Hinterland Brewpub - Milwaukee

No Longer In Business

A fun, fancy little stop on our Milwaukee urban beer hike ... not at all what I expected for a Green Bay-based brewpub. This is a semi-schwanky gastropub that happens to serve beers from the Hinterland home base. We felt WAY underdressed in our shorts and t-shirts, but everyone was friendly, the beer was good, and the staff and clientele were all very friendly. The food looked really good, but maybe put on a nice shirt if you want to stop by.

Stopped in for a sampler. A small but fancy place with a small stone bar and wicker chairs. Only a few taps with their house beers and a few assorted bottles. Servers were nice and offered suggestions. I didn’t purchase food on my visit as while it looked good it was quite expensive.

Finally stopped in to check this place out. I like their beer but the venue is a bit out of my comfort zone from a regular brewpub. There’s a lounge in back where you can hang out and have beers and cocktails. Just like the Green Bay location the bartender had to go somewhere else to get my beer as they only had three beers on tap in the back, what’s up with that? The menu has some interesting and spendy items on it. The service was decent.

Cool place, worth checking out! Looking forward to there Saison!

A pretty classy place with some nice beers during my stop. Sampled 7 different beers, pricing is a bit more than most places. I didn’t eat but if I did I would have expected it to be pretty pricy.

We stopped by for a couple of beers and were extremely impressed with the quality of the beers we had. We tried four different beers and they were all well made. We didn’t have any food as we sat at the bar, where we had comfy chairs and great service. The decor is very tasteful and while I don’t particularly need that in my beer bars, it’s nice to see someone trying to up the profile for beer venues.

sampler of 3 mediocre beers: $6.75 ala carte dinner salad: $9 time to get appetizers to table: 40 minutes elk: $38 spending $375 at this restaurant then being told during coffee that we have to leave because there is another party of 6 waiting for our table: priceless.

This was quite similar to the Green Bay location. It had a hip and cool northwoods atmosphere with exposed beams and such.. very hip clientele, very fancy menu (even the lounge menu was catered to foodies), and the beer was solid to fairly good. They seem interested in experimenting with beers (see BA IPA), but the atmosphere is far from beer-geek. Prices were OK for the beer ($4.50 for the regular Hinterland beers, more for the BA IPA), and very pricy for the food (similar to the Green Bay location.. I did not eat here, but the Green Bay food was fantastic). I’ll go back.

I think my taste in beer establishments is changing more and more I look for beer culture more than a big selection of taps. I didn’t find Hinterland to really have either. Unless you looked carefully, you would not guess that there were specially brewed beers in this place. Fairly trendy decor, pricey nouveau cuisine (Kobe beef mini-burgers, sushi, etc), prominent wine displays, and no prominent displays of beer . There were only a few mainstream bottles evident in the cooler behind the bar, and the 6 tap handles serving Hinterland-brewed beer were small, unlabeled, and partially concealed. Although this place serves beer brewed at their Green Bay location, it is hardly a celebration of beer. I enjoyed the Luna Stout I tried, but I’m not very likely to return here.

Green Bay gastropub how has a second location in Milwaukee’s Third Ward. I liked the place, but it does walk the line between discerning and trendy. Lots of exposed brick and wooden beams, typical of sophisticated but (generally) unpretentious places. And yet it did border on the pretentious, possibly because of the trendoid-oriented menu, more likely because the music on my visit was decidedly loungey. The house-brewed beers are brought down from Green Bay. The three I tried were all more interesting than good but that’s good, because I do like to experiment. The barrel-aged IPA was overly-whiskeyish not necessarily a bad thing, but I could barely detect the hops underneath all that. Similar reaction to the two others distinctive, intriguing, but still flawed. I will try this again, probably more than once, because there’s a spirit of experimentation here, but with so many other great beer bars in Milwaukee (Romans, Comet, Nessun Dorma, Palm Tavern) Hinterland probably won’t be a priority. (And they only had four guest beers, of which Pilsner Urquel was the only top quality entry.)