brewery

I had never attended a baby shower before. Of course, I’ve heard about them. You play silly games, talk with people you’ll never meet again, and graze on miscellaneous snacks. All of my expectations were met but what the other guests may have not expected was my competitiveness. Nobody sent me the memo that the games were meant to be fun, not to be won. After a fierce round of baby jeopardy with the oddest rules I’ve ever encountered, I needed a drink. My wife wasn’t present to temper my competitive streak, she was dealing with a screaming baby. Needless to say, she needed a drink too. So we popped the kid in the car and made for Waconia Brewing Company.

Before our child was born, my wife and I were determined to hold on to as much of our previous life as we could. That’s why we were in a car driving north to spend the second week of our daughter’s life at a resort on Lake Clitherall. We’d taken her to the Minnesota State Fair when she was only 6 days old but now it was time for her first brewery, an environment with a lot less of a safety valve than massive fairgrounds with over 100,000 people. With some degree of trepidation I took hold of her carseat and stepped into the taproom of Alexandria’s Copper Trail Brewing.

We’d heard that garlic can induce labor. When our baby didn’t show up on her due date we took the hour drive west to the Minnesota Garlic Festival in Hutchinson, Minnesota. After bouncing around the fairgrounds, avoiding the abnormally creepy Narren, tasting all manner of garlicky foods, and nibbling on delicious black garlic we were determined to cleanse our palate with a couple of brews at the local Bobbing Bobber Brewing Company.

I’ve always enjoyed hitting two birds with one stone. The first bird was a brewery we’d visited but I hadn’t written about and the second was an outdated Groupon that had been driving me crazy. Our car became the stone as our destination was put into Google Maps: 10K Brewing.