Milwaukee - beer, custard and farm animals

Continuing on the story of my trip.....

Well, after I left Chicago, we headed back down to Katie's place in Milwaukee, arriving in about midnight. The next day, we started the touristy stuff. Now when you think of America and great tourist destinations, Milwaukee (and wisconsin in general) doesn't exactly jump out as a "must go" destination, but it does have one major export - beer! Milwaukee is the home of Miller, one of the better american mass-produced beers (the microbreweries are better but not as well known). Before Miller Time though, breakfast time! For the 2nd time in my trip, my breakfast/brunch consisted of a burger and fries - good eatin'! As well as the burger tho, I was introduced to a delicacy particular to the Milwaukee area - frozen custard. Sounds a bit strange I know, but is like a creamier verions of ice cream, and is damn tasty! I was almost half tempted to go into the place, ask for the owner and try to negotiate the franchise rights for exporting it back home.

After that trip down culinary lane, it was time to start the real business of the day - Beer! We headed over to Miller Valley, and joined the tour. If you;ve done the Guinees tour or any of hte distillery tours sat home, the miller tour isn't really anything special - all you get to see are the warehouse and the bottling plant, none of the actual making of the beer at all. Then again, it's free, and you get free samples at the end, so is better than a poke in the eye with a sharp stick. We also got lucky as well, normally at the end you go to the miller bar for 3 free beers, but on our particular tour there was a marketing dude there who wanted volunteers for some sample taste testing of some new brews. Guess who's hand was nearly the first up! We got beought into this big-ass fancy room, got 6 unlabelled cups of beer and had to rate them each on things like flavour, character (heavy beer, light, medium etc), and a few other things. How bad! I thought after that we'd get some sort of cert saying "official Miller beer tester" or something like that, like you get at the Jameson museum, but all you got were a few glasses (and they were Fosters glasses too - I can get them at home!).

After the Miller tour, we went to Lakeshore breweries - one of the local microbreweries. That was more expensive - $5 as opposed to free, but you got 4 free drinks as opposed to 3, so not too bad (so my outlay up to that point was 10 different brands of beer for $5!). That tour was even less imprssive than the Miller one, but hey, free beer! The rest of that day was Pretty much spent in recovery from all that beer and the cumulative effects of the weekend (brought Katie's dog for a walk down by the lakeshore - excitement!), altho we did find a rather nice mexican restaurant which did killer margaritas! the margaritas are responsibe tho for a rather fetching picture of me riding a 5-foot chili pepper......

The next day was State Fair time! Katie's mom had scored us fre tickets (worth $25 each) to the Wisconsin State Fair, which just so happened to be on while I was there, so never having been to one before, I was all for going! I wasn't sure really what to expect, but was a lot less redneck than I thought it'd be - only a few John Deere baseball caps on show (but a lot to be bought in the stalls), and I only saw one guy with a mullet. It pretty much consisted of a few barns with animals on show in them (cows, pigs, sheep, horses etc), a midway with a ton of amusement rides and the usual kind of stalls where you have to shoot cards, put balls through hoops, burst balloons with darts etc to win prizes (all heavily rigged against you), a few stalls selling t-shirts and various sundry fair-related stuff, and a ton of food stalls. My god, were there a lot of food stalls there! Katie kept pointing out things to me saying "you have to try those", but if I tried them all I'd need to charter a plane of my own to come home on! And, just to wash down all the food, there were also quite a few beer tents as well - it being beer country and all. I was also introduced to two of the redneck phrases du jour - "Get 'er Done!" which apparently comes from some redneck comedian on TV, and "honky-tonk badonk-a-donk", which is apparenlty the big bouncy ass of a C&W-listening woman (as in, you can get women's t-shirts & shorts with "I've a honky-tonk badonk-a-donk" written on them).

So, we wandered around, ate a lot, drank a fair bit, did some of the games etc, and then when we were sick of it all (not to mention stuffed and slightly tipsy), headed out to meet a few of katie's friends.