Travels with Barley by Ken Wells

video blared from an amplified LCD screen on the gas pump. I didn’t think I needed to be entertained while pumping self-service regular, but I guess the theory these days is to let no moment pass in America without a mass media fix. What’ll they think of next—MTV screens in the bathroom stalls?
    Bob Dylan, in his satirical 1965 breakout album, Highway 61 Revisited , may have introduced Highway 61 to the global music world, but the route it follows, hugging the Mississippi for most of its length, is an ancient one, heavy with echoes of Native Americans, frontiersmen, fur traders, riverboaters, and settlers and, more contemporarily, grifters, madmen, and religious visionaries, not to mention visionary musicians, poets, and writers. Also known as the Great River Road, the official highway was created in 1938 out of existing federal, state, and local routes. Its original purpose, as a major north-south thoroughfare, has been largely subsumed by the construction of quasiparallel four-lane Interstate highways that lop off hundreds of miles from Highway 61’s more meandering path. One perhaps unintended virtue of this: traffic and attention have been diverted from long stretches of the Great River Road, which at least has kept the strip mall developers from lining every mile of it with the tacky, kudzulike sprawl that now blights the entrances to an astonishing number of American towns.
    Indeed, as I nudged into Wabasha County, I passed through rustic river hamlets with names like Wabasha, Weaver, and Minneiska: I motored up and down bluffs, watching pleasure boats etch silver wakes upon the broad river below; I glided past endless stretches of tasseled cornfields and low-cropped soybean fields, all being nudged slowly toward harvest by a cheerful and unrelenting sun. It was only when I entered the semicluttered outskirts of Winona, Minnesota, an otherwise pretty town with a population of 27,000, that I was suddenly jolted back into beer world.
    I swore I saw what seemed to be an improbable sign: for a bowling alley/brewpub.
    As soon as I could, I made a U-turn on the four-lane highway and doubled back and, sure enough, I wasn’t wrong. Tucked into a shopping center, I spied a sign that read: ‘The Westgate Bowl/Wellington Pub and Grill/Backwater Brewing Co.”
    That seemed a lot for a bowling alley to take on. It was about 3:30. I pulled into the parking lot and went in.
    The place was almost empty (unsurprising, given the hour) but seemed as advertised. A long wooden bar, with an impressive array of beer taps, fronted a glassed-off sixteen-lane bowling alley. A woman sat at one end of the bar nursing a beer and talking to a waitress. The occasional thud of bowling balls thumping the floor came from behind the long glass panel behind the bar. I peered through and saw a cluster of kids staking out a solitary lane in a sea of empty ones.
    I settled in at the bar and was greeted warmly by the waitress, whose name was Jody Wilkins.
    â€œYes, we do brew our own beer,” she said, in response to my question. “Of course, we serve Bud and the like, too.”
    I told her I’d never heard of a beer-brewing bowling alley. She said she hadn’t either until she worked here and that if I hung around for a while, I might snag the owner-brewer, Christopher Gardner, and have a chat. “He’s around here someplace,” she said. “You want a beer?”
    I actually didn’t want a beer but since I’d had a research beer for breakfast I couldn’t very well pass up a research beer at tea time. I looked the taps over and settled on a backwater IPA. (Hops again!) Jody poured it and sat it before me, and I sipped it. It was a worthy, well-balanced IPA—and by far the best microbrew I’d ever had at a bowling alley (and, okay, the only one so far).
    I nursed my beer for about a half-hour and was about to give up on the proprietor when he sauntered out of a back room with a man