New Glarus Brewing Company

Tucked into the rolling hills of Green County in the small Swiss-settled village of New Glarus, Wisconsin, New Glarus Brewing Company has been quietly — and defiantly — making some of the best beer in the country since 1993. The brewery was founded by Deborah Carey, who raised the startup capital as a gift for her husband, Daniel Carey, a Diploma Master Brewer with a pedigree that includes an apprenticeship at the legendary Ayinger brewery outside Munich and a stint as production supervisor at Anheuser-Busch. Tired of the corporate grind, the couple converted an abandoned warehouse into a brewery and produced their first commercial batch in October of that year. From the very beginning, Deb made a bold, counterintuitive call: New Glarus beer would be sold exclusively in Wisconsin. That “Only in Wisconsin” philosophy — which became one of the craft beer world’s most recognizable mantras — has never wavered. In 2015, the brewery took another principled step and converted to employee ownership, cementing its ties to the community it has always called home.

The physical campus has grown dramatically from that original Riverside warehouse on the edge of town. In 2008, New Glarus opened its showpiece Hilltop Brewery — a 75,000-square-foot facility designed to evoke a Bavarian village, perched on a bluff overlooking the patchwork farmland south of Madison. The grounds span a hundred acres and include a hop garden, a heritage apple orchard that supplies fruit for the brewery’s beloved fruit ales, a spacious outdoor beer garden, hiking trails, and an on-site effluent treatment system that recycles wastewater for the town’s drinking supply. It is a destination as much as a brewery, drawing over 150,000 visitors annually — many of them crossing state lines specifically to get their hands on beers they simply cannot buy at home. (Note: the Hilltop Brewery is currently closed for renovation work; the tasting room, gift shop, and beer depot have temporarily relocated to 218 Hoesly Dr. Verify current access details at the official website before visiting.)

What separates New Glarus from virtually every brewery of its size is the combination of ambition and restraint. Brewmaster Dan Carey holds himself to the Reinheitsgebot purity standard on his core lagers and ales, sources specialty malt directly from European maltsters, and travels to Europe personally each year to select noble hop varieties. Yet he is equally committed to the brewery’s “Thumbprint” series of fruit and barrel-aged rarities — including the world-renowned Wisconsin Belgian Red, a Door County cherry ale aged in 2,000-gallon oak fuders that consistently tops global fruit-beer rankings, and Serendipity, a wild-fermented sour ale born from a happy accident with apples, cranberries, and cherries. The Brewers Association has recognized New Glarus as a top-15 U.S. craft brewery by volume for multiple consecutive years — a staggering achievement for a company that technically does not sell a single drop outside one Midwestern state.

A visit to New Glarus Brewing is one of those rare Midwest experiences that justifies the drive no matter where you’re starting from. The self-guided tours are free, genuinely informative, and set against a Bavarian-village backdrop that feels entirely unlike any other American brewery campus. The surrounding village of New Glarus is itself worth an unhurried afternoon — with Swiss bakeries, cheese shops, and a heritage character that makes it unlike any other small town in the region. Come for the Spotted Cow, stay for the Wisconsin Belgian Red, and leave with a case of whatever the Thumbprint series has on offer. Odds are excellent that it will be something beer lovers across the country would trade serious favors to get their hands on.