Evil Czech Brewery, Mishawaka, IN (from July 2014)

What a great name for a brewery. Especially when everything in the area is all about being Irish. But why shouldn’t the place of the North America’s premier Catholic university also be a good drinking town? And it is a good drinking town—if you are 22 and don’t know any better.

There are plenty of nice places to go around campus. The chain restaurants are well represented, and I can only imagine the Hooters down the road is one of the busiest in the country.

Fuck Hooters. It was Taco Tuesday at the ECB.

South Bend, from everything I can tell, is relatively void of good places to drink. It is really just the town Pullman and Corvallis are desperately trying to become. Basically it is the bizzaro Eugene. Where hippy culture spills out into the community around the University of Oregon; the South Bend the upper-class Catholic culture is what gets you here.

ECB is a breath of fresh air. It sits in Mishawaka, which is to South Bend what Springfield is to Eugene. The building is very unassuming on the outside. It could just as well be an attorney’s office or an orthodontist. Inside, it is a full functioning restaurant/bar with character good enough to be a joint in the Northwest. It is one of the few drinking holes in town that seem to function independently of the university—but not in spite of it.

If Notre Dame were to shut its doors tomorrow, Hooters would be gone; Buffalo Wild Wings would be gone; fucking McDonald’s might even be gone; but the Evil Czech would still be there.
When I got there, I sat down, and was advised to drink a pint of the porter. I did and it was good enough. None of the beer I tried was bad, and most of it had an above average alcohol content. I was so happy to not see any sort of Irish stout that was whoring itself off of the university that it took me two beers before I asked the waitress what they had for a Pilsner.

For those of you who don’t have a fucking clue, a Pilsner is the style of beer associated with the city of Plzn in Czech Republic. Someone from Plzn would be a Plzner—thus Pilsner.

There was no Pilsner on tap—and not that I am the biggest Pilsner fan—if I am in a Czech bar, I better fucking try a Pilsner. I don’t think the girl serving understood why I asked, but she did say that the brewmaster only makes one batch of Pilsner a year, and that is on the anniversary of when the
Allies liberated Czechoslovakia in World War II.

That’s pretty fucking cool.

Ironically enough, I was sitting there watching Germany destroy Brazil in a World Cup game, and the whole place was behind them. There had to be some sort of off colored remark to make there, but I felt it was better to keep it to myself.