Hinterland Erie Street Gastropub is located at 222 East Erie Street, Milwaukee, Wisconsin. The original location is the brewery located at 313 Dousman Street Green Bay, Wisconsin. I have visited the Milwaukee location several times in the past two years and consider this an excellent example of Great Lakes Cuisine.
The beer is wonderful and reason enough for a visit. Their amber lager is a deep caramel color, with a sweetness balanced perfectly by the complexity of bitter hops. A variety of seasonal beers often compliment the core offerings. The Door County Cherry Wheat is a light Weiss-style beer flavored with the slight tang of Montmorency cherries. As much as I appreciate the featured local ingredients, I prefer a stronger flavor profile in my Weiss beers. They offer a tasting flight of three beers and is my preferred way to get through all of their excellent brews.
The ever-changing dinner options typify much of Great Lakes cuisine and are executed extremely well. I enjoyed the sweet potato – brussel sprout hash topped with a soft-cooked egg and crispy bacon adding the perfect saltiness. On another visit, it was a sampler of rillettes, more in the rustic tradition of slow-roasted and shredded meats that retain a coarser texture.
A fall 2012 menu is featured below. Note the inclusion of summer sausage and hook’s 5-year cheddar cheese, braunschweiger with mustard, pickles, and rye crackers, and their version of a frankfurter, the Paul Funk-Furter with hinterland pale ale mustard. The appetizer of crispy pork scrapple with a slow-cooked egg and bourbon barrel maple syrup has culinary ancestry in Low German cuisine, but developed in the US by the Pennsylvania Dutch.
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