Fine Drinking: El Bait Shop & Yankee Clipper

I got to take a sun on the horizon laden trip to Des Moines this month around Labor Day. The sky still has that orange-fading-to-blue hue that's downright enchanting, like the colors you see on a the label for Schell's Dark in the clear bottles. I always make too long of a list for my visits to Iowa. From a distance, I can't recall how hearty the food & drink is around Des Moines. I eat myself into a food coma & get a satisfied gut full of what I believe to be session beers on the typeface of a menu, but end up going down full of fortified barley like it had been harvested & malted just days before it went into a mash tun.

What I still have left on my list includes Jethro's BBQ near Drake University campus, the Chicago Speakeasy restaurant (what I've been told is an uncompromising supper club equidistant from its namesake & the grilled midwest steer it's reputed to serve so finely), and a perpetually expanding selection of craft eateries that pour an ever expanding selection of Iowa-brewed beers.

Des Moines has become a small pill version of Chicago - another city I never get to fully take in (for many more geographical & financial reasons). Though I have to give it to the Iowans that never seem to stop sprawling out from their city's core; they still manage to give plenty of time to the core of their capitol city, never treating it like a remote destination filled with urban dangers. The later is likely because for a city of over 100K people, Des Moines' social concerns still seem very trailer park-eque when I watch their local news channels from my hotel rooms.

El Bait Shop
After three prior visits with this airy downtown Des Moines pub on my list, I finally penciled it into my itinerary as my Tuesday morning, beer & breakfast destination. El Bait Shop should be in Chicago, Philadelphia, or even Tampa, just somewhere you'd expect a more than worthwhile selection of breweries from all corners of the US & the world. Hundreds of beers, fine offerings that form a list that seems to prove Iowa liquor distributors have the advantage of being central to the major transportation pathways between the biggest populated metroplexes.

El Bait shop had Rogue, Lakefront, Stone, Summit, Bells, New Belgium, Left Hand, Shipyard, Lost Coast, and on & on & on through a list of premier craft brands. Their selection of Iowa brews could teach a course on the state's breweries. What I love about Iowa's microbrewers is the purity & clean finish of their product they get into the kegs & bottles of damn near every brew in any season. Take Peace Tree Brewing from Knoxville... Their Hop Wrangler IPA isn't some overhopped caramel malt bomb that's rushed to market, it's a malt-developed ale with excellent citrus notes that wouldn't overpower a lager drinker. The well-read bartender mentioned Hop Wrangler is fermented with Belgian yeast & its malt character lightened in the kettle with candy sugar. A pour from the tap (its handle gaudily wrapped with a belt buckle) complimented the Mexican-spiced chicken wings that the kitchen served up without haste.

El Bait Shop's menu has plenty of American pub grub, representing border-to-border styles to compliment their well traveled drink selection. Fine wines & whiskeys are also on site, and Thursday's happy hour features free samples from Des Moines area homebrewers... A loaded deck of glad-handed offering that ranks El Bait Shop & IA liquor distributors as good sports in my book. Also, come for the scavenger hunt decor, the mural to Where the Wild Things Are, and the library of beer-related stickers adorning the bar.

Also drunk: Madhouse Coffee Stout (Davenport, IA), Summit Honeymoon Saison (St. Paul, MN).

The Yankee Clipper
The Ankeny bar that a respectable amount of my childhood found me in was a no-brainer stop on my way out of town, for little more than the actuality that it was a Tuesday. Taco Tuesdays are no rarity among the townie bars I frequent, but for more than 15 years I have known how uniquely special, nay important the Tuesday tacos are at the Clipper.

Take a deep-fried flour tortilla, stuff it with Iowa beef, season it with Iowa butchers' spices (or whatever makes the Clipper's grill taste so uniquely Iowan), add Cheddar, lettuce, tomatoes, sour cream, & line the top of that mother with some deep red sweetly hot sauce... That's a Clipper taco. I was only there for an hour, but in the time it took me to polish off two PBRs & a pint of Boulevard Wheat the staff of four running the lunch rush made & moved more than thirty tacos both inside the pub & out the door for locals on their lunch breaks. At one point, ten tacos sat brown bagged & tagged, awaiting their hungry recipients whom I'm told come from four counties surrounding Des Moines, every Tuesday for this lucky feast.

The tacos haven't changed since I was a kid, either; that's the magic part of the experience. No downsizing has occurred for this perfect meal. It still fills the belly, never seeming any smaller in the hand than it did when I was nine years old. The Clipper is a friendly local tavern with a library of 70s-era backlit Lite beer fodor, Iowa State University effects, and various other scraps from the locals that keep it a nightlife destination even though it's in the old downtown Ankeny, far from the big box retail encampments that line what once was farmland & villages surrounding this exurb turned suburb.

Also noted: the cozy, but well-equipped men's room.
 
Finally, one for the 'Yeah, I Really Saw It!' file. While en route to the Clipper, on the edge of the village of Marquisville traveling north on US highway 69 near it's interchange with I-35/80, I noticed a discarded plasma TV box in the median near a turn lane. As I approached it, I was stunned with neo-luddite happiness: not only was it a box for a plasma TV, a brand new flat panel TV laid scuffed & weather-beaten, still wrapped in its shrink wrap, having apparently fallen out of the box when its owner made a turn too hard! I was moving too rapidly to get a good photo, but it was quite a satisfying sight. Don't get me wrong, I feel badly for whomever lost their newly purchased TV, but if you know anything about me, you'll understand why such a tragedy of consumer products gave me an unbelieving, mouth-agape smile.