Welcome to Part 2 of our Brewery Tour! Click here if you haven’t read Part 1 (and honestly, how can you not have? It’s required reading for 9th grade English. You read it right after To Kill A Mockingbird and right before The Communist Manifesto). Once again, thank you Logan of the band Red Legs for unifying this lovely brewery with my active and efficient liver. Geoff, my partner in booze and photographer, and my wife Kate and I went to Steele Street Brewery in Ionia, MI to get a taste of the locals!

It was super effective!

Clem Jenkins was a local I tasted, and honestly he was salty. I don’t recommend him. Buzz off back to Newaygo and stalk some hipster or something!

Just out of frame was a pissed off bee trying to ass-stab me.

The next pint we had was the M-66 IPA! This beer was, sheepishly admitted by the brewery, their “failed attempt” at making a New England IPA. As you know, NEIPA’s are usually very cloudy and hazy… but there ain’t a cloud in the sky of this beer. It’s like the opposite of a Volkswagen emission test- no smoggy haze.

The cleanest of coals.

Here’s the thing: they say they screwed up. But if you look at it as a normal IPA, it looks great! Golden amber, almost more amber than not at all. Awesome bubbles appearing on the sides of the mason jar.

Taking a whiff of this… honestly I couldn’t smell. I still had the memory of that Double D Milk Stout wisping around my sinuses, so I couldn’t concentrate. Minus points from House Dennis. Also, there was a bee flying at my face. Minus points from nature. I’m gonna pour gasoline down a sewer drain or change my car’s oil on the beach.

If Nature and I had to fight trial-by-combat style, I choose Hexxus as my champion. 

I asked Kate to smell this. She said, “This smells like beer. Wait… it smells like raspberries.”

I love my wife, but I don’t understand her.

Going in for a tongueing (oh, God, that felt gross to write), the beer didn’t have that cloudy, silty mouthfeel of a NEIPA, but it absolutely had the associated citrus notes. Hoppy, but not at all overpowering. It did NOT taste like a fart.

I had Kate taste this beer. She said, “This tastes like fart.” That means it’s great!

It’s not a New England IPA, but it’s an absolutely solid beer. And super drinkable! My recommended pairings include anything that doesn’t have anything to do with the East coast, Maine, Massachusetts, Delaware, New Hampshire, the Founding Fathers, the Liberty Bell, or a good chunk of American Colonial History.

If their failures all taste this good, but all means keep f***ing up.

Tune in next time on The Pint Sized Review for Part 3 of our tour of Steele Street Brewing! This is where shit gets interesting, and I get too drunk to take proper notes!

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