Half Moon Restaurant and Brewery, Kokomo

The shame of the whole thing, was that this place is a restaurant first. I think it would be a better bar if it was separate. I can't blame them for selling food though--food is one of my favorite things to eat.

I was headed south on 31 to Indianapolis to go see a Butler basketball game. I'm a whore for sporting events, especially college sporting events, so the opportunity to check out a game at Hinkle was a hell yes. It wasn't feasible for me on a quick trip to check out any of the Indy joints, but a stop in Kokomo was perfect.

I walked in, and the rush-hour dinner crowd had this place locked down. Usually when you walk into a place like this where they have people paid to seat you, people like me are able to just walk past and go to the bar. When I walked in, there was only restaurant in my line of sight. I had to ask the hostess if I could sit in the bar. She looked at me like I was an idiot and a busboy had to explain that the bar was through the restaurant around the corner. That's not a good place for a bar because if I get piss pants drunk, I don't want everybody and their family to see me walk to my car and try to figure out how I'm going to drive home.

Once in the bar things got a little better. It was a cozy little sausage fest but it was a bar all the same. The barmaid was eager to pour me samples of what they had, which is always a plus. Everybody else in there looked to be a local, which isn't bad either. The gentleman to my left at the bar was drunk. The gentleman on my right was an old 300 pound man with white hair and a white beard and a big red jacket. That right there was worth the price of admission because it was only four days before Christmas. 

I don't know about you guys, but it was my first time drinking with Santa Claus.

The beer that they were very proud of was a porter that had been run through a hop bucket full of peppermint candy. I tried a sample. It tasted about is good as it sounded. 

Yes, that is what Santa was drinking. Shit you not. 

They were also all over mixing their Irish red mixed with the porter. They called it something, but I don't recall what it was. I even thought about writing it down just so I could tell you folks. But I didn't. 

I ended up drinking the red ale, which was nothing special, but it wasn't bad. I bought a growler of the porter, which was nothing special, but it wasn't bad and I wanted it on Christmas Day. 

I was also happy with the number of televisions in the bar. It felt like a lot but it probably wasn't many. The bar itself was cramped like a Red Lobster bar, so more than two TVs felt like a lot. And at the time I was in there, there were two basketball games and a football bowl game, so I kind of checked out to the world around me and watched sports and drank beer.

I was brought from my slumber when the drunk to my left began asking the barmaid to spank him with the paddle again. If the story I heard was true, last time she spanked him, she broke the paddle over his ass. I did not see a paddle in there, but that might be because it had previously been broken over his ass. I'm not really sure. 

To my right, Santa made a halfhearted comment about getting his ass spanked too. I finished my beer and left before shit got violent. 

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.