The Corona Diaries Vol. 78: In the Halloween Spirit

(early November 2022)

 

(Watch the prelude.)

  

On my way home from up north, I made a quick stop at a liquor store to get some beer from the northwestern part of the state that is unavailable in Madison. Some of these brands were seen on store shelves down south in the past but no longer while others have always only been sold in their home region.

While it would be nice and convenient to have these brands at my local liquor store, I have really come to appreciate that some things are not at my fingertips and that they simply require travel to experience. I like regional variation. It’s fun and alluring to go somewhere and find different beers, different foods, etc. than I get in Madison.

I had hoped to stop in at Valkyrie Brewing but my schedule precluded a visit. Same goes for the Northwoods Brewpub. Still, the prospect of Northwoods’ rye ale and Valkyrie’s smoked Oktoberfest make fall treks up north all the more alluring.

Rather than jumping on the interstate as soon as I could, I took some back roads to Osseo where I would catch I-94. I drove through the small town of Cleghorn which is just a short jaunt east of the former site of Hadleyville, which I detailed in a previous entry. Cleghorn is surely home to a few hundred people at most and has one crossroads with no stoplights.

Up until recently, it didn’t even have a tavern, to the best of my knowledge. The main part of town is simply an abandoned building and a store which is now a bar. Here’s that abandoned building.

This was just one of those trips where I decided that I would pull over if I drove by anything that even remotely piqued my interest.

I have a weird affection for Cleghorn despite never having actually done much beyond driving through it. It’s like a ghost town for me because I don’t think I’ve ever seen a human being there. I’ve seen cars drive through it, seen them parked outside of places knowing there are living, breathing persons inside but I have never seen them.

It is like a little game I play. I take the back roads to drive through the town to see if there are actually any people around.

********

My initial plan had been to spend another day up north but things were changed when I recalled that I had a ticket to see the 1977 Italian horror film, Suspiria, on the big screen. But it was not to simply be a film screening. Claudio Simonetti's Goblin would be performing the soundtrack live! Simonetti was in the original line-up of Goblin that composed the music for the film back in ’77.

That’s not Madison as my phone is not capable of taking decent photographs under concert conditions and, sadly, I haven’t found any online.

It had been a while since I’d seen the original Suspiria and it was just a lot of fun to watch it with all of the super blood red reds and other brilliant colors that it’s known for. What a treat to have a live score!

After the movie was done, the band continued performing for another hour and a half or so. They seemed very enthusiastic – happy to be playing in front of an audience. Bassist Cecilia Nappo was bopping all around her part of the stage and Claudio Simonetti almost seemed content to play into the wee hours. He was proud of his music and thrilled to play for people.

This was a couple days before Halloween but the students were out in full force that night, lining up at bars and fully costumed. I had no problems except for the fact that the last bus had left 15 minutes or so after I stepped out of the theatre. Hopefully the new network redesign and the introduction of BRT will keep this from happening in the future.

A bit of the show is on Youtube.

 

********

The next day I indulged in more seasonal film goodness by going to see From Beyond.

Director Stuart Gordon was a Chicago native but he attended UW-Madison and became heavily involved in the theater scene. He founded Broom Street Theater in 1969 and it is still around today. I suspect most people know him as the guy that adapted a couple H.P. Lovecraft stories for the big screen including From Beyond.

It's a fairly typical mid-80s horror film with plenty of body horror. Like Suspiria, I hadn’t seen it in ages and I just had a blast watching it on the big screen.

 

********

The Halloween theme carried on after the holiday itself had come and gone. For starters, my friends and I began a game of the Alien role-playing game.

It is based on the film franchise with plenty of references to the movies. I played Leah Davis, the pilot of a freighter ship named the USCSS Montero. My crew and I are on a delivery run and were put into cryogenic suspension as the voyage to our destination would take quite a while.

We awoke to discover that we were nowhere near the planet that was to take our delivery. Instead, the ship’s computer had re-routed us to intercept a scientific research vessel called the Cronus that had been missing for nearly 75 years. Our mission to deliver a shipment of Helium-3 had been changed by our corporate masters at Weyland-Yutani to recovering data from the Cronus' computers, rescuing any remaining crew, and towing the ship back to dock, if possible.

We found the Cronus in bad shape. No breathable air, no lights, and lots of destruction and dried blood. Although the ship’s synthetic (i.e. – robot) was mostly functional.

I got a bit anxious and nervous while playing it. One of the characters from my ship had a motion sensor and detected something for just a moment before we found the remaining crew of the Cronus in cryo suspension. So, there’s an unknown presence on the loose, we had to wait a while for the other crew to awaken from their slumbers, and the synthetic on the Cronus isn’t quite right and won’t answer all of our questions. It was only a matter of time before something bad happens.

Will we make it back to the Montero before all hell broke loose?

********

The final seasonal thing that I did was to make a visit to Exquisite Corpse, Madison’s home of surreal taxidermy, with a friend.

Exquisite Corpse was opened by Marcia Field last year after a diagnosis of terminal cancer. She died back in August. Originally from Chicago just like Stuart Gordon, Field moved to Madison in 2001 and it sounds like she always had something of a morbid curiosity which she parlayed into a love of taxidermy some 10-12 years ago, it seems. I can’t find an exact year.

This one is called “Sacred Heart” and she described it as a homage to her first pacemaker which she had implanted while she was in her 40s.

Most of her work was influenced by her illness, her awareness of how fleeting life is.

This one is “The Ascension or Tenth Life” and features a cat atop a Catholic Last Rites kit.

Here are some chipmunk bones in tiny vials set as earrings.

This one is still personal, I suppose, but also political – “Goebbels’ Wet Dream or The Exterminator”.

A commentary on anti-Semitism featuring a muskrat, a Zyklon B can, et al. It illustrates how the Nazis would portray Jews at rats in their propaganda. Note the 2 volumes of MAUS by Art Spiegelman on the right.

For a mere $40 you can have what looks to be preserved cow eyes as a paperweight, I suppose.

There was a trio of taxidermy dioramas by guest artist Angela Webster. Here’s “Lab Rat Revenge”. Poor cat trapped and at the mercy of a rat!

A very neat exhibit.

Since our visit was on a gallery night, other denizens of the artist spaces there also had their works on display. We stopped in at Mary Made It Studio down the hall.

We found the artist, Mary Gill, chatting away with another aesthete. Originally from Trinidad, her life there remains a huge influence on her art.

I really liked this once entitled “The Gate of No Return” which succinctly depicts the slave passage to Trinidad and the aftermath of slavery.

If I had a few thousand dollars to spend on art, I would have bought it.

She also had this wonderful triptych that was about 10’ long and depicted various Trinidadians talking to their loved ones who were incarcerated and awaiting trial. Ms. Gill described how these facilities have a scheme to charge the incarcerated and their families which makes it profitable to keep people locked up instead of giving them their day in court.

Ms. Gill was extremely friendly and very willing to discuss her art. I am looking into buying prints…

********

Lastly, I want to note that I cooked some bigos recently. This is Polish hunter’s stew. I didn’t do it up all proper and instead made a down & dirty batch. I used kielbasa that I bought at Andy’s Deli in Chicago plus beef, half a head of cabbage that needed to be eaten, onion, and sauerkraut.

When I had everything browned and all of the ingredients ready to be combined for a long simmer, I realized that we didn’t have any kraut. I scoured the refrigerator 3 or 4 times as I would have sworn that I had bought some on my last trip to the supermarket. But no. So I made an emergency run to the store for kraut.

It turned out rather well, I thought. Hearty fare for chilly evenings.

********

 
Bonus photo. Here’s a non-taxidermy diorama I stumbled upon while on a bike ride. It was next to a building whose peeling paint had revealed a ghost sign underneath.

 

The Corona Diaries Vol. 76: Like a Kid in a Candy Store

(late October 2022)

(Listen to the prelude.)

Just as I did last year, I spent a relaxing evening in a hotel room in Chetek. Feeling a bit pensive, I began doing a little bit of writing – just noting some thoughts that had come to mind on the trip. I then listened to a little bit of music including “Unquiet Slumbers for the Sleepers...” by Genesis. With its waves of acoustic guitar and the drone of bass pedals, it has a dreamy, almost solemn feel to it. It is now my evensong on my treks up north.

With the music being done, I did a spot of reading.

I’d been meaning to read Philip José Farmer’s novella, Riverworld, for a while now and figured this trip would give me a little time to dig into it.

I thought that this tale was expanded into Farmer’s Riverworld novels, that he liked it so much that he would take the concept and mold it into a series. Well, it turns out that this story was written around the time he was writing the material which ended up being the second Riverworld book. So it’s a supplement and not a foundational text.

My introduction to the Riverworld books came back in the mid-80s when I bought Gods of Riverworld on a whim based mainly on the cover at a Waldenbooks(?) at Six Corners. After bringing it home, I discovered that this was the fifth book in the series. Oops. So I went and acquired the first, To Your Scattered Bodies Go. It didn’t take long before I was completely entranced by the story.

In a nutshell: Explorer Richard Francis Burton wakes up on the shore of a river completely naked. Around him are countless others, including beings not from Earth, in the same predicament. They died and wake to find themselves in Riverworld. And so the books detail the exploits of Burton, as well as others, as his band of afterlifers trek down the river to find out just where they hell they are as well as how and why.

Such a scenario offers countless opportunities for human dramas to play out – love, conflict, the value of religion, contemplation on the meaning of life, and so on. And all the while the mystery of the river and its environs looms large.

The novella features Tom Mix, actor and star of many a Western in the 1920s. He and a couple of companions flee a group led by the evil Kramer, who is a dictator figure that commands armies and looses them on other groups along the river. Mix and company join up with a rival faction and they go to war with Kramer.

I didn’t get too far in but it was fun.

The next morning, I was up just before dawn and found that there was a hard freeze the previous night. I had to put a little effort into scraping my windshield. On my way out of town, I stopped at the Northwoods Bakery in search of Swedish limpa bread. I found none. The bakery was under new ownership and limpa bread had been taken off of the menu. However, this still left many a tasty treat.

It all looked so good that I had a hard time choosing. As I was gazing into the display cases and nosing around the shelves, a woman behind the counter informed me that the day’s lunch special was to be a Long John grilled cheese with tomato soup. I told her that, sadly, I would miss out on the doughnut sandwich as I was on my way north.

I ended up buying some onion rolls which were excellent; a loaf of sweet cream bread which is cylindrical and about 4 inches in diameter. This is the stuff you normally see as cinnamon raisin bread. And a chocolate croissant which I decided to save for later.

Ooh! I almost forgot. I also bought a couple sheets of lefse, a Norwegian potato flatbread.

The Norske Nook’s menu is full of wraps made with the stuff instead of tortillas including a smelt wrap, an Upper Midwestern dish if there ever was one.

With the back of my car getting ever more full with every stop, I was off to Loon Lake Wildlife Area for another hike hoping that it was not home to any bears with a fondness for pastries. This was a 30-something mile drive and, after I got what I figured was fairly close, I found myself lost in an area where the roads had these odd numerical names – with fractions, no less. 16th Avenue was normal enough but then I found myself on ¾ Street. I missed a turn and was suddenly going down 17 ¼ Avenue. Silly me! I forgot to turn onto ¾ 1st Avenue.

Whoever named all these roads was either a mathematician or had a wicked sense of humor. Or both.

I eventually found the entrance to the wildlife area despite the best attempt by the DNR to hide it. There were no signs on the way leading you to it. In fact, I almost drove right by it as there was nothing but a small sign saying “Parking” visible from the road. Had I been coming from the north, I wouldn’t have even had that.

Based on the size of the letters on the sign at the trailhead, I guessed that this area is primarily used for hunting and trapping as those words were written in nice, big letters while the small print nearly hid the fact that hiking was also allowed. Thankfully gun season was still a few weeks away so I felt safe entering even though I wasn’t wearing blaze orange.

The trail, or at least the easily traversable part, wasn’t very long as it took me only about half an hour to reach the end. Along the way there were small lakes such as this one.

There were various and sundry prints to be found in the muddier parts of the trail though most were like this.

Deer!

In fact, I scared one that was on the shore of one of the small lakes. I caught movement out of the corner of my eye and turned to see a deer butt and white tail bounding off into the woods.

The trail ended at a small clearing and I discovered that it used to continue down a hill but that it hadn’t been groomed, i.e. – driven on, in a while. The former tire tracks were overgrown and the path was cut with deep ruts but I followed them for a while anyway.

I looked down just in time to avoid stepping in some further evidence of deer.

I had now seen both kinds of deer poo: the real stuff and the edible kind which I found at a gift shop in Osseo along with the rabbit variety. 

I continued up a hill and onwards for a little while before turning around and heading back. Despite a lack of sun, it was fairly warm out and very quiet. Another wonderful walk.

********

When my hike was done, I figured I’d go grab a snack in Hayward. I hadn’t been there since c.2005 and wasn’t able to do much beyond work and dinner at that time. After visiting Stone Lake last year, it only seemed right to go there next as I had spent some time there as a boy. This means I’ll be visiting Spooner next year, I suppose.

I took what I highly suspect was the route my family drove every summer up to the cabins. First I went to Rice Lake where I caught Highway 48 over to Birchwood. From there I turned north onto County F which took me along the western shores of Lake Chetac. Finally, after this very scenic stretch, I could turn onto Highway 27 which would take me into Hayward.

As I was heading north, I spied a family of deer out for a stroll.

I was curious to see if the gentleman’s club that was at the intersection of 27 and 70 was still there. My memories are of a not particularly fancy place whose entrance was flanked by wagon wheels.

Now, why, you may ask, did I retain memories of a gentleman’s club from when I was 10 or 12 years old? To this I have no answer beyond the memory is a funny thing.

As it turned out, the club had moved a little west into what I later found out was formerly a German restaurant.

Why yes, I did have to look up “whip shitties”. Its former location is now a gas station.

I rolled into Hayward and sought out sustenance first thing and I found it at the Angry Minnow Brew Pub.

I had slaked my thirst there back in 2005 and proceeded to do so once again. The Angry Minnow is in a wonderful old building that dates back to 1889 when it was built to house the offices of the Northern Wisconsin Lumber Company. Credit must be given to the brew pub owners for maintaining a late-19th century look to the place. 

Cozying up to the bar, I was greeted by the barkeep who, I think, was happy to have a customer at last. An Oaky's Oatmeal Stout looked to fit the bill and I ordered a pint of that to restore my strength along with a bowl of chili to warm my bones. The stout was on tap and given a healthy dose of nitrogen. I utterly failed to get a decent photograph of the pint replete with swirls of those tiny nitrogen bubbles cascading around the glass.

The beer was tasty as was the chili. For her part, the barkeep was friendly and happy to engage in conversation. She had much more to say than the gal behind the bar in Bloomer and told me a bit about events in Hayward, what brought her and her husband there, et al.

I left feeling sated but not full. One 4-pack of beer was purchased before I was on my way downtown. While I mainly have vague recollections of Hayward’s Main Street, my memories of this place, Tremblay's Sweet Shop, are rather clear.

It would seem that candy and the prospect of naked ladies were of high importance to my pre-teen self. And just as that boy did, this middle-aged man stood in the front window and watched the candymakers ply their trade. In this case, it was brittle.

Upon entering, my nose was sent into fits of rapture by never-ending clouds of butter-sugar vapor that wafted throughout the store. This wonderful aroma brought back childhood memories aplenty and my excitement grew exponentially after crossing the threshold. It was like being a kid in a candy store once again.

Fudge, brittle, truffles, hard candy, jaw breakers, chocolate covered everything – this place had it all.

I felt my resistance being whittled away so I bought some dark chocolate covered pretzels and beat a hasty retreat before I developed a cavity vicariously.

I didn’t get very far as there was a bakery a storefront or two away. There I purchased the last loaf of what is surely a leading contender for the quintessential bread of northern Wisconsin, if not the state as a whole: cranberry wild rice.

Wisconsin leads the nation in cranberry production but I don’t think there’s much wild rice harvesting any longer. (Our neighbors in Minnesota seem to have a prosperous wild rice industry, though.) Recall that I had made my way up to Hayward via Rice Lake. I presume that wild rice was grown there in the days of yore.

Wild rice is a distant cousin of the stuff that provides a bed for sushi or soaks up all that sweet & sour sauce when we order Chinese takeout. It is very much an Upper Midwestern grain.

The bread was a bit on the heavy side and quite tasty.

The cranberries were sweet-tart and the wild rice added a nice nutty flavor.

On my way out of town, I spied the Hayward Masonic Temple and just had to take a snap because this trip, as it turned out, was all about stopping to photograph the quotidian and sometimes banal.

On my way back to Rice Lake, where a hotel room awaited me, I saw a flock of turkeys off to the side of the road in a field.

********

Bonus photo. This time it’s an ad from an issue of the Milwaukee Journal from 1918.

Got that peach body, you a tarty: Peach Gose by Angry Minnow Brew Pub

As I was driving south on Highway 27 from Hayward, I realized that I had completely forgotten to take any pictures of the giant fiberglass muskie there at the National Fresh Water Fishing Hall of Fame.

Oops.

On the plus side, I had been able to stand in the front window of Tremblay's Sweet Shop and stare at two women making some kind of brittle. The last time I stood there peering into those windows, Ronald Reagan was in his first term as president. I smiled when I saw that their shirts referred to them as “fudge packers” and no doubt my roughly 12-year old self would have giggled himself senseless at this.

In addition to buying treats down on Main Street, I also stopped in at the Angry Minnow Brew Pub as I noted in a previous post. A pint of their Oaky’s Oatmeal Stout made fine companion to a bowl of chili on an overcast day that was keen to remind you that winter was nigh. I struck up a conversation with the barkeep who had no one else to attend to but me as I believe I had arrived just after they opened. My eagerness for a chat was aided by the fact that I hadn’t actually seen another human being that wasn’t behind the wheel of a car for several hours. I had driven out into the boonies to do some hiking and I think that last person I saw not in a car was the clerk at the hotel as I left just after dawn.

Now that I think about it, I hadn’t had a conversation with anyone since the previous day so a little basic human communication was most welcome. This was made easier by the fact that the barkeep was a nice woman probably a few years younger than me. She had an open, easy going demeanor and a warm, friendly face so it was easy to chat with her.

Our conversation turned towards the Minnow’s taps as she tried to sell me on the various brews on offer. I told her that I wasn’t a hophead and she remarked that their brewer was also more inclined to malt and less extreme beers which led me to believe that the barrel-aged offering and the obligatory IPA were more nods to popular tastes than a lived aesthetic.

I could be wrong, however.

But it got me thinking about how the breweries and brewpubs of the northwest part of the state of which I was familiar do not, generally speaking, have beer lists that consist of 99-100% trendy styles. (Eau Claire’s Brewing Projekt is a notable exception.) They all brew an IPA but not 40 of them. Fruited sours? Sure! But, again one instead of one for every kind of tropical fruit their local produce distributor carries. Pastry/barrel-aged stouts? You betcha but a precious few only.

Does this reflect the tastes of the brewers? Or are the clientele up north not demanding dozens of IPAs? Perhaps a bit of both.

When I had finished pondering beer styles, I took in my lovely surroundings. As noted previously, The Angry Minnow is located in the former offices of the Northern Wisconsin Lumber Company, built when William McKinley was president. There are vaulted ceilings, stained glass windows, and lovely wooden everything. I loved the atmosphere and it made me think of the other brewpubs/brewery taprooms that I’ve been to in the northwest part of the state.

The taprooms up there feel like a third space to me, like an extension of my living room as opposed to a place that needs to disguise its dark, industrial nature. Up north I found hygge instead of the cold, metallic vibes that seem common here.  For instance, Delta Beer Labs makes a wonderful Gose (with no fruit!) but their taproom is clinical and sterile to my taste. In cinematic terms, I don’t want my taproom to have the cool surliness of The Andromeda Strain’s Dr. Ruth Leavitt, but rather the earthy demeanor and sultry curves of Willow from The Wicker Man.

With my navel gazing and my meal over, it was time to head back to my hotel. I was determined to bring some beer back home and got a mixed 4-pack. I knew that some of their stout needed to make the journey but what else?

Not all of their beers were canned and a couple were right out as they were styles that I don’t care for. Despite summer being long gone and having a strong preference for unfruited sours, I took a sample of their Peach Gose and decided that it too would journey south with me.

 

 

When I opened the can, there was a loud pfsssssss sound and I could hear lots of bubble action and could smell the beer despite the can being several inches from my nose. It appeared that I had a kinetic brew on my hands. Somehow I managed a pour which produced only a modicum of head. The foam was loose, white, and noisy like Rice Krispies and dissipated quickly. The beer was brilliant yellow and very hazy, presumably from a large amount of wheat used in brewing it. Despite the haze, I could see a few bubbles inside my glass. It smelled really nice with a small blast of lemony citrus, a moderate dose of peach, and a generic sour aroma.

My first sip caught a big wave of sour that got mellower very quickly. This was not a one of those Xenomorph blood sour beers that quickly eats the verdigris off of pennies. While the peach was up front, it didn't taste like it was in competition with the beer's sourness. Instead, the fruit came to complement the tartness, not to bury it. Well, maybe take a bit of the edge off of it. A firm fizz gave a little extra bite as the beer's light body yielded some wheat and a dash of citrus.

 

The sour/fizzy bite lingered on my tongue as did the peach which took its time in fading away.

 

Just as my conversation with the bartender had portended, Peach Gose was not an extreme beer. The sourness was firm but never attacked my palate. Similarly, the peach added some balance but never tried to smother the tartness. My own preference is for tasting coriander instead of added fruit when it comes to the Gose, but this was a nice little diversion. With its light body and fizzy fruitiness, Peach Gose is a better summer beer than for these below freezing temps, but needs must when the Devil drives. I would definitely have this again on a summer trek up north.

Junk food pairing: until the lighter flavors of the supper club experience are synthesized in a lab and sprinkled on a chip, pair your Peach Gose with a big bag of Harvest Cheddar Sun Chips.

Not Too Lofty: Oaky’s Oatmeal Stout by Angry Minnow Brew Pub

https://hosting.photobucket.com/images/v99/tim_archer/angmin-oakys-1.jpg

As I was driving south on Highway 27 from Hayward, I realized that I had completely forgotten to take any pictures of the giant fiberglass muskie there at the National Fresh Water Fishing Hall of Fame.

Oops.

It had been about 17 years since I had last been to the town that I think of as the Wisconsin Dells of the northern part of the state. Not wholly apt, I grant you, but, in addition to fishing, the town celebrates the area’s logging history (it is in Sawyer County, after all) by being the home of the Lumberjack World Championships where contestants chop and saw in various way, speed climb poles, and attempt to run down a series of floating logs (a.k.a. – boom running), amongst other competitions.

In February, Hayward plays host to the Birkebeiner, the largest cross-country skiing race in the country, which attracts skiers from around the world.

Tourism just seems to be an outsized part of the town’s economy, hence my identification of it with the Dells. I suppose it just needs some kind of fall harvest festival, such as for cranberries, and Hayward will have all of the Up North bases covered.

My last visit to Hayward included a stop at the Angry Minnow Brew Pub which had been open only for a year or so. I recalled being there on that snowy night in 2005 but had completely forgotten what I had eaten and drunk. And so I have scoured the archives and found what I wrote about my stop there 17 years ago:

“I went to The Angry Minnow and had the best food of the whole trip - a grilled hunk of pork loin. I also had a pint of their stout which was also excellent.”

On my visit last month, I had come from a hike and was thirsty and needed something in my belly. I believe that I pulled into town just as the brewpub was opening as I appeared to be the first customer of the day.

The Angry Minnow is in the former offices of the Northern Wisconsin Lumber Company (and who knows what else it has been home to over the years) and is a gorgeous place. Vaulted ceilings, stained glass, and, of course, lovely wooden everything give the place a wonderful old-timey vibe. It’s not difficult to imagine a lumber baron from back in the day stopping in for lunch with his secretary on his shoulder and enjoying a cold beer from, oh, the Northern Brewing Company up in Superior or perhaps the Phoenix Brewing Company in Rice Lake.

I know nothing about Hayward’s brewing history. The northwestern part of the state gets short shrift in the brewing history books (Book. Singular. - ed) I own and, I would argue, this persists today with breweries in that part of the state playing second fiddle to ones in, well, just about any other part of Wisconsin. While some beer from the northwest is available here in the south, it is breweries in the Milwaukee, Madison, and Green Bay areas that dominate store shelves and tavern taps.

While there are, no doubt, multiple reasons for this, the main one is surely that a lot of beer from that part of the state simply isn’t distributed down here. It is the Twin Cities and not Milwaukee-Madison that is the closest big market for them. This means that a venture to that part of the state is a real treat for me as I am able to sample the tastes of a region that are, by and large, unavailable to me at home.

In a repeat of history, I sat down at the bar and promptly ordered the stout - Oaky’s Oatmeal Stout. While there were several other brews on offer, the stout had the most appeal for me. As I explained to the bartender after we’d struck up a conversation, I am not a fan of American pale ales and IPAs and barrel-aged brews tend to be too much barrel and not enough beer for me. The peach Gose was mildly interesting but I tire of fruited beers. Besides, I was keen on something heartier.

The stout on tap was laced with nitro and so my glass had a lovely bubble vortex that my cheap camera phone was not able to capture. My beer was accompanied by a bowl of chili which was very good. Before forgetting to get that snap of the giant muskie and hitting the road, I bought a mixed 4-pack that included some Oaky’s.

While my pour at home did not have the visual elan of the nitro pour up north, it did have a lovely tan head of loose foam that stuck around for a spell. The beer was a deep, deep reddish brown that repelled all light that attempted to penetrate it. My nose caught roasty grain, a dash of caramel, and a bit of grassy hops.

A medium dose of fizz greeted my tongue on the first sip which stood in stark contrast to the smaller nitro bubbles. However, the oatmeal here provided a medium-bodied smoothness underneath. Roasted grain and coffee flavors were prominent while an apple-like sweetness and some spicier hops helped out from behind. On the finish, the sweeter flavors disappeared leaving coffee to be joined by dark chocolate and increasing spicy hoppiness.

Things ended with medium levels of both dryness and bitterness.

My assessment from 2005 holds today. This is an excellent beer! The thing is, it isn’t particularly stout. While I enjoyed the roasty and coffee flavors immensely they were never in your face. There is an aura of restraint here, with the flavors lovingly choreographed to be tasty without being imposing. It proved to be a perfect accompaniment to the chili and hearty enough to make my aging joints forget the walk they had just endured. Yet I felt able to hit the trails once again after my pint had been emptied.

One of northwest Wisconsin’s finest craft beers.

Junk food pairing: you need a bag of prime rib potato chips to go with your pint of Oaky’s Oatmeal Stout. And someone needs to devise venison flavored chips.