There are a number of brewpubs/craft breweries in the greater Quad Cities area - some may say that the area has reached a saturation of craft breweries. But they keep growing with three more opening since last fall. However, one of the oldest craft brewpubs in the area is still one of the most popular - Bent River Brewing Company. One Saturday earlier this year, my wife suggested that we head over the Bent River in downtown Moline for lunch. It had been awhile since we had been there for either beers or food and I thought it would be a nice diversion from laying around on a cold weekend day.
Tim Koster was a home-brewing enthusiast who started Koski's Home Brew Fixin's in 1993 to supply other local enthusiasts with equipment, supplies and ingredients to make their own beer at home. Koster was a pretty good brewer and he was convinced that he could sell his beers to the public. He opened Bent River Brewing Company in 1996, but continued to brew in small batches. It was a full two years later before he was able to procure copper brewing kettles from the Brauhaus company from Austria and they produced their first half-barrel of beer, an American Pale Ale.
As business grew, Koster put in a kitchen and began to provide food to go along with his beers. One of his good customers was Joel Krogman who was a longtime Culver's franchisee who had opened up the Blackthorn Pub and Eatery just down the street from Bent River. When he wanted to get away from his own place for awhile, Krogman would belly up at the bar at Bent River and he got to know Koster and really enjoyed the beer Koster was brewing.
Blackthorn closed in 2003, but Krogman continued to come into Bent River to pass time while he worked as a consultant in the restaurant industry. When Koster told Krogman that he was thinking of selling Bent River, Krogman came up with a group of investors - Brian Smith, Nick Bowes, and Alan and Kathy Reschke - to join him in buying the brewpub. The group took over the brewpub in 2009 with Nick Bowes as the general manager of the brewpub.
It became very evident that Bent River's success was getting the best of them. They were selling their variety of beers at over 60 restaurants and grocery stores in Eastern Iowa and Western Illinois and business was growing at a tremendous pace. Krogman realized that they needed to expand their brewing operations and they looked for buildings in the greater Quad Cities to turn into a brewery.
They found a building at the corner of what was at first a car wash, then had been a car detailing and convenience store operation at the corner of 24th St. and 5th Ave. in Rock Island across from the venerable Jim's Rib Haven. Krogman and his group put in a new beer fermentation system with a bottling line, erected a silo that can store over 30 tons of grain, put in a bar and special events area, and a distribution warehouse. With brewmaster Steve Ratcliff overseeing the operation - and Tim Koster coming back as a consultant on the new operation - the Rock Island Brewery, Tasting Room, Special Events and Distribution Center for Bent River opened in the spring of 2012. Almost immediately, Ratcliff - who has been in charge of brewing at Bent River since 2008 - was overseeing the production of over 10,000 barrels of beer annually. Bent River beers are found at bars, restaurants and stores in Iowa, Illinois and Wisconsin.
(In 2016, Krogman and his investors franchised out the Bent River concept to a group of three investors in Burlington, IA. The franchise group had bought an old J.C. Penney store in downtown Burlington and opened Burlington Bent River in the fall of 2016 complete with all of Bent River's beers.)
The original Bent River is located in the heart of downtown Moline along 5th Ave. (see map) It's housed in a building that dates back to the turn of the 20th century and is part of a number of buildings recognized by the National Register of Historic Places. The facade of the building was renovated in an Italian Renaissance style to enhance the planned restoration of the historic buildings in downtown Moline.
Inside Bent River is a long bar with the original copper brewing kettles in a line behind the bar. Spotlights hanging from the ceiling highlighted the kettles and exposed ductwork hung over the bar area.
The current beer list hangs in two places from the ceiling above and behind the bar. Bent River features around seven or eight year-round beers with another half-dozen or so seasonal beers.
The dining area consists of a long narrow room with booths along the wall, and a series of high top and low top tables. They kept the historical integrity of the building with a tin ceiling and antique-style lighting with fans hanging from the ceiling.
We took a seat in a booth along the wall and a guy came over to drop off menus and tell us that Candi was going to be our server, but he wanted to know if we wanted anything to drink. My wife got the Haze IPA which is a very forward and hoppy beer. I wanted to try samples of the blueberry stout they had just come out with, as well as the jalapeño ale. I'm not big on stouts or on fruit beers, but I wanted to see what this one was like. It was more of a coffee taste than a blueberry taste. And the jalapeño ale was a little peppery in taste, but wasn't all that spicy. I ended up getting a pint of their award-winning Mississippi Blonde, a nice light beer with an ABV of 3.6 as I didn't really want anything hoppy or heavy for lunch. The Mississippi Blonde got a bronze medal in its category during the 2007 Great American Beer Festival in Denver.
The food at Bent River isn't anything fancy as it's more along the lines of typical brewpub cuisine - burgers, sandwiches, appetizers, wraps, salads, and entrees such as mac and cheese, fish and chips, and shepherd's pie. I've had the burger there on my previous visit and I thought it was fine. But they had changed the menu from the last time we were in and they had a number of smoked meats on the menu including brisket, pulled pork, turkey, pastrami, and sausage. The smoked pastrami sandwich was sort of calling my name.
We started out with some of the smoked brisket poutine - chopped brisket on fries with deep fried cheese curds and topped with a housemade vinegar-based barbecue sauce. I didn't care for the barbecue sauce - it was similar to a sauce my grandmother used to put on her Swiss steak when I was a young kid. And she made Swiss steak all the time for nearly every birthday dinner she hosted. It got to be a joke amongst our family members for all the times she did Swiss steak. The poutine was just all right in my book.
My wife really wanted to try some of the barbecue, so I decided to go that way rather than to get the smoked pastrami sandwich. We went with the two meat platter of pulled pork and brisket. For our sides, we got baked beans and sweet pepper cole slaw. The meat was also topped with the vinegar-based sauce that I didn't care for at all.
The brisket and pulled pork were both tender enough that you didn't need a knife to cut it up. But the taste of the vinegar sauce just didn't do a thing for me. I know there are people who like the vinegar-based barbecue sauces - I do, as well, if they're not too heavy on the vinegar. Still, I ate my portion of both the pork and brisket and probably would have liked it with a more sweet and smoky - and somewhat spicy - barbecue sauce. Or no sauce at all. (I should have gotten the sauce on the side.)
The sweet pepper cole slaw was all right, with chopped red and yellow peppers mixed in. But the baked beans just downright sucked. They were drab in taste with almost no redeeming quality whatsoever. I think I had a couple bites of the beans before I decided that they weren't even worth having any more.
Bent River is one of those places where the food and beer are good - not great - but they do a good job of preparing both. While I had a minor problem with the vinegar-based sauce they used on the brisket and pulled pork, the meat was very tender and flavorful. The sweet pepper cole slaw was fine, but the baked beans were not very good. We were also somewhat disappointed in the brisket poutine. It would have been a lot better had they put gravy on it instead of the vinegar-based barbecue sauce. My wife enjoyed her Haze IPA - she really likes a good hoppy beer - and I have always liked their Mississippi Blonde beer. Some people may like their new blueberry stout beer - I didn't care for it. And the jalapeño ale sampler was all right, but didn't have that forward peppery taste I've had in other jalapeño beers. Bent River may not be the best brewpub I've visited in terms of food or beers in my travels over the years, but they've found their own little niche in the Quad Cities and are still one of the more popular places in the area.
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