drank the beer, saw the corn and ate a little cheese

Wisconsin is beautiful, rolling hills, trees, randomly placed and irregular shaped corn and soy bean fields, big white farm houses with large porches. And of course the occasional cluster of giant enclosed animal (chicken?) sheds with huge fans at the end. On our way from Madison to New Glarus we drove past a farm with some cows and saw a cluster of six or so clean, brand new looking dog igloos with a fence around and a cow in each igloo (U.S. raised veal maybe?). Sort of weird and disturbing.

New Glarus is a tiny Swiss town with statues of cows wearing clothes scattered throughout, lots of brick buildings and most businesses ending in Haus. The driveway that leads to New Glarus Brewing Company starts at the bottom of a hill and wraps around to the top where you get to a beer estate (made us think of some of the wine estates we've seen in California). The Brewery is pristine with giant copper vats, shiny stainless steel pipes running throughout the building, delicious beer and a beer garden. It's unfortunate that it's only sold in Wisconsin.

Made our way to Milwaukee, didn't get very much cheese tasting in, but we did make it to Miller Brewing Company, Great Lakes Distillery and Milwaukee Brewing Company via bike.
Miller is a huge compound, more than four blocks. With machines that can 2000 beers a minute.
Great Lakes Distillery makes excellent liquor, some of the best Absinthe and Vodka we've had and has only four full time employees. It was a super chill place with nice people that pulled out their air compressor for us to fix a flat.

Now we're in Chicago and need to get out on the bikes and start checking things out since we didn't manage to get Oprah tickets.


Back in Big Sky, MT at a farmers market some hooterites suckered us into buying more eggs than we needed by telling us to just pickle them. They saw us walking up to their booth beers in hand and seized the opportunity to be folksy. These are the same Hooterites that sold us the pickled onions and pickled pickles. We gave it a shot and it's good, we just threw in a fresh batch and they look...''interesting.'' Hooterites are like the Amish but somehow not the same.

***Correction: Don't worry! Veal/Calf dog houses are not to prep the baby cows to be someone's expensive dinner, but actually "hutches," homes for the dairy cows until they are weaned! (thanks to Andrea of Big Sky for educating us!)