The Shoreline Brewery is steps from Lake Michigan in Michigan City, Indiana. That's a Hendrick's martini, Sprecher's root beer, and Queen Mum India Pale Ale. They have a huge selection of their own brews available at any one time, which they can do because they apparently are very, very popular. The Queen Mum, one of multiple IPAs brewed by Shoreline, is done in the more restrained British style. There's also a huge-hopped American IPA here called Sum Nug, two black IPAs, and an imperial IPA, not to mention the dozens of other beers made by Shoreline.

It's really got nothing to do with Shoreline, but about that Sprecher's. When we visited Wisconsin  and the Sprecher's brewery years ago, we fell in love with their root beer. The memory of Sprecher's root beer remained our benchmark for great root beers ever since. So what changed, our tastes or the root beer? It seemed nothing like we remembered it; this was dull and one-dimensional.