Suzanne's Blog: Day 4 - Chippewa Falls, WI to Fargo, ND

I was disappointed enough at missing the last Leinenkugel's tour that I decided to catch the first one in the morning before hitting the road, so at 10am there I was standing outside the doors of the Leinie Lodge waiting to buy my ticket. For $5 you get the tour plus a wristband for 5 5-oz. samples of beer. Normally 10am would be a little too early for me to start drinking, but... Now I wish they sold some of their other beers outside the Wisconsin-Minnesota area! The tour took about an hour and led us through the history of the family brewing business and what their brewing process is. We got to go through the brewhouse and see the tanks where they cook and ferment the beers and the bottling house where everything is bottled or canned, and the "beer heaven" warehouse. Some things I learned about Leinenkugel's that made me like them even better:

They still use the same Big Eddy spring water that they have always used. They just can't pull enough of it from the old spring house they started with so they get it from the city of Chippewa Falls.
They are on their 6th generation of family learning the business and they've always taught it the same way - every family member going into the business works their way from the bottom up, learning every position in the business, from cooking the wort to fermentation to bottling and warehousing.
Their whole brewery only employs about 50 people and they still give them weekends off.
They use mostly locally/regionally sourced ingredients - local water, wheat from North Dakota, barley from nearby states, etc. The hops they have to get from west of the Rockies because a fungal blight decades ago made it impossible to grow hops in Wisconsin.
They have a pomegranate shandy coming out in November!!!
They make a Wisconsin red pale ale that is only available in Wisconsin.
Finally, their Summer Shandy outsells all of their other beers combined and is the only one available in all 50 states.

After my tour was finished, I finally got on the road to Duluth, Minnesota. I guess I was a little worried about leaving so late because I got pulled over in an aerial speed trap further north in Wisconsin! Whoops! The state trooper was very nice and only gave me a warning, but I was much more observant of my speed after that. The bridge over the St. Louis River/Bay and Superior Bay from Superior, WI to Duluth, MN was rather high and a bit windy, which made for a little bit of white-knuckling on the way over, but I made it into Duluth and found the Duluth Trading store on Superior Street. I don't know what I was expecting - I guess I thought it would be huge like Bass Pro or REI. It was a perfectly acceptable and respectable store of all their catalog goods, and I was very happy to purchase a new pair of jeans. I was just underwhelmed for some reason. Maybe it's because I was still stressed for time, especially having run into some rain on the way there. That and the weather wasn't looking any more promising for the 4 hour ride across Minnesota to Fargo.

So, long story short, I got wet on the way to Fargo. But it could have been SO much worse. I think I somehow managed to ride the line between thunderstorms to the north and to the south of the road I was on, which was gorgeous! Many of Minnesota's 10,000 lakes, it seemed, and I got to cross the Mississippi River where, as the Indigo Girls sing "at a place where you can walk across with 5 steps down," it was that small. Anyway, I finally rolled across the Red River and into Fargo at 9pm, just before it got dark. A little soggy but safe nonetheless, and I definitely didn't need to use the word "uneventful" to describe the day!