The Place Where We Live

I originally intended to begin my Michigan beer trip posts - logically- with the first day of our trip. However, after posting my photo album to a Yahoo Group that Kevin and I belong to (Craft Beer in Michigan) several people saw my photo of a Leelanau Brewing Company sticker marked “Phantom Brewery?” and helped clear up  my questions about the existence of such a place. Also, since I was trying to reel everyone in yesterday with my teaser of a “phantom brewery” I decided that my first post would have to be about Leelanau Brewing Company even though I have never actually been there (well sort of) and have never sampled their beer.

Here’s the story:

On Tuesday, the day after we exploring the three breweries in Traverse City, we decided to venture intoTraverse City wine country and drove out to Chateau Chantal, a great winery on Old Mission Peninsula recommended by my mom. We were sampling wines but standing there in beer t-shirts (me in my “Make Beer Not War” shirt and Kevin in his Detroit Beer Co. shirt) so we felt obligated to explain to the man serving us that we were on a Michigan brewery tour–not to mention our utter ignorance of wine in comparison to our knowledge of beer at this point. 

It turned out that, in addition to making wine, this man also brewed his own beer and was intrigued by our trip. He asked us if we had been to Leelanau Brewing Company on the Leelanau Penninsula yet. What’s this? A brewery that we had never heard about. We were excited. He even went on to mention that he had tasted their beers and noted that they were packaged in 750 ml bottles.  “Hmm,” we said. “That sounds just like  Jolly Pumpkin.” (another craft brewery in Dexter, MI - which we’d visited before.) However He wasn’t familiar with JP.

He then asked a co-worker to look online for the address and phone number for us. She wrote it down on a post-it-note along with a toll-free phone number. After a few samples and bottles of wine to take home as gifts, we were on our way excited about our new discovery.

We  were able to quickly locate the address on the map and drove directly to the location.  “This works out well,” we thought. We were stopping in Lake Leelanau to buy coffee anyway, so it was on our way. We located the address right - 473 North Manitou Trail West. However, we didn’t find a brewery or pub. Instead, we found a bed and breakfast called “The Snowbird”. We decided that maybe we were accidentally on South Manitou trail so we pulled out turned around and went back in the opposite direction thinking that we might find another 473 street number down the road. No such luck. I decided to call the toll free number but got something that sounded like a home answering machine message. This was odd. Finally we decided to stop in downtown Leland at a bakery ( I don’t know why… but usually at every bakery there’s a brewer or at least someone interested in beer). One woman told us that she knew the place  and that it was actually in Glen Arbor. The other woman behind the counter reminded her that she was thinking of Leelanau Coffee Roasters not Leelanau Brewing.  In the end, neither of them had ever heard of it. 

We got back on the road and decided to forget about the brewery and stop and pick up our coffee at Higher Grounds. Just for the heck of it, we asked the two women working there about it.  They had never heard of it either but one of them went in the back to ask someone else. She came back to tell us to stop looking for it because it didn’t exist. The way she made it sound Leelanau Brewing Company was either a grand idea that never materialized or a ghost brewery that once existed but had gone out of business long ago.

We went on our merry way thinking we hadn’t missed out on anything…and decided to put it out of our minds… Until we arrived several days later at New Holland Brewing Company and picked up the most recent edition of Great Lakes Brewing News and noticed that - Sure enough -Leelanau was listed as a Michigan brewery. However, there was no  street address and the phone number had a 248 area code (Oakland County?) not a Traverse City area-code. How bizarre! However, we shrugged it off when we also noted that Leelanau was not listed in the Michigan Beer Guide.

The last straw was our stop “The Hide Out” in Grand Rapids where we saw the Leelanau Brewing Company sticker pasted to their cooler. The funny thing is, no one their could explain it their either.

Hence the phantom brewery.

Then we got back home and, as I said earlier, posted the photo to the Craft Beer in Michigan group. Several people wrote us back to tell us that Leelanau does exist although all of their beer is being brewed by Jolly Pumpkin Artisan Ales in Dexter  while the Leelanau owners are building/developing the brewery in Lake Leelanau. They pointed us to the Leelanau Brewing Company website (I don’t know why we didn’t think of this when we were finally in Saugatuck and had Internet access!) which held all the answers including the fact that their “headquarters are not currently open to the public.” The woman at the winery must have missed this small detail.

We also found out that Charles, the owner (and probably the mysterious voice on the answering machine) will have a booth at the 2007 Michgan Summer Beer fest. So we will get to sample Leelanau Brewing Company beer.

Needless to say, we can’t wait to meet Charles at the beer festival if possible and to someday stay at the “Snowbird” when it is a farmhouse craft brewery/B&B.

Believe me…we definitely know how to get there by now.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 10th, 2007 at 9:18 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.