Wisconsin cheese and beer tours: Wine tasting for real men (and women)

Wed, 05/02/2012 - 23:00 — Anonymous by Brent Butler Wisconsin's state motto
may be "Forward," but for anyone serious about cheese and beer it might just
as easily be "Upward." At least as far as personal caloric intake is
concerned. When waves of Germans immigrated to the state in the 19th century
due to religious persecution in Europe, centuries of brewing traditions met
favorable Midwest geography. For more than a century, mega-breweries
like Pabst, Blatz, Schlitz and Miller crowned Milwaukee as "the beer
capital of the world." Today, only Miller remains of the large
domestics (Pabst, the last to leave, pulled out in 1996 and is now brewing
in Los Angeles), but dozens of independent microbreweries have emerged in
their place and have kept Wisconsin at the forefront of the craft-brew
revolution. Wisconsin is also the top cheese-producing state in the country,
churning out almost 1.18 billion kilos annually. read more