State #15: Missouri

Beer: Bully! Porter

Brewery: Boulevard Brewing Company, Kansas City, Missouri

ABV: 5.4%

Bully!

Believe it or not: St. Louis is not the largest city in Missouri. (That’d be Kansas City, by a score of 459,787 to 318,069).

I've seen pictures, and the brewery itself sorta-kinda looks like that.

Believe it or not: Kansas City is IN Missouri! I bet if you’re reading this you’re probably sharp enough to know that there are two Kansas Citys (one in Kansas, one in Missouri), but, being a geography teacher, I am keenly aware of what the average American knows (and doesn’t know) when it comes to geography, and I bet there are millions of Americans who don’t have a clue that Kansas City, Missouri, is really the Kansas City.

Finding a beer from Kansas is going to be tough. Boulevard (named after Southwest Boulevard) is less than a mile from Kansas. Hey, brewer people! Move a little to the west and make my blog easier!

Believe it or not: Anheuser-Busch is not the largest American-owned brewery in Missouri. Seeing as how the Belgians bought Budweiser in 2008, America’s worst beer is now ironically owned by people from the country that make by far the best of it. The answer to this one is Boulevard Brewing Company, the 10th largest craft brewery in the country, also of Kansas City. And everything they brew makes the cross-state swill from St. Louis taste that much worse.

Six too many Bud Lights.

As promised, I am not taking the easy way out with this blog. I could have had a Bud Light three months ago and written something snarky about it. It would have been easier to drink, and easier to write about, but instead I had a Bully! Porter (yes, the ‘!’ is officially part of the name) from Boulevard, and the world was a much better place for it. This is really tasty stuff. I found it at the State Liquor Store in Utah during my recent road trip, and enjoyed it after a sweaty day of hiking in Zion National Park. I had it on the same night that I tried Utah’s own Polygamy Porter, and found it to be a far better companion to the chili I was eating. This is a real-deal porter, unlike Polygamy: thick and black and rich and chocolaty and hoppy.  

Boulevard Brewing Company has flyover country covered: these are the states to which they distribute. What's up, Massachusetts! (Super professional awesome map made using GIS for Nitwits)

So apparently porters are not just for winter anymore. I’ve had quite a few of them this summer and enjoyed them all. It’s rapidly becoming one of my favorite styles of beer, and I’d love to get my hands on some more Bully!, but their distribution footprint leaves something to be desired, unlike Budweiser’s. Now, of course it’s fun to rag on Budweiser for being tasteless and ubiquitous, but I’m glad some people still like it for two reasons. Firstly, because the economy of St. Louis is hurting, and it needs all the brewery jobs it can support; and secondly, because it makes stuff like Bully! Porter taste all-the-more interesting.

I wrote this immediately after eating dinner, saw this picture, and got hungry all over again.