Saying goodbye to Minnesota with this beer writer’s greatest hits.
Every month, I drink a whole scad of Minnesota beers, and I share my notes here, in this funny little column that I’ve been writing, depending how you count it, for 87 months. Now, that all comes to an end.
In that epoch, thousands of Minnesota beers have been released. Breweries have opened and closed. I got married, had two kids, and, weeks ago, bought a house in Maine. And on that last point: This edition brings an end to my tenure as the writer of Local Suds, as it was known in City Pages, and now Doin’ Beers, as it lives on in Racket.
It’s been an honor—sappy shit incoming!—to write this little list every month for these last seven-odd years, and I thank the dozens of you who bothered to read it. If this column led you to even one beer you enjoyed, hallelujah. It wasn’t in vain.
For the farewell edition, I wanted to look back at my time here and highlight some of the consistently incredible beers that propelled me from month to month. In the tide of new beers coming every day, these were the beers I’ll look back on fondly from my nine-year tenure as a Minnesotan.
BlackStack Fugazi Italian Pilsner, 4.8% ABV, n/a IBU
BlackStack is more renowned for its big, murky IPAs and cobbler-style sours, but what makes all that maximalist shit work is that fact that the St. Paul brewery knows exactly what it’s doing. If you can’t make a beer that meets table stakes, you can’t make a beer that surges across the flavor spectrum. Fugazi, a perfectly crisp and balanced pils that breaks clean as a biscuit across the palate, is the beer that proves BlackStack is among the top of the top in Minnesota.
Read the rest of the article here!