A pint at every stop

A day on the Sleeping Bear Ale Trail through Benzie County

By Jacob Wheeler
Sun editor

Cheers to local craft breweries!

Two of six breweries on the newly minted “Sleeping Bear Ale Trail” made the top five of MLive’s Best New Michigan Brewery search. Frankfort’s Stormcloud Brewing Company won the gold medal earlier this month, and Hop Lot in Suttons Bay came in fourth.

The Ale Trail celebrates half a dozen (relatively) new breweries along the M-22 and US-31 corridors in Leelanau and Benzie counties. Patrons could foreseeably visit all six over the course of a weekend. The Ale Trail complement’s the region’s already well-established wine tourism pilgrimages.

“We are kind of the outliers of the Traverse City region,” Matt Therrien, owner of Lake Ann Brewing, told MLive. The six breweries, which include Big Cat Brewing in Cedar, Green Bird Organic Cellars in Northport, Hop Lot, Lake Ann Brewing, Stormcloud and St. Ambrose Cellars in Beulah, wanted to set themselves apart from the more urban Traverse City Ale Trail. “The name was kind of a no-brainer,” Therrien added. “With the popularity of Sleeping Bear Dunes, to latch onto that made sense.”

The brewpub owners pooled their money to produce a brochure rack card that describes the beverages at each establishment along with a map that shows customers how to get from one drinking hole to the next. Plans for a website are in the works.

“It gives us the opportunity to cross-promote each other because we are pretty spaced out,” Big Cat Brewery owner and chef Aaron Ackley told MLive.

In part one of our two-part series along the Sleeping Bear Ale Trail, the Glen Arbor Sun — with help from our sister publication, the Betsie Current — visited the three Benzie County locales along the trail. (Look for our visit to Big Cat, Green Bird and Hop Lot in a future edition.)

Lake Ann Brewery, Lake Ann

Matt Therrien, who worked for years in his family’s construction and masonry business, converted Guy Gray’s original Snack Shack—which was built in 1945 in the heart of Lake Ann—into a cozy, northwoods-inspired brewpub that feels like your grandpa’s hunting cabin or a scene from an L.L. Bean catalogue. The ceilings are low, and the walls sport beadboard and plaid paneling. Coleman lanterns hang against the back wall, and a Pabst Blue Ribbon statue and a “fisherman’s thermometer” adorn the shelf above the bar. (Therrien’s uncle delivered PBR for 30 years.) There’s no television at the bar, because Therrien “hates T.V.”

Despite the PBR homage, you won’t find any generic beer on tap at Lake Ann Brewing Co. Therrien will serve craft American ales including his “Listen Chief IPA,” “Aral Hills Pale Ale,” “Village Blonde,” “Lake Ann Amber,” “Mr. P’s Porter,” and “Mr. Blue Sky Wheat,” which is less sweet than those made with German hefeweizen yeast.

“I like bananas and cloves in my nutbread, not in my beer,” Therrien says.

After homebrewing for 20 years and making what he admits at first was “terrible beer,” Therrien couldn’t pass up the opportunity to open a brewpub in downtown Lake Ann. The vacant building had gone into foreclosure in 2011, and when Therrien first eyed the space two years ago, he thought it was a wreck.

“I looked at the building and said ‘no way.’ A year later, I looked again, and the idea began to grow on me,” he admits. “How often does the best location in town sit available for years?”

Therrien eventually negotiated Honor Bank to a favorable price at half the building’s original listed value. It was clear to him that the bank—and the community—desperately wanted an owner. He closed in the spring of 2014. Ever since then, the community has helped Therrien to decorate the space.

“A lot of the stuff we have in here is stuff we reclaimed,” Therrien says. There are church pews from Bayview Wesleyan Church, stools from Union Street Station in Traverse City, chairs from Hermann’s European Café in Cadillac, and a framed portrait of Italian chef Tony Pisari, a former owner of the building. “So many people have come and dropped off stuff and said, ‘Hey, we thought you could use this.’ The nice thing about being in total artistic control is that I can hang things up and no one will complain.”

Eleven months before Therrien opened, his wife Jennie convinced him to place a sign out front announcing that the brewery would be “open tomorrow.” The advertisement was a joke, of course—the building needed to be gutted, renovated, and retrofitted to brew seven barrels of beer at one time. All summer, fall, and winter, the sign remained, though Therrien tired of the incredulous gawks of passersby. (“You’re opening tomorrow? But the place is a wreck!”)

After Lake Ann Brewing opened, a mantle behind the bar sported a sign that read, “Free beer—tomorrow!”

Stormcloud, Frankfort

Stormcloud Brewing Company has pulsed new, year-round energy into downtown Frankfort since it opened three summers ago. The venue is dynamic, the townies pack the venue throughout the winter for quirky events such as weekly trivia nights, the crowd is upbeat, and the beach is just two blocks away. But head brewer (and co-owner) Brian Confer’s beer is why MLive named Stormcloud as “Michigan’s best new brewery”.

Following a public poll — during which 30,000 votes were cast, nominating more than 100 breweries — John Gonzalez and Amy Sherman, who host MLive’s Michigan Best series and Behind the Mitten broadcast, traveled 2,500 miles throughout the mitten state and sampled more than 300 beers.

“On this search, we were looking for new breweries that are making exceptional beer. Period,” Gonzalez says in a press release.

Gold medal for Stormcloud, thanks to Confer’s handcrafted, Belgian-inspired ales.

“Each and every beer we sampled [from Stormcloud] was just about perfect,” Sherman says. “Add to this the great sense of community that Stormcloud has created in Frankfort, and you have a winner.”

Six years before Stormcloud Brewing Company opened next to the Garden Theater in downtown Frankfort, Brian Confer realized that he wasn’t going to retire as a photographer — making ends meet was too difficult.

His profession was quickly going digital, so Confer turned the film-processing dark room in his studio in Elberta into a room for home-brewing beer. He called it “Stormcloud”. The brew room had everything Confer needed: good water, a huge sink, and space to make as much of a mess as he wanted. Three or four batches later, the artisan knew he wanted to focus on Belgian-style beers — primarily ales that emphasize malts and fruity, yeast flavors.

“I wanted to be different than what Traverse City offers,” said Confer. “Our theory was that there are so many great (India Pale Ales) in TC, who would drive 45 minutes for another IPA? We could take a risk and do something completely different, and specialize in a niche-focused attraction.”

The risk paid off. Stormcloud the brewery opened in June 2013, and quickly became one of Benzie County’s favorite destinations. Even after Frankfort’s typical tourism season subsided post Labor Day weekend, patrons kept returning to Stormcloud. Though Northern Michigan’s long and arduous winter of 2014 encouraged hibernation, Stormcloud routinely packed the house during Wednesday “trivia nights”.

Stormcloud is much more than a bar; it’s a place for the community to gather, and that’s by design.

“Our idea was to create a destination that was truly a ‘third place’ for people,” explained co-owner Rick Schmitt. “The first is home, and the second is work. We wanted an inviting environment where you could come and drink beer, or read, work or play board games with your family. A century ago in Europe, every little town had a brewery, which was where you could go to hang out.”

St. Ambrose Cellars

The Benzie-based, honeybee-inspired business trifecta of Sleeping Bear Farms honey, St. Ambrose Cellars meadery, and BeeDazzled soap and candle shop together compose one of the biggest honey producers in Michigan. St. Ambrose Cellars is located at an historic 19th-century stagecoach stop in rural Beulah next to a big red barn on the corner of Pioneer and Homestead roads. Locally grown and locally owned, all of the processes happen here among five buildings: bee raising, pollination, fermentation, beeswax production, winemaking, and tasting of the products. There are non-alcoholic drinks offered, as well, and kids can taste root beers and sarsparillas on tap that are also made with local ingredients such as maple syrup.

The complex is the brainchild of Kirk and Sharon Jones. He handles the operations at St. Ambrose, while she “does her own thing” at BeeDazzled, her business at their home on River Road near Benzonia, where she raises bees, grows a garden of bee-preferred flowers (“the bees love Angelica,” observes Sharon), and sells organic bee byproducts like soaps and candles, in addition to things you have never imagined existed, like earwax candles. Sharon believes in the healing powers of these remarkable insects and advocates “apitherapy” — using bee stings to prevent and cure other ailments.

Early in their bee production, Kirk experimented with mead, an alcoholic beverage that dates to ancient times and is found all over the world, from northern Scandinavia to southern Africa. The word is derived from almost every conceivable language root, so popular was the drink. The percentage of alcohol might range between 6.5 and 20 percent or more, and the beverage is created by fermenting honey with water, sometimes with various fruits, spices, grains, or hops. It may be carbonated, still, sparkling, dry, sweet, or semi-sweet, but its fermentable sugar comes from honey and, as we all know, honey comes from bees.

A St. Ambrose special concoction, the “Black Madonna,” taking its name from a mythical Lithuanian tale, is a citrusy mead that is fermented with blackberries and probiotic bacteria. But it does not replace the excellent St. Ambrose wines, all made from Michigan grapes. Ambrosia, fragrant and pleasing to the palate, was called the “food of the gods” in classical mythology, and one can see why, here at St. Ambrose Cellars. This wine is fantastic.

The Joneses researched extensively to name the facility. They were looking for an identity. The logo for St. Ambrose Cellars was based on two icons: St. Ambrose himself, the Milanese patron saint of beekeepers and candlemakers, and Melissa, meaning “bee,” herself an ancient goddess whose image Sharon found in the British Museum in London. The result is a perfect mesh of male and female, which is the image that adorns the assemblage of buildings at the Cellars, beneficently welcoming you, the browser and the taster.

Tasting and talking, storytelling and conviviality, meeting new people, eating and drinking—all of this was in the tradition of the mead hall (think King Arthur) in the Old World. An all-purpose large building, a single room, a festive gathering around a long and tall wooden table begets the scene set 1,000 years ago.

“Mead implies the gift of poetry and sweetness of conversation,” reflects Sharon. Meeting new people in one friendly space—the hall, or, in this case, the tasting room—results in the cheerful ambiance that brings visitors to St. Ambrose. The gathering table comes from wood that was found in the swampy waters off Apalachicola in Florida and rescued by a friend, taken to a mill, and rebuilt.

Betsie Current editors Jordan Bates, Susan Koenig and Aubrey Ann Parker contributed to this story.