, talked to a number of people about beer and brewing. Sent long messages to some of them. Hopefully, didn’t scare them off too badly… 😉

Thing is, there’s a lot of resources for/about beer and brewing. Here’s
just a few to get people started. And once you get started, well, anything can happen.

Local/Regional

Relevant for North Central Indiana and some other parts of the MidWest

  • Legends of Notre Dame
  • Beer pub on Notre Dame Campus. The site has their beer menu…

  • Mishawaka Brewing Co.
  • Michiana’s only brewpub, at this point. They have some limited brewing supplies.

  • Quality Wine and Ale Supply [Added: 24/03/08. Thanks, Andy C!]
  • A homebrew supply shop in Elkhart, which might be the closest “LHBSS” to Mishawaka/South Bend. Looks like they have an extensive selection and decent prices.

  • Zeke’s
    Beer pub in Dowagiac, MI.
  • Indiana Beer
  • A site about beer events in Indiana.

  • Great Lakes Brewing News
  • A beer newspaper which is distributed for free at Legends and MBC. Jim Herter, business manager for Notre Dame’s food services, writes for the Indiana section.

  • Chicago Beer Society
  • Group of beer lovers and homebrewers. They do cool events like “Thirst Fursday” the first Thursday of each month.

  • Grape and Granary
  • A mail order brewing supply shop which has a good selection and ships to Northcentral Indiana pretty fast. There are other homebrew supply shops, including online, but this is the one that my friends in town have been using.

  • Theta Ridge Coffee
  • Importer of green coffee beans. As other beer lovers seem to enjoy fresh coffee, I thought I’d mention this one.

In my humble opinion, the best liquor store for beer in South Bend is City Wide Liquors’ downtown location:

109 E. Jefferson Blvd.
(Across from Keybank, down the street from Century Center)
South Bend, IN 46601
574-287-8652

General Beer Sites

Lots of information about homebrewing

  • Palmer’s How to Brew
  • A homebrewing book available online for free.

  • Papazian’s Complete Joy of Homebrewing
  • A good, inexpensive brew book for beginners and intermediate brewers.

  • HomeBrew Digest
  • A mailing-list for homebrewers and a “library” of brewing information.
    Some of the library’s stuff is a bit old but the mailing-list is a cool place to contact brewers.

  • Beertown
  • A site for different brewing associations, including the American Homebrewer Association

  • Real Beer
  • A general site about beer with a lot of information about brewing.

  • Bodensatz
  • A site with lots of info about homebrewing.

Miscellaneous Beer Sites

  • Beer Judge Certification Program
  • The most useful thing, IMHO, are “style guidelines” that are used for homebrew competitions. I hope people won’t get too stuck on the details as some of it is very arbitrary. But it’s a good way to get information about some styles, like “Irish Red Ale” or “Dunkelweizen”…

  • Rate Beer
  • A site where one can rate beers they try and/or read people’s comments about beers. Some of these comments are a bit strange and those people tend to like specific types of beer, but it’s sometimes a good way to choose a beer you want to try. Hops are liked by raters and so are strong full-bodied beers but the best-rated beer is in fact a Belgian Trappist…

  • Michael Jackson the Beer Hunter
  • The best-known beer writer, not the youngest member of the Jackson 5.

  • Beer Advocate
  • I mostly use it to look for beer pubs across the US and in other places, especially when I travel. Many places have lists of brew- and beerpubs and may even do pubcrawls for beer geeks…

  • PubCrawler
  • Another site listing beer pubs in the US and elsewhere. Actually, I was confusing PubCrawler with BeerAdvocate. They accomplish similar goals…

  • All About Beer
  • A brewing magazine.

  • Siebel Institute
  • A very serious institute where you can get a degree in brewing technology. Education you can actually use!

2 thoughts on “Beer and Brewing in South Bend and Elsewhere”

  1. @Andy Thanks for the link. Either I missed it or the store was opened after I left South Bend. Have you been there?
    It would have been a bit far for me as I don’t have a car and lived on IUSB campus but as I notice a number of people coming to this post looking for info, it might be useful to someone.

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