Number 7

7 Madison River Brewing Company
A hole…we were told that Belgrade was really “Low-grade” or better yet “Below-grade” so Patti and I were a little nervous about this joint! We had a tough time locating this hole of a place; I even looked on the bottom of a six pack of Irresistible Amber Ale at the local Quickie-Mart in town…20900 Frontage Road sounds like it should be near the freeway-NO? After driving up and down both sides of I-90 during a hell of a thunderstorm, we finally stopped the cable guy…”Yah, it’s four miles from here across the trailer park in the industrial center along the railroad.” Hmmmm…railroad frontage road, now I get it, this is old school railroad, not twenty first century verbage. There’s more to the story than I’m tellin’; draggin’ a dim lit trailer, an early arrival and a billion dangly caterpillars, but let’s not dwell on a half filled pint…on with the good stuff!

The brewery does look like a hole…a run down industrial axis along the rail, but once you pass the door, it’s a nice little place with lots of character. Anna the barkeep was wonderful, the locals were knee deep in four-dollar, 24 ounce hand blown mug beer…she would fill a colorful growler sized tumbler…and bang, back to Patti and Johnny as we engaged her with stories of our search for the holy grail of brew and our recent nuptials in Yellowstone. This led to an impromptu tour of the back room to rummage for labels, where I discovered that they concoct and urn Moab Brewery’s (our 30th brewery of the tour) Dead Horse and Scorpion Ales.

Hope Juice IPA and Copper John Scottish Ale are the darlings of Madison River sampler procession, equally yummy imbibes! A few days later we got a text from one of the brewery’s we really liked (yep, it’s on the top ten list), they told us that Anna stopped by to try out their beer and said, we had sent her in…how cool is that?