With the city currently in the throes of local awards fever, Milwaukee Record presents The Randoms, a series of highly specific and delightfully arbitrary “best of” awards that do away with pesky voting and feigned attempts at impartiality. Throughout the week, we’ll be recognizing the people, organizations, and places that help elevate life in Milwaukee. This week is sponsored by Boone & Crockett, 2016’s Best Bar With A Taco Truck Out Back (Bay View).
It’s been a banner year in Milwaukee brewing. Between Good City, Third Space, and Urban Harvest opening up, Enlightened expanding, Like Minds returning to town (sort of), and both City Lights and Westallion preparing to brew in the near future, there’s simply never been a bigger annual in local craft beer. And that’s just factoring in the new breweries that started here. On top of an array of new locally-born libations being poured, a few out-of-town operations saw the allure of Brew City and relocated to Milwaukee in 2016.
Following four years canning and kegging crowd-sourced concoctions in Madison, MobCraft Beer moved to the more affordable and thirsty confines of Walker’s Point at the end of June. About five weeks later, another respected regional microbrewery hit the reset button Milwaukee. In early August, Black Husky Brewing opened its new taproom in a renovated space in Riverwest, after Milwaukee in particular took a liking to the husband-wife brewery that started in a log cabin in the Upper Peninsula border town of Pembine, Wisconsin. With a cozy Locust Street site and time-tested beer list—try the milk stout!—that was pre-approved by its adopted market long before they relocated, Black Husky quickly established itself as one of the best microbreweries in town (new or otherwise), and an operation Milwaukee can be proud to call its own…now.