OMG! Did We Settle in Milwaukee for Beer Garden Culture?
Tales from the vat…a pair of older parents choose an Old World town
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- 2009: Year of the Wedding
- 2010: Year of the Baby
- 2011: Year We Don’t Move
- 2014: Year We Put Down Roots in Milwaukee
My guy has a penchant for naming things. His plants all had names when we met. Only Droopy remains from that era, but we have since added Lily, Vera, Billie Jean, Chief, Patrick, Squidward, Sir David Lenny, and L’il Lenny. And he began, and now we continue, naming the years of our lives together. Sometimes in advance, sometimes in retrospect.
It was New Year’s Day 2014, at 11:15 a.m., when it became the Year We Put Down Roots in Milwaukee.
We had walked with our three-year-old to a park near our home in downtown Milwaukee for whatever festivities were happening near the ice rink. There we bought s’mores kits from boy scouts and roasted marshmallows over open flames on sticks they had whittled clean for our benefit. The kits were in baggies, maybe assembled by boys with grubby hands, stapled with a label made on a dot-matrix printer: “Graham crackers, chocolate, marshmallows. $2.” We bought beer in glass bottles at 11 a.m.
All I could think was that in my hometown of Chicago, the contract to produce official s’mores kits would be a political favor for someone’s brother-in-law, and they would have cost $8. Our beer would have been poured into plastic cups so that adults wouldn’t be breaking bottles for god-knows-why and leaving shards on the ground for all-hell-to-break-loose, but then again maybe it was because someone’s cousin owned a plastic cup company. Open flames, sticks straight from nature, grubby hands not sticky fingers, no corruption upcharge, glass bottles…
“Let’s just stay.”
I said it because I had delivered the original condition: if we get married, we have to live in Chicago. I’m a 4th-generation Chicagoan and love big cities. My business, my whole life, my heart were based there. When I go back, the air smells, tastes right. Like the atmosphere swirls around to greet me with a welcome home kiss.
Milwaukee has all the infrastructure and amenities of a big city, but is roughly one-sixth the size of Chicago in population and area. In my snottiest cosmopolitan place, it is simply too small town for me. We live in the heart of downtown, a block from the two busiest intersections in the state of Wisconsin, and I can sit on my balcony on a Sunday in winter and not see a single person for hours. But it was me who said it, “Let’s just stay.”
And it has remained the right decision for us.
- 2021: Last month, a mom unknown to me invited me and other moms by text to meet at a beer garden with the kids to celebrate the end of a crazy school year. On a Wednesday. At 1 p.m.
Heck, yeah. Beer garden culture plus pandemic WFH flexibility. We were all there. Six moms, one beer each, relieved at some getting back to normal. (The kids entertained themselves.)
What are some elements of our pervasive beer garden culture?
The Outdoors
Beer gardens are fresh-air, outdoor fun.
Like Chicago, Milwaukee has preserved miles of its beautiful Lake Michigan shoreline for uninterrupted stretches of public land — beaches, parks, trails. Also as in parts of Chicago, there’s an incredible system of bike trails that winds through woods and other scenic places.
In Milwaukee, however, I can hop on the system of trails just blocks from my home. And it goes to two different beer gardens on the Milwaukee River. I wrote most of this article in the pictured beer garden, in fact, a half-hour by bike from my home, 80% of the trip on a wide, paved trail through the woods. (Much safer if you’re a lightweight drinker like me bred south of the state line.) At the other garden, the river has something of waterfalls, and twice a year there you can see salmon fly up stream to spawn.
Our Milwaukee County parks and urban plaza spaces are brimming with outdoor activities, including in the summer at least five different free outdoor concert series and two different free outdoor movie series we can walk to. Yes, most have beer for sale. Sometimes wine. There are also traveling beer gardens, roaming the park system all season in search of drinkers.
But it’s hardly just Milwaukee. The whole state of Wisconsin is for nature lovers and outdoor enthusiasts. Hiking. Camping. Biking. Birdwatching. Canoeing. Kayaking. Waterfalls. Bluffs. And not 2–3 hours out of town in traffic. 15 minute drives from downtown for the closet hiking; camping within 45 minutes for quick overnights. Cross-country skiing and snowshoeing by candlelight in the Winter.
Did we stay in Milwaukee for the great outdoors? Why, yes we did.
Family-Friendliness
Beer gardens are multi-purpose, intergenerational, family-friendly gathering spots.
Yes, you can bring the kids. Why wouldn’t you? Your parents and grandparents and neighbors and their college kids might also be sitting down at your picnic table with a half liter.
How family-friendly and family-oriented Milwaukee is was one of the first things to hit us. Dudes in suits would smile and wave at my son in the stroller while they were ambling the streets of our central business district on a phone call. Some even stopped to say, cute kid! Plenty of people would also say aw, your grandson’s adorable, but that’s another story.
Then there was the first 5:30 p.m. potluck at our son’s daycare. Easy enough for us to make it — we’re both self-employed and working from home. But nearly every last parent was there. On time. Even the lawyers. It wasn’t a fluke. The first time my husband had to cut out of a business meeting with executives to pick our son up from daycare was awkward, Well, I, uh, gotta go pick my my kid. Response: Oh, okay, see you later. No guff. No guilt. No repercussions. And no rush hour traffic.
In both cases, we marveled at these small but not insignificant differences for days. And several times afterwards when we found ourselves in social settings with high-strung Windy City parents, folks reverberating at a level we no longer recognized as normal life.
Did we stay in Milwaukee because it’s family-friendly? Most certainly.
A Relaxed and Easy Nature
Beer gardens are relaxed and easy.
Beer. Picnic tables. Friends. An escape from the summer heat. A brisk outing deep into fall. Come alone, read a book. Meet friends, catch up. Stay awhile! They have giant pretzels, brats, and ice cream sandwiches if you get hungry. One of these beer gardens has become the default meeting spot for chatty matches with my serious Scrabble buddy.
Relaxed and easy — we joke that it takes 10 minutes to get wherever we need to go in Milwaukee, and it’s not all that far from the truth. In Chicago, we used 45 minutes as the de facto time allowance — car, bus, el, subway, bike. Party’s at 2? Everyone, we leave at 1:15! Movie’s at 8? 45 for travel, 15–30 minutes for the ticket line, 15–30 for popcorn and settling in? We leave for the subway at 6:30 sharp.
But how relaxed and easy permeates Wisconsin culture beyond time and family-friendliness was best encapsulated by a sticky note contribution (see photo) in an historical society exercise asking people what Wisconsin means to them: Where you can live in any decade — unironically.
We became parents at 41 and 37; we’re now 52 and 48. Not only do we want to live at this slower pace, it seems the only pace we go at anymore.
Did we stay in Milwaukee because it’s relaxed and easy? Yep.
Support for Local Industry
Beer gardens support a key local industry!
Well, I never! As in, I’d never stoop to take cartoonish Wisconsin brat-and-beer stereotypes at face value. But then there was the wintry Sunday morning a decade ago when we walked over to the convention center for the Auto Show so we could push our son around in the stroller somewhere warm. Something didn’t look quite right. What was it? Oh, it was 9 a.m. on a Sunday and just about everyone but us was walking around with a beer. No worries, pretty soon so were we. To fit in. Because it was a hoot. Because, what was this place? Soon we were in line for brats.
My guy barely drinks. I am not the biggest fan of beer. But its elevated cultural status and ubiquity compel me. Reeled in, I am.
You may have heard of this fan-owned team, the Green Bay Packers? We’re not fans of them either, yet we do enjoy game days. Cheesehead football has afforded us supermarkets and movie theaters all to ourselves. Our son negotiates the sportball cultures of both cities by alternating between hand-me-down Bears and Cubs T-shirts from my cousins’ kids with his Bucks jersey.
Did we stay in Milwaukee because locals support their own? You betcha.
The Good Life
Beer gardens represent the good life.
For me, modest drinking is part of the good life. Though to be fair, I literally can’t drink much anymore without falling asleep or getting a headache. Elsewhere I wrote that I’m a European in an American body when it came to transportation alternatives. The same is true for Old World wine and beer traditions. When raising a glass with friends intermixes with life’s routines, when it’s a supplement to the daily grind, that works for me. A recent Atlantic article somewhat misleadingly titled “America Has a Drinking Problem” devotes inches of ink to social drinking’s convivial, creative, quality-of-life benefits.
Did we stay in Milwaukee for the good life? Ya der hey.
We stayed because my husband’s clients are here and my business was more portable. Because it’s close enough to Chicago — a 90-minute train ride or drive away — to hop down there when we want to. Because it’s a happy medium between my preference for big cities and his previous preference for suburbs.
All in all, we have uncovered and built the good life here.
Milwaukee comes from the Algonquian word Millioke, “The Good Land” (as you may already know from Alice Cooper in Wayne’s World). We’re living the good life in the good land. So, yes, OMG, I believe we did in fact stay here for the beer garden culture.
Sharon Woodhouse is the owner of Conspire Creative, which offers coaching, consulting, conflict management, project management, book publishing, and editorial services for solo pros, creatives, authors, small businesses, and multipreneurs.
