Official Location: 14600 E. Eleven Mile Road
Actual Location: 696 service drive at the
Groesbeck Exit
Warren, MI
When you and your friends were real young, did you ever get the crazy notion to put on a neighborhood play? No, me neither, but I remember my oldest sister once did. She was (of course) the self-anointed director/producer/head writer, and we were all “voluntarily recruited” as actors, set builders, gaffs or best boys (I don’t know what gaffs and best boys are, but they seem to be in a lot of movie credits, so I added them to round out the sentence). Anyway, if memory serves, the play was an amateur production (to say the least) of a Gilligan’s Island meets Lost in Space episode, and it pretty much sucked ass. No big surprise there.
Anyway, when I went to the Dragonmead Brewery in Warren the other day, I was kinda’ reminded of that amateur production of my youth. Don’t get me wrong, unlike my sister's play, I ultimately really took a liking to the Dragonmead, but at first blush, it seemed like it could use some help from grown-ups.
For instance, the location is just plain bizarre to me. Much like the play, which we held in our friend’s living room simply because it was available, the Dragonmead is located in an industrial strip center, surrounded by warehouses and a junkyard, in the asphalted cluster f**k that is the 696 service drive/Eleven Mile Road/Groesbeck eternal construction nexus. I have to believe the founders of Dragonmead only chose that site because it, too, was available. I’ll go further and guess that one of their father’s was still paying the lease on his out-of-business tool & die shop there and said, “Sure, you kids wanna’ run a little lemonade stand? You can use it until April. Just don’t put any nail holes in the walls.”
The sign out front also reminded me of the hand made flyers for our adolescent production. I’m not going to completely bash another person’s honest attempt at production art, but let’s just say the picture above actually does it a considerable amount of justice, and you rarely see that level of quality on anything other than velvet. And considering its unexpected location, bigger would indeed be better.
So, with all that time and money being saved on the location and the signage (and website updates, and the food menu), I had to wonder if it is was being better used elsewhere. I am so happy to report that it was. First, the inside was a pleasant surprise. It was clean, always smoke-free, tastefully decorated and had a spirited mix of patrons even in the middle of a workday afternoon. The staff was friendly, and there was a surprising amount of quality, stained-glass artwork. Granted, stained glass has never been a bar attraction for me in the past, but remember, this is in an industrial complex. It really gave it that odd, single-red-rose-growing-on-the-moon kinda’ aesthetic.
But all that doesn’t really mean squat unless the beer is good. And, damn, is that beer good! They have dozens and dozens of their award winning beers on tap, and unlike the trendy new brew pubs that want to make beer out of everything from acorn squash to coconuts, Dragonmead organizes their offerings in real categories like English Ales, Scotch Ales, Stouts, IPA’s, etc. Thank you!
With the exception of the IPA’s (which universally taste to me like someone burnt an orange in an old tire and put it out with a Bud Light), I’ve pretty much tried them all. The stouts are amazing and the Porters are a pleasant surprise. If you want to know about the others, just go there.
m. karvinen
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