Welcome to Food/Drink Week at Milwaukee Record, brought to you by Third Space Brewing. From May 13 through May 20, belly up and enjoy adventurous, odd, and elaborate coverage of all things edible and drinkable in Milwaukee and beyond.
Remember when you were a kid and you’d mix all the soft drink options on a fast food restaurant’s soda machine together? (Hell, we’ll still add a splash of Cherry Coke to liven up our diet cola from time to time.) That combining of carbonated beverages has been called things like Swamp Water, Graveyard, Garbage Coke, Mystery Pop, Rocket Fuel, and simply Mix. In that same spirit, we recently decided to go to 3rd Street Market Hall to visit City Fountain, Milwaukee’s first self-serve tap beer wall, and make the grown-up version of that iconic drink creation.
With the blessing of 3rd Street Market Hall and the help of videographer Bert Lauderdale, we worked our way down the beer wall and filled a stein with ALL 30 of City Fountain’s Wisconsin-made draft beer, seltzer, and wine options. The result of this foolish endeavor was a multi-colored New England AND West Coast style IPA/fruited sour/barley wine/imperial stout/hard seltzer/lager/red ale with a dash of Pinot Grigio. We dubbed the unholy mixture the “Milwaukee River” and we decided we’d drink all ~36 ounces to hammer these points home: don’t be like us and do NOT do this.
Though these draft beverages are good-to-great on their own, the blend of all 30 in one glass was indescribably bad. Check out our video of the experience to see just how terrible the “Milwaukee River” actually is. Cheers!