Batch Brewing Company

We finally went. Batch had been on our list too long, and the nudge came from somewhere else entirely — Mike ordered a local brewery’s pilsner over lunch at Mudgie’s and found out “local” meant about a block away.

We sat at the bar on a Saturday around 3pm, Tigers game projected on the wall behind us. The room is smaller than the exterior leads you to expect and was comfortably full; the people beside us all turned out to be restaurant and bar industry folks spending a Saturday on the other side of the counter for once. Mike had the Chela Familiar, their Mexican Vienna-style lager, and took home a six-pack of Fly Life — the easy-drinking Detroit lager that reads to us as their answer to Miller High Life, and an improvement on it. Andrea had the sparkling white, which is worth flagging: keeping real non-beer options on hand doesn’t always pencil out for a brewery, and it matters enormously when you aren’t both drinking beer.

Our bartender Joe is from London, and we spent the afternoon trading the pros and cons of living inside the city limits, plus a fair amount of trash talk on all sides. The hospitality alone is worth the return trip.

The patio is enormous, covered and uncovered, with a stage. The shipping-container bones read cold from the street and warm the moment you’re in them. This corner, a little off the Michigan Ave drag with much easier free street parking, is becoming our preferred stretch of Corktown — Folk is a short walk.