Travels with Barley by Ken Wells Page A

dressed like a chef, heading outside.
    â€œThat’s him!” Jody said, pointing.
    They’d cleared the door by the time I could respond but I chased them down in the parking lot.
    Gardner at first seemed confused as to why a man with a notebook and pen was running after him and shouting, but said he had a few minutes to talk when I explained my mission. We walked back into the bar/alley and sat at a table where Gardner, a cheerful, middle-aged man who looked like he liked his beer, told me the bowling alley had been started by his father in 1961, with never a thought of adding a brewpub. But Gardner got the idea from his brother, a homebrewer, and started making beer on a shoestring, at first using an old retrofitted soup kettle in place of a mash tun and boil kettle. “It’s just a little system,” he said. “We brew two barrels a week, usually. When we’re busy, we’ll brew eighteen barrels a month.” (A barrel is 31.5 gallons.)
    Gardner said that when he started he had no idea how his bowlers would go for microbrew but he was pleasantly surprised. “I’d guess we sell 30 percent of our stuff and 70 percent of the other stuff.”
    I asked him if he thought he might be the only brewpub/bowling alley on earth. He said he’d never really considered the question; the town was just a good place to sell beer.
    Winona, I learned, was built atop a large Mississippi River sandbar flanked by bluffs on each side. Mark Twain, in his pilot days, called this stretch of the river the “Thousand Islands” and didn’t care for all those shifting obstacles the islands created. Winona was largely settled by working-class Poles who came in the 1850s to cut timber for the lumber barons who dominated the town well into the nineteenth century.
    â€œHeck, at one point back then, Winona had more millionaires per capita than any place in America,” Gardner told me. These days, Winona was solidly Middle America—a mix of blue-collar workers and a fairly large contingent of white-collar employees and college students, mostly owing to the presence of two colleges, Saint Mary’s University, a 1,600-student Catholic-affiliated college, and Winona State University, an 8,000-student state school.
    â€œSo we get everybody in here—white-collar, blue-collar, college kids,” Gardner told me. “Fall and winter are the busiest, when all the students come back.”
    Gardner then introduced his sidekick in the chef’s uniform, Chad Peters. He turned out not only to be Wellington Grill’s actual chef but also the alley’s current brewmaster. He’d just come from his lunch shift and his white chef’s jacket looked like it’d had a losing argument with an obstreperous deep-fat fryer. “I started here in ‘99 as a cook,” the thirty-something Peters said. “I became an accidental brewer. I used to brew a lot at home and one day they just said, ‘Hey, you wanna brew?’ I said, Okay.’”
    Peters said his philosophy was to keep the beer fairly simple and fresh. “It’s all kegs. We don’t bottle anything. We make it in small batches and it rarely stays around long. We’ll switch our beers from time to time—we’ll choose a pale ale over an IPA in the wintertime.”
    I actually think of pale ale as a summer beer but, whatever, that meant Peters made quite a bit of pale ale. The town gets about four feet of snow annually, a goodly number of zero-degree days, and is frost-free only about five and half months a year. On the other hand, it’s probably fair to say that the drinking season in bowling alleys is perpetual summer (though statistics I unearthed indicate that bowling alleys as surrogate beer joints may be somewhat overrated—they only account for 3 percent of all on-premise beer consumption).
    At any rate, that’s all I got: out of Gardner and Peters—they had to run off to