Nothing really says “awesome” quite like “family friendly brewery.” Such places are the best of both worlds, contributing to the cycle of having babies because you drink, then drinking because you have babies. New Holland Brewing on 8th Street in Holland, Michigan is one such place. Renowned for its beer, it has a comfortable back patio for kids to hang out at and one very attractive menu.

So, we started with two appetizers to appease the little folks and people who eat like little folks (aka me). These were the Pretzels and Beer Cheese, and the Pepperoni Pinwheels. I feel like they definitely missed out on a golden Holland-related opportunity by calling them pinwheels instead of windmills, but you take what you can get. And what I got was two very delicious appetizers. The pretzels where soft and fluffy with just the right amount of salt on them. The beer cheese was oh so lovely.

The pinwheels were like little mini bites of pizza heaven. They were perfectly cooked dough packed with pepperoni and mozzarella cheese. Then, as if to say that they needed more, the pinwheels were topped with shredded parmesan and served with marinara. I know it is unreasonable to consider these anything more than deconstructed and repurposed pizza, but I couldn’t help but feel a deep appreciation for how they were done.

For my main course I went with a pizza that seemed almost tailored for me. It was called the Pork BBQ and was topped with smoked pork, peppadew peppers (yes, I said almost), jalapeno peppers, Dragon’s Milk (a beer of theirs) BBQ sauce, and Michigan cheese curds. I ordered without the peppadew peppers because blech, and my pizza came out looking like a beautiful work of art. The dough was a strong start, the sauce added just the right amount of sweet and smokey, while the jalapenos and pork added some kick and umami. But, with that being said you could probably have put those cheese curds on any pizza and they would have made it amazing. They added a thickness, a creaminess and a bold cheesy flavor that is almost upsetting in that it took me until age 34 to eat such a flavor.

New Holland continued the tradition of breweries having delicious and even creative food. It also brought the concept of pepperoni pinwheels and cheese curds as a potential pizza cheese into my purview and I couldn’t ask for much more than that. Oh, and the beer was pretty damn good too.

Where I come from, microbreweries are known to have good food. But, as I have learned, many parts of the country (perhaps all except Oregon?) are much newer to the micro or craft brewery concept and have focused much more on the beer than the food. Arizona, though, while new to the union and pretty new to brewing seems to have struck the right chord. Perhaps it’s because there are so many damn people here from Michigan, but whatever the case I was eager to get myself a non-media meal at SanTan Brewing Company ( you can check out the media one here).

I snagged myself a pint of beer (Hazy Horse for those of you who care) and quickly moved on to ordering a meal. I went with the Chipotle Bacon Cheeseburger because it was topped with delicious-sounding foodstuffs like house-smoked chipotle bacon, pepper jack cheese, aged white cheddar, chile lime mayo and LTO. I ordered medium rare, without the LTO and with fries on the side.

It came out looking picture-perfect and as soon as I took a perfect picture I plopped that bun on top and went to work. It was everything I had hoped it would be and more. The bacon was nicely crisped, the burger was cooked exactly as it should have been and the flavorings just worked beautifully with each other. And the decision to go with double cheese should be applauded.

While the burger exceeded expectations, perhaps the fries were the most surprising thing about the meal. SanTan was not willing to simply roll with ordinary fries, but sliced them thick and battered them with ale before deep-frying them. It gave them a nice golden-brown crisp and soft, supple interior.

SanTan Brewing Company has definitely embraced the idea that not all people go to a brewery for a beer and it would be hard to find that more exemplified than in the Chipotle Bacon Cheeseburger.

Burgers and brews go together like Forrest and Jenny, which is why my eyes generally shoot to the burger menu when I check out a brewery. It’s also why they always have burgers on the menu or, well, I question judgment. I did not have to question any judgment about burgers when I paid a visit to Four Peaks in Tempe, at least not at first.

I ordered the Popper, which is attempt at a jalapeno popper-style burger. It has the cream cheese and the jalapenos, but also fried onion strings. And unbeknownst to me until arriving in front of me, it also had the dreaded lettuce and tomato.

Fortunately, it was easy to remove the veggies, but it would take a lot more effort to restore my trust. The burger didn’t exactly do that. It’s not that it was bad by any means, it was actually fine. Just not much more than that. Fries were good, beer was good, and the burger went well with the beer.

The thing is, though, I wouldn’t go to Four Peaks for the burger. I would probably go for beer, and let the burger take the backseat. There are worse things than that, but there are a lot better as well.

It seems like just yesterday that I packed up my bags in Michigan to move to Los Angeles, but alas it was nearly 10 years ago. A lot has changed in those 10 years, and aside from housing prices and traffic much of it has been for the better. Take, for example, breweries. Michigan was littered with them and I found LA barely had one (San Diego was strong, though). Now, they are much easier to find and have even come around to serving brewery food instead of fancy stuff (I’m looking at you, Golden Road, but glad that you have also fixed yourself up!) Highland Park Brewery is one of the new entrants and I set out to test both its food and booze.

The booze passed the test, plus Highland Park Brewery had a great selection of local guest taps. But I know all you really care about is food and so I should say that I ordered the Meatloaf Burger. It was made from beef and bacon blend, then topped with a fried egg, avocado and pimento cheese. Thinking that a meatloaf is essentially a giant burger, I kind of thought this would simply be a burger with a hipster name. It turned out I was wrong, as this literally looked like a slice of meatloaf. More than that, it tasted like a slice meatloaf as opposed to a burger, which is all at once a very clear and very ambiguous description. Just know that from a texture and density standpoint, this was meatloaf.

And that’s all good and well, but call it what it is – a meatloaf sandwich. I love a good slice of meatloaf as much as the next guy/gal, but it is important to set my expectations correctly. Because of these expectations, I couldn’t help but feel at least a little bit disappointed by the sandwich, which is sad because it was really an ideal mix of ingredients for an unvegan.

Nonetheless, the menu at Highland Park Brewery, just like the beers, is ever-changing. I am all but certain that the meatloaf burger is gone from the menu and has been replaced by something that may be described better. Whether that is the case or not, I certainly enjoyed the beers and can only mildly complain about the naming of my meal, which meant I was a happy man and would happily return.

Breweries are the best, right? And they typically have awesome food. That’s why I was pretty excited to find out Phoenix was getting a new brewery called Helio Basin and tried to make my way there at the first opportunity. Plus, it didn’t hurt that I had a connection at the place and wanted to show some support.

Like any good drinker, I started out by ordering a flight of all the beers on tap. There were seven in total and they came served on a piece of wood shaped like the state of Arizona, so you know, like lumpy. I drank my way through the beers and decided that the Citrus Paradisi was the best. It was a hoppy blonde and who doesn’t like those?

I wasn’t terribly hungry and found the menu to be a bit short for a brewery. It centered around “tortillas,” which were really just tacos by another name. I chose the pork belly variety, which had the fewest veggies (read: none) and include pistachio and pine nut mole, roasted corn, cotija and cilantro. The pork belly was cooked perfectly and I definitely appreciated the other taco innards, which enhanced the flavor without taking over.

I must say, though, that I would have liked a more robust menu. I get that Phoenix is the Southwest and tacos are basically required, but a little something more would have really won the place over for me. As it was, they put together some good beer and food, so I’m sure Helio Basin will become a mainstay in Phoenix.

Downtown Buffalo hosts all sorts of fun events during the summer and so far none more fun than Thursdays at Canalside. But right by Canalside is place called Pearl Street Grill & Brewery, which is supposed to have some good things to eat and drink. As a man who loves brewery food, I was excited at the prospect of Pearl Street and after ordering one of their seasonal beers I took a gander at their menu.

What I found was exactly as I expected, as in burgers, sandwiches, pizza and all that good brewery food. I chose the Ditch Digger Burger, topped with double smoked bacon, cheddar and onion rings. Like the rest of the burgers, it also came with lettuce and tomato, plus fries. I ordered medium-rare without the lettuce and tomato, but failed to ask about pickles. As in many cases, this would be my undoing, as the burger arrived with a couple of nasty pickles.

Yet, while this was a bit of my undoing, the truth is that this was but a small aspect of the disappointment of the burger. There was also a stray piece of some unrecognizable vegetable laying upon the patty and the onion rings seemed to be hastily thrown upon the burger with no regard for order. While the bacon and cheese were good, as always, the patty left a lot to be desired. Not only was it overcooked, but it wasn’t even the overcooked that comes juicy from butter or some other juicifier. No, this was just working its way toward hockey puck levels, although not quite getting there.

The fries made a futile, but noble, attempt to redeem the burger. They were good, but I didn’t order fries with a side of burger.

In the end, it’s best to stick to the drinks at Pearl Street. They aren’t all good, but at least when you finish them you’re on your way to drunk instead of disappointment.

Montana. Big sky country. The land of traffic jams caused by cows. Yes, like very few people before us (based on the lack of a line at the border), we returned from the Great White North through Montana. Billings is a long way from the border, but at some point we found ourselves there and in need of eats. Thusly, we discovered the creatively named Montana Brewing Company.

With brewing on site, Montana Brewing Company was in the heart of Billings and had the kind of menu one would hope for at such an establishment. Having destroyed an abnormal number of burgers in the previous days, I thought it was time to reintroduce white meat to my diet. And the white meat that stuck out the most to me was the Gorgonzola Chicken Sandwich. This started with a grilled chicken breast and was topped with peppered bacon and gorgonzola crumbles on a “Wheat Montana” bun, which has some sort of meaning that was completely lost on me. It also came with fries.

Unbeknownst to me, the sandwich also came with your typical lettuce, tomato, pickles and onions. This was upsetting to see when my sandwich arrived, but fortunately these lesser ingredients had not been mingled with the real food. And since we’re on the subject of real food, I have to say the sandwich was quite good. After all, it is difficult to go wrong with chicken, bacon and cheese, but I have seen it happen and this time it did not.

The Gorgonzola Chicken Sandwich was exactly the type of thing I would expect from a microbrewery in the middle of Billings, Montana, and I mean that in the best way possible.

Many times I have lamented the lack of a microbrewery in LA. Sure, I’ve heard there’s one in Eagle Rock, but in 3+ years of living in LA I haven’t set foot in Eagle Rock and probably couldn’t point it out on a map. Plus, that’s one (allegedly good) brewery for a city with a metropolitan area of just under 18 million. Blech. But Michigan is another story, with plentiful great microbreweries. One of these is CJ’s Brewing Company in Commerce. And while I’ve had some delicious beers there, as with most microbreweries, the food is just as good.

And it’s not just about burgers and wings. No, CJ’s is known throughout the metro Detroit area to have the greatest jambalaya my step-mom has ever eaten and the best BBQ chicken pizza my dad has ever had. Not in the mood for jambalaya, I decided to give the BBQ chicken pizza the old college try. This pizza is topped with their hickory BBQ sauce, shredded chicken, bacon and red onions. Plus, it’s offered as both deep dish or round. I ordered a personal-sized deep dish, without the onions for a whopping $6.99 (insert sarcasm here).

After a short wait, the supposedly amazing pizza was brought to me. I was delighted to find that CJ’s deep dish was Detroit-style like you would find at Buddy’s, which means square, thick crust and big, rectangular slices. With four slices, this was a personal pizza not likely to leave me hungry. I dug in and found that yes, CJ’s had achieved BBQ chicken pizza perfection. The crust may be thick and deep, but it’s hardly noticeable because a thick crust is almost necessary to balance out the massive kick of flavor that this pizza delivers. The BBQ sauce was ideal for pizza, being both sweet and smoky. A desire for regular tomato sauce never crossed my mind after digging into the hickey BBQ sauce. The shredded chicken was tender and surprisingly not too prevalent for a pizza with chicken in its name. It actually took a back seat to the bacon, which was at the perfect crispness for pizza and added an additional smoky, salty flavor. This pizza really could have been called BBQ bacon with chicken and the name would have been more accurate.

Accuracy aside, this was one BBQ chicken pizza not to be messed with. And even more amazing is finding something like this at a microbrewery. After three of my four slices, I was tapped out and had to take the final slice to go. California Pizza Kitchen may have put BBQ chicken pizza on the map, but CJ’s has perfected it.

For a night in Toronto, I really didn’t have much of a clue about where to eat. Finally, a buddy of mine told me to check out the Mill Street Brewery. I am always up for a microbrewery since that seems to be a lost art in LA, so I looked it up. It turned out that the place was actually pretty easy walk from our hotel, so we headed to Mill Street to see what we could find. After a twenty minute walk through a mildly sketchy part of town featuring a homeless pirate watering plants with a two-liter of Canada Dry, we arrived at the Distillery area. This part of town was once some sort of huge brewery, but now had shops, restaurants, bars and people testing Smart Cars and Segway Scooters. Even before we started drinking, our goal was to take a drunken ride on/in one of these (no, we did not achieve our goal).

When we got to the Mill Street Brewery, we found that there was about an hour wait. No worries, we were at a brewery and needed some beer before doing anything else anyway. We sidled up to the bar and started to test out their beers. Before we were even seated, I downed their Helles Bock, Tankhouse Ale and Stock Ale. The Tankhouse was my favorite, although the Helles Bock was also pretty good. They had a good amount of options, including rotating taps, so I could definitely see myself returning and having a whole different experience.

After about an hour, the table was ready and we took our seats. A look at the menu revealed some good microbrewery food. Hoping to have a Grizzly Peak-style experience, I set my sights on their burgers. Of these, the Distillery Burger looked the best to me. It came with Mill Street Coffee Porter BBQ sauce, crispy pancetta, Swiss cheese and crispy onions, which sounded great except for those dastardly onions.

There was also something on the menu that I wasn’t sure I’d be able to get in Toronto: poutine. Poutine is definitely more of a French-Canadian specialty, so we weren’t sure if it would be any good, but we ordered it anyway as an appetizer. Mill Street had put a bit of bit of a brewhouse twist on the poutine, called Pulled Short Rib Poutine. It was made with fries, alfredo, Tankhouse Ale braised Angus short ribs, green onions, Ontario cheese curds and gravy, of course. I couldn’t convince my compatriots to get it without the green onions, so when it came I had to dig around with my fork to avoid them.

The poutine here was pretty good, but it wasn’t poutine in its truest form. The cheese curds were fully melted by the time it got to the table and the gravy was thick and had soaked through the fries so much that it was pretty much an amorphous blob of gravy, cheese and potatoes. The ribs seemed kind of out of place, although it tasted just fine.

When the main course came, I was glad to see it had been made without vegetables like I asked. You never really now how an unvegan is going to be received in a foreign country. Sadly, despite being free of vegetables, this burger could have used a bit of work. It was a bit overcooked and quite dry. This could have been somewhat compensated for if there had been a lot of BBQ sauce in between those buns, but there just wasn’t enough of that sauce on it. This was too bad, because if it weren’t for this patty, it could’ve been a damn good burger.

Mill Street Brewery was a cool place in a cool part of town, but go for the beer, not for the burgers.

Everyone in LA seems to know that the place has no good beer culture, yet no one has really done anything to fix that. Sure, there’s BJ’s (no good) and a couple other microbreweries that are difficult to get to, but come on, LA is a huge city that deserves more. So when I left LA for Ann Arbor for a bit of a bachelor party, we headed to the Grizzly Peak Brewing Company. I’ve loved the Grizzly Peak for a long time, even dating back to before I could drink their beer and drank their micro-brewed root beer. I have a lot of great memories of the place and hoped that my most recent visit wouldn’t be a disappointment.

While their menu switches things up every once in a while (ooh Bison Sloppy Joes?!), their burger has been a constant source of satisfaction for me. Not wanting to be risky, I stuck with The Grizz Burger, which starts out with lettuce and tomato for $8.50 and goes up about 35 cents per topping. I ordered without the wasteful lettuce and tomato, then topped it with bacon and smoked gouda. I had it cooked medium and then got some fries for an extra buck fifty. As for the beer, they have some great staples and some seasonals to go with them. I stuck with one of their staples, a golden ale. It was 4 bucks for a pint or 4.95 for a 22-ouncer, so I opted for the 22.

The beer came first and was just like I remember it”¦smooth, crisp and tad bitter; the kind of beer you could bring home to mother. Then came the burger. I’m pretty sure Grizzly Peak either changed how they serve cheese or I’ve never ordered it with gouda before, because I was surprised to find the cheese was shredded. I’m typically threatened by change, but I actually kind of liked the idea of this shredded cheese. It fit perfectly on the burger and didn’t cause any cheese to leak over the side. I also noticed that there was no bacon, so I immediately told my server who immediately grabbed some for me. Now I was ready to eat.

Just like I remembered, the Grizz Burger was the perfect microbrewery burger. The meat was cooked just perfectly and was slightly juicy. The smoked gouda and bacon added nice flavoring and the bun was just the right size. It is the pub burger by which all other pub burgers are judged. I say pub burger because I kind of feel like pub burgers fit into their own class. They don’t do anything crazy like load up with chili or extra patties. They aren’t huge, but they are definitely bigger than fast food. Essentially, they are made for good beer and good company, and by these standards, the Grizz Burger is just awesome.