My wife and I woke up in Colorado Springs during the last part of our vacation in Colorado earlier this year and decided to try to make it to Omaha - a 9 hour drive one-way. I figured I could make it easily - well, I've done 9 hour drives before for my work and while it was tough, I've made it. But I was a little worried my wife would have some problems with it. By the time we got to North Platte, my wife was tired and hungry when we stopped there for gas. Since most of our trip to Colorado was tied to visiting brewpubs, my wife did a quick search of brewpubs in the area. She found a place that was - well - I was a little skeptical as to the location. It appeared to be out in the middle of the country south and west of North Platte. After gassing up and putting the address into the GPS, it just gave me a general destination to go to. As we drove down a county highway, I saw something off in the distance - a sort of pole-barn building sitting on a flat plain near the road. We pulled in and realized we had made it to Pals Brewing Company.
One day a little over 20 years ago, Paul Oettinger - who was also known as "Pal" to his friends - just happened to be biking down State Street in Madison where he was going to school at the University of Wisconsin. He saw a small sign in a storefront window that roughly said, "Brew Your Own Beer Cheaper Than You Can Buy It!" Intrigued because he was becoming somewhat of an aficionado with small batch craft-brewed beers, he stopped into the little shop and found out what he would need to start brewing his own beer at home. It turned out that he would need $85 bucks for a beginners home brewing kit and $85 bucks didn't exactly grow on a tree for a college student studying microbiology. But he was able to come up with the money and he began to brew his own beer at home.
After college, Paul Oettinger and his wife, Amy, moved to Kalamazoo, MI which was becoming a burgeoning craft brewery town. Finding like minded people in a local homebrewing club, Paul Oettinger became fast friends with a man who loved to experiment with different types of tastes in beers. That's when he really became hooked on homebrewing and it became a passion that was also embraced by Amy. He had perfected one of his recipes so well that his friends would insist on Oettinger bringing over a couple small kegs of his "Palsbrew" whenever they were invited to a party.
The Oettinger's had talked about buying or opening their own brewpub. A microbrewery was up for sale in Kalamazoo, but they didn't buy it. Nor did they buy a brewpub in their home state of Wisconsin that was up for sale after they moved back to Madison a few years later. They knew they would have their work cut out for them by starting a brewery in a place like Madison.
Paul Oettinger's older brother Mark, and Mark's wife Mendy had moved to North Platte in 2006 to be the General Manager of the Walmart store there. Paul and Amy Oettinger would sometimes come out to North Platte to visit his brother and the two couples would continue to talk about their dream of one day opening a brewpub. It was during a visit over Thanksgiving in 2015 when it occurred to Mark Oettinger that North Platte was in dire need of a good brewpub. There were over 175 brewpubs in the state of Wisconsin at that time, but in Nebraska there were less than three dozen. Paul Oettinger couldn't agree more.
The Oettinger brothers decided to jump into a brewpub venture with both feet. Paul quit his job in Madison and moved out to North Platte to pursue his dream. The Oettinger families found some land south of North Platte in which they built a brewpub from scratch. They wanted their brewpub to be a little bit of everything - have enough room for outdoor activities and music in the summertime, have a little patio to enjoy a beer on the first warm day in the spring, to have a small tap room that could be used for meetings or special tastings, and to have a menu that wasn't too extensive, but would give people something to nibble on while they enjoyed their beers made from Paul Oettinger's years of homebrewing recipes. Pal's Brewing Company had a soft opening on St. Patrick's Day in 2017, then opened their doors for normal business in two weeks later.
As I said, getting out to Pal's Brewing was a bit nerve racking as the GPS was taking us to a general area and not really a destination. When we saw the building on the flat plain along the west side of the road, we were happy enough to pull into the parking lot. (see map) The building didn't look like much from the front - it looked like an industrial pole barn with an awning over the front entrance.
Inside the building, we found a large space that had a long bar, a brewery facility off to the side, and a number of high-top tables throughout the room. A guy playing guitar was setting up to provide some music on a Saturday afternoon.
We took a seat at a table toward the corner of the restaurant. I had to use the facilities before we got settled, and I went into the men's room to find a couple of urinals made out of stainless steel kegs. They were similar to the ones I've seen at the Lionstone Brewing Company in Geneseo, IL. (Click here to see the Road Tips entry on Lionstone.)
After getting back to the table, we were greeted by a young man who came out from behind the bar. He gave us a food menu and asked us what we'd like to drink. We had to take a minute because we weren't familiar with their beers. The beer menu was on a flat panel television on the wall near us and we decided to try a couple of their beers - the Nob IPA and the Palgian Belgian pale ale. The Palgian Belgian pale ale, well, we didn't really care for all that much. But the Nob IPA was outstanding. My wife and I drank at a lot of brewpubs on our trip to Colorado, but we both remarked that the Nob IPA may have been the best beer we had tasted on our trip. It had a somewhat forward hoppy taste with a very nice smooth finish on the back side. We were very impressed with the beer.
The food menu at Pals is pretty basic. No sandwiches or burgers could be found, which was sort of a downer for us. They had a number of appetizers including Wisconsin cheese curds - both regular and baked. We figured that they didn't have a fryer in the kitchen as they didn't have wings, mozzarella sticks or french fries on the menu, but they had something called pizza fries that appeared to be nothing more than small bread sticks served with a choice of dipping sauce. They also had pecan-smoked ribs basted in a barbecue sauce and topped with blue cheese crumbles. We thought about that for a moment and decided against it.
The signature food item at Pals is pizza. They have 10" or 14" thin crust pizza (including a 10" gluten free crust for a $3 upcharge or a 10" cauliflower crust for a $5 upcharge) along with 5 different types of sauce, five different types of cheese, six different types of meat, and six different varieties of vegetables. We ended up getting a 10" thin crust with Mendy's Pizza Sauce - a tomato-based sauce - along with Italian Sausage chunks and Pepperoni slices. They also had what they called Palsbrew mushrooms - beer-marinated mushroom slice - but my wife wasn't too adventurous in ordering them. She is coming around when it comes to fresh mushrooms when for years her stomach would turn with the canned mushrooms. But the beer-marinated mushrooms - as much as I wanted to try them - didn't trip her trigger. We got the mozzarella cheese on the pizza, but they also had cheddar, blue cheese, goat cheese, or cheese curds for pizza cheese.
And the pizza was, well, it was good. Much better than average. The crust wasn't crisp, but it was chewy and pliable. There was a ton of the mozzarella cheese on the pizza along with copious amounts of a sweet and tart sauce. The Italian sausage came in big chunks - just as we like it. And the pepperoni was salty and spicy, but there could have been more slices on it.
A young lady from the kitchen brought our pizza out to us and we were both ready to sign up for a couple more beers. But no one else came out to check on us while we were having the pizza. It was getting sort of annoying as there didn't seem to be any staff members around either on the floor or behind the bar. The guy who took our order - we figured he was a manager - finally came back out to the bar area and I had to flag him down to get his attention to get us a couple more beers. He brought them over to us and asked if we liked the pizza. We did - and it went together very well with the Nob IPA that we thoroughly enjoyed.
After we got our bill and paid, we decided to take a look around the backyard of Pals. We found an area where they had an outdoor bar for events, picnic tables, and a "bags" game area. It looked like there may have been an area for live music outdoors, as well.
There was a wrap-around patio on the backside of the building. It featured a number of picnic tables under an awning and it looked out to the backyard at Pals. Being that it was Nebraska, you could see for miles in each direction. There was something kind of relaxing and refreshing within a pastoral setting in the middle the plains. Quite honestly, we really didn't want to leave, but we had hotel reservations in Omaha that evening. We were looking at another 4 hours in the car before we'd get to our destination.
Pals Brewing Company was a great find and a pleasant surprise. As I said, their Nob IPA may have been the best beer that we tasted on our trip to brewpubs in Wyoming, Colorado and Nebraska. It had a great hoppy taste, but was smooth on the back side. The pizza was also very good. The abundant mozzarella cheese and the sweet and tart tomato sauce was a great combination along with the Italian sausage and salty/spicy pepperoni. I wouldn't call Pals Brewing Company in the middle of nowhere, but it was out in the country giving it a great laidback rustic feel. This is a place that I would go back to in a heartbeat and spend some more time enjoying their beers, pizza and country setting.
Comments