It was a beautiful sunny Sunday recently and my wife was antsy to get out of the house and enjoy the day. She suggested we take a ride along the Mississippi head west and south out of the Quad Cities. We took off around 11 a.m. and I drove down to Muscatine to go to the Contrary Brewing Company, one of our favorite little microbreweries in the area. However, when we pulled up just before noon, we saw that they don't open until 1 p.m.
Undeterred to find a microbrewery and my wife willing to continue to drive on a beautiful day, I pointed the car west and went to the small town of Kalona, IA to check out a brewery that I'd heard about, but had never been to before. Just after 1 p.m., we pulled up in front of the Kalona Brewing Company.
With the last name of Brewer, you'd think that your destiny would be brewing beers. And that's sort of what happened with Kalona Brewing Company co-founder Lee Brewer. While living in Seattle in the mid-80's and working as a painting contractor, Brewer came across one of the first craft breweries in Seattle - Redhook. One day, Brewer walked into Redhook - which was housed in an old transmission shop - and asked co-owners Gordon Bowker and Paul Shipman if they needed any basic labor help at any point. They told Brewer to come back on the following Saturday. He did go back and eventually Brewer was helping with brewing and bottling the Redhook beers on a part-time basis.
Learning from the brewers at Redhook, Brewer started to brew his own beers at home. This led him to a friendship with Mike Hale, the owner/brewer at Hale's Ales, a microbrewery in the Seattle suburb of Kirkland. Brewer caught on with Hale's Ale and helped brew beers for Hale for a couple years.
In 1994, Brewer decided to move to Iowa. He landed a job at Fitzpatrick's Brew Pub - one of the first craft breweries in Iowa City - where he worked off and on for a few years before going back full-time to contract painting. Brewer continued to make his own beers at home and he reached out to a long-time friend from the Seattle area, Ted Nagy, with an idea he had come up with.
Nagy was a machine designer who became friends with Brewer when the two would sit around and enjoy some of Brewer's home-brewed beers. While living in Iowa, Brewer dreamed about running his own brewery and he got with Nagy to talk about the possibility. Nagy had turned into a serial entrepreneur and thought that a brewery situated in Iowa might be a good thing.
Pictured right - Ted Nagy and Lew Brewer. Photo courtesy Kalona Brewing Company Facebook page.
Nagy eventually moved back to Iowa to run a plastics injection molding firm. At one point, Nagy and Brewer thought about starting a winery. But the two knew that the climate wouldn't allow for high quality grapes to be grown. So, they went back to the idea of starting a brewery in the small town of Kalona, IA, about a half-hour drive south and west of Iowa City.
They were having trouble finding a building in Kalona for their brewery and were resigned to the fact that they would probably have to build a brewery in a rural area outside of Kalona. But in 2011, a building in downtown Kalona became available. It was a former farm implement store and was large enough for a brewery and a tap room. The two signed a deal to buy the building.
Of course, there are always snags along the way and their quest to start a brewery was no exception. Brewer and Nagy literally had to start from scratch putting in plumbing, heating and ventilation, and redoing the floor of the old building. Then during the build-out, they found out that their original plan of just having a brewery and a tasting room didn't meet city code. In order to be able to serve their beer on the premises, they had to put in a restaurant. That effectively cut down on half of the space they had allotted for their brewery operation.
Undeterred, Nagy and Brewer went ahead with their plans for a brewpub. Then another bit of luck came about. The Miller building next door to the building they were already in had become available. They jumped on that spot and were able to use all their brewing equipment that they had originally invested in.
To help with the build-out, Brewer enlisted the help of his son Sam who was living in Hawaii at the time. And realizing that with the increased brewing capacity, Brewer had to have an assistant.
Lew Brewer turned to a local man who he'd known for a few years, Warren Yoder. Known as "W" to his friends, Yoder worked for his family's hardware store/building supply business, but dabbled in making his own beers for a number of years. Brewer asked Yoder if he'd ever considered brewing beer as a full-time vocation. At first, Yoder declined saying that he wasn't certain he could jump into uncertainty after working for the family business for 17 years. But a week later, Yoder went back to Brewer and agreed to become his assistant.
With the help of Nagy's wife Becky, the group decided to use only locally-grown or locally-raised products for both their beer and for the food they would serve in the restaurant part of the brewpub. Kalona is a community that is home to a number of Mennonite and Amish families, and many of them grow produce and raise livestock. Nearly everything the Nagy's and Brewer would need to brew beer and prepare food for the brewpub was literally at their doorstep.
Brewer and Yoder started brewing their beers in 2012 while the restaurant part of the operation was being built out. They distributed their beers in the Iowa City/Cedar Rapids area at first, but over time they began to self-distribute to the Quad Cities, Des Moines and other places in eastern and central Iowa.
With the build-out complete, Kalona Brewing Company opened their doors for the general public on Sept. 13, 2013. The Nagy's and Brewer obviously weren't superstitious as Sept. 13 fell on a Friday that year.
Kalona Brewing Company is located at the corner of B Avenue and 4th Street in Kalona. (see map) The building was known as the B-4 building when Nagy and Brewer bought it in 2011. It's in the heart of downtown Kalona which is known for its shops, boutiques and antique stores. Kalona is a popular destination because of these shops and parking can be iffy. However, since it was Sunday, many of the stores were closed and we were able to park on B Avenue just down the street to the east of Kalona Brewing Company.
The inside of Kalona Brewing Company featured a polished concrete floor and and exposed truss ceiling. Scattered with the tables in the space were couches and coffee tables giving the somewhat modern industrial motif a more homey look. Natural light courtesy of the large windows on the south and west side of the brewpub splashed into the space. Just past the bar were ceiling to floor windows that displayed the large brewing vats in the brewery.
The kitchen area was situated in the back corner of the space. It featured a large wood-fired oven and a prep area that looked out over the brewpub. The head chef at Kalona Brewing Company is Kalona native Oliver Hassman who learned the ins-and-outs of beer and wine pairing with locally-raised/locally-grown foods at Vesta in Coralville, IA. (Click here to see the Road Tips entry on Vesta.) Hassman was the head chef at Vesta before joining the Kalona Brewing Company in 2018.
We took a seat at a table in the corner out of the sun across from the kitchen area. Our server that day was a young lady by the name of Kris. She brought over a brunch menu that they serve from 11 a.m. to 2 p.m. on Sunday. We weren't too interested in the brunch menu as my wife had breakfast earlier in the day and didn't want breakfast again. (Although the Salsa Verde Toast consisting of two eggs over-easy, sausage, pickled onions all topped with a green sauce sounded interesting to me.) Kris told us that the kitchen would switch over to the regular menu at 2, which was about 45 minutes away. That was fine with us, as it gave us time to try some of their beers.
The beer selection at Kalona Brewing Company is deep and varied. The beer list featured a number of interesting beers including lagers, stouts, ales and wheat beers. Some of the more interesting beers were a blueberry hefeweizen as well as a cinnamon-peach wheat ale. We tried three or four samples - the Sucha Much IPA, the Hook & Eye hazy IPA, the Limber Legs Oktoberfest, and the Tree Stand German-style pilsner. All were very good, but my wife selected the Sucha Much IPA and I went with the Hook & Eye hazy IPA. The Hook & Eye was named after an attachment that Mennonites and Amish families would have on their clothing instead of buttons or zippers.
Since we couldn't get lunch for awhile, it gave us some time to end up looking around Kalona Brewing Company. They had a spacious wood-fenced patio in the back featuring a pergola over the concrete patio. It was a nice fall day, but it was too cool to sit in the shade.
We hung out back inside waiting for the regular menu to turn over. Kris had brought over some menus for us to look over so we could make our choices right at 2 p.m. It wasn't a lengthy menu, but it had some interesting items. First of all, Kalona Brewing Company is somewhat famous for their wood-fired pizza made with a hand-tossed, house-made dough. There were three sauces for their pizza - a San Marzano red sauce, an alfredo white sauce, and a pesto sauce. While we weren't in the mood for pizza that day, the margherita pizza sounded good, as did their house-made sausage pizza.
Kalona Brewing Company featured a handful of appetizers to share including coconut-ginger shrimp, chicken wings with a choice of either Buffalo sauce or a ginger chili glaze, a spinach-artichoke dip, and a burrata cheese plate with a gremolata garnish (chopped parsley, garlic and lemon zest) and served with apricots and dates. There were a number of soups and salads on the menu as well as sandwiches, burgers and entrees such as a beer mac & cheese, fish & chips, a New York strip steak from locally-raised natural beef, and a stir fry.
Kris came by just before 2 p.m. and said that she could take our order now for lunch. My wife wanted to get the roasted beet salad Kalona Brewing Company had on the menu. She loves getting the roasted beets in a jar from one of the shops in Kalona and she was pretty certain that the beets at Kalona Brewing would come from the same source. The roasted beet salad came with fresh mixed greens, candied walnuts, and feta cheese. A triangle of flat bread came on the side. For her dressing, she got the house-made raspberry vinaigrette. She thought the beet salad was outstanding and she offered me a bite of some of the roasted beets. I never cared for pickled beets until I had some that my wife's grandmother canned a number of years ago. These beets were especially flavorful with a bit of a roasted taste to them.
I was in a quandary as to what to get. Even though the menu wasn't all that vast, there were some things that definitely got my attention. They had two burgers - one a regular burger with beef from JimRay Farms, a Kalona-area grass-fed cattle operation. The other burger was the Diablo which was topped with a salsa verde, guacamole, and a jalapeño slaw. (The Diablo sandwich was also available with a grilled chicken breast or with a portobello mushroom or a Beyond Burger patty for vegetarians.) But in the end, I went with the meat loaf entree.
The meat loaf featured JimRay Farms beef served on a bed of Kalona Brewing's beer mac & cheese, with a side of a sautéed fresh vegetable medley. I got the small portion which consisted of 2 pieces of meat loaf instead of 3 for the large portion. The meat loaf was topped with a red wine demi-glace. I normally don't order meat loaf when I'm at a restaurant because my meat loaf at home is about the best I've ever had. But I have to say this meat loaf was very good. It wasn't dried out and it held a lot of great beef flavor. The red wine demi-glace was a nice addition and I really liked the beer mac & cheese that came with the meat loaf. I was not unhappy with my choice.
My wife was torn between the chicken avocado sandwich and the grilled salmon Caesar salad. In the end, the grilled salmon Caesar won out. The salad featured Arcadian greens and a spring salad mix, and was topped with sliced red onions and shredded asiago cheese along with a house-made Caesar dressing. I piece of grilled salmon finished the salad. Another wedge of flat bread came on the side. She was very happy with her choice of lunch that day.
It had been a long time since we had been to Kalona and our visit to the Kalona Brewing Company had been a long time coming. We liked virtually everything about our visit. The beers were very good, the service we had from Kris was friendly, accommodating and she was fun, and the food was top-notch. We're glad that we waited out the brunch period and got the regular menu, even though their brunch menu looked very interesting. Kalona Brewing Company is a bit of a drive for us, but it was worth the trip. And we look forward to the next road trip we make over to Kalona for shopping and a visit to Kalona Brewing. Actually, I'll let my wife shop while I hang out at Kalona Brewing Company.
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