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
- Mishawaka Brewing Co.
- Quality Wine and Ale Supply [Added: 24/03/08. Thanks, Andy C!]
- Zeke’s
Beer pub in Dowagiac, MI. - Indiana Beer
- Great Lakes Brewing News
- Chicago Beer Society
- Grape and Granary
- Theta Ridge Coffee
Beer pub on Notre Dame Campus. The site has their beer menu…
Michiana’s only brewpub, at this point. They have some limited brewing supplies.
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.
A site about beer events in Indiana.
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.
Group of beer lovers and homebrewers. They do cool events like “Thirst Fursday” the first Thursday of each month.
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.
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
- Papazian’s Complete Joy of Homebrewing
- HomeBrew Digest
- Beertown
- Real Beer
- Bodensatz
A homebrewing book available online for free.
A good, inexpensive brew book for beginners and intermediate brewers.
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.
A site for different brewing associations, including the American Homebrewer Association
A general site about beer with a lot of information about brewing.
A site with lots of info about homebrewing.
Miscellaneous Beer Sites
- Beer Judge Certification Program
- Rate Beer
- Michael Jackson the Beer Hunter
- Beer Advocate
- PubCrawler
- All About Beer
- Siebel Institute
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”…
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…
The best-known beer writer, not the youngest member of the Jackson 5.
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…
Another site listing beer pubs in the US and elsewhere. Actually, I was confusing PubCrawler with BeerAdvocate. They accomplish similar goals…
A brewing magazine.
A very serious institute where you can get a degree in brewing technology. Education you can actually use!
there is a store locationin elkhart which provides a convenient chance to actually buy materials in a store, not online. their website is http://www.homebrewit.com
@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.