Local Expression
Different bases, naturally, take their brewing in different directions.
The Navy Club in Seoul went crazy for unfiltered wheat beers of all descriptions, and ended up with five on draft at once, from hefeweizen to a honey wheat, to an authoritative weizenbock.
The brewing operations on other bases ebb and flow as troop deployments play out. Club Alliance at Yokosuka, Japan, has the largest capacity of any of the military base brew pubs, but when the fleet sails, the brewpub stops brewing, to resume again when the fleet comes home.
At Fort Bragg in North Carolina, the taps currently feature six house-brewed beers at Iron Mike’s, the bar and brewpub: amber, yingyang, Fuggles, a German wheat, an Australian lager and an extra special bitter. The brewpub has been operating since the fall of 2006. Iron Mike refers to the statue of a soldier that sits a block from the officer’s club. Like many of these brewpubs, Iron Mike’s brands its décor, beer and tap handles with references to local base lore.
“We had a boss, Col. Post, who had been to the brewpub at Fort Drum, and thought it would be a wonderful idea for Fort Bragg,” recalls Michelle Hagwood, the club manager.
“She was one of the first people that started that initiative.”
When it opened, the novelty of a brewpub was a lure to the soldiers, but ingrained army traditions may have kept some away. “We are the Fort Bragg Officer’s Club and that limits our clientele a little. There are about 50,000 soldiers on the base. Very few of them are officers; most are enlisted. We’re open to everybody, but when it says “officers club” on the door, it deters the enlisted folks.”
That’s a shame, because the brewpub is sleek and modern with large-screen tvs. And brewer Isell Oquembo produces a range of craft styles, meticulously executing her training.
“On days that I’m brewing, the most important step is cleaning and sanitizing. I get the equipment out of the cooler so it can come up to room temperature, then the first steps take about three hours,” she says. She likens the brewing process to “cooking a good soup.” German wheat beers are among her most popular brews: Michelle Hagwood confesses that a fresh hefeweizen with an added shot of peach schnapps is “out of this world.”
Unexpected Benefits
The popularity of military brewpubs has been swept along with the demand for everything else from the civilian world to have its counterpart in the military sphere.
“I think the popularity of the brewpubs may have something to do with the recruiting/retention issue,” speculates Michael Smith, Micropubs president. “The MWR organization sees the benefits in making the base where these people live as much like home as possible. Providing an up-scale brewpub setting is seen as a draw.”
There may also have been some unintended but positive consequences. Brewpubs aren’t like bars. “It seems to have changed the culture a little,” says Smith. “Historically, when enlisted men or women would get off duty, the assumption was that they’d go to a bar and drink half a case of beer and get in trouble. Our places don’t lend themselves to that kind of drinking style.”
In certain cases, it seems to have led to a reduction in problems like DUIs. Fort Irwin, where Smith’s company built their first brewpub, is located about halfway between Las Vegas and Los Angeles in the middle of the desert, down a 35-mile access road. The side of the road is dotted with crosses to mark the deaths of drivers who came home too fast and too drunk from Barstow. “This is all anecdotal,’ cautions Smith, “but the accounts we hear say that there are fewer DUIs. That would be great.”
Serving Comfort, Not Conflict
Just as in the civilian world, military brewpubs encourage a perspective on beer that invites the drinker to pause and savor, not drink blindly. With the emphasis on freshness and diversity and the importance of good food and company, the brewpubs extend to hard-working soldiers and sailors (and other \branches perhaps yet to come) the pleasures of a well-earned pint. If serving men and women are sipping beers the rest of us can’t get, well, they probably deserve it.
