Mad Anthony Brewing Company – Fort Wayne, IN
When I first moved to Indiana, there seemed to be a serious dearth of craft breweries.
But when the General Assembly chose to deregulate microbreweries, suddenly more and more craft breweries started popping up all over the state. Imagine that.
Mad Anthony Brewing Company actually predated this change in the law, which makes their success all the more impressive. They now boast four locations in Northern Indiana.
I visited their brewery in Fort Wayne, their original location. It had all of the mystique of a Rust Belt dive bar, complete with memorabilia from the 60s and various nick-knacks, ensuring that, as their website says, “visitors are immersed in a time long since passed.”
This sense of nostalgia and the longing for better days gone by is very much at the heart of the Rust Belt—a region that has since been ravaged by globalization and deemed as “flyover country” by coastal liberals whose only concern is that they vote for their candidate every four years.
Never mind the fact that big government policies helped destroy the very economic foundation these states worked so hard to build and chased away generations of families left to search for jobs elsewhere.
But I digress…
Every beer I tried on tap at Mad Anthony was fantastic. I sampled four different styles and all of them were solid, from the Drunken Punken Pumpkin Ale, coming in at a beefy 8.5% ABV, to their well-balanced Sockless IPA.