Midtown Brewing Company

Visited the brewpub on a warm Friday afternoon right after the quarantine was lifted. Didn't go inside; sampled the beers on the patio out front. Quick, professional service. Seven Midtown beers plus a large number of others. Also ciders and mead. Lots of metered, street parking available.

Showed up around 5 o'clock on a Saturday. The downtown area was dead. Despite this, every step of the visit took a while, from getting seated to putting our orders in to getting drinks and food. Which is a shame, because the food was excellent and the beer selection was great. I had the Midtown Nugget Single Hop IPA, my wife had Perrin's Caramel Nitro.
Building itself is well lit, with a dark wood bar running along one side and lots of wood topped tables. Looks like they had growlers, howlers, and what looked like pints.

 

 

 

 

 

New tap sustem, 52 by my count.

 

I stopped here for a late lunch on a Monday with my wife to check out this brewery. This pub is located in and older storefront building in downtown Lansing. We had a previous visit several years ago but I did not do a review then. We also had a couple of visits when this place operated under the name of Michigan Brewing Company. No changes have occurred to the physical facility that we noticed since then.

There were three beers on tap that are brewed by Midtown, plus they had 12 other taps with beers from other Michigan breweries (incl. one cider). There are also about 30 bottled beers available, including Bud, Miller, etc. The house taps typically vary from 3-5 Midtown brews, but only three were available at the time of our visit. One was a pumpkin cream ale that was not to my liking due to an overload of spices, but the other two (a gold ale and an IPA) were tasty. I gave the beers a C rating overall, but the IPA was a solid C+/B- beer.

The food menu is a step above typical pub grub, but the standard pub fare items are there too, and we ordered burgers with a choice of sides. They were good burgers, and the pub fries and sweet potato fries were also a cut above average. A nice thing about this pub is that they have peanuts available on each table to be able to shell and eat while drinking the beer and waiting for the food.

Overall we enjoyed our experience and would go back again when in the area.

 

Not bad overall, its a cool location, right downtown Lansing. MBC is pretty much the only craft beer pub in the area (with the exception of the newly opened (Aug 2012) Eagle Monk Brewery). That being said, I am not a fan of Michigan Brewing Companies beer in general. Even when their actual brewery was open they didn't have any beers I really cared about. Supposedly, the Pub is not really associated with the brewery, I guess they just serve their beer and use their name.? Now that the brewery is shutdown I don't know if (or how) the pub will last.

The food is about average, nothing really spectacular. The service always seems pretty good.

If you are in downtown Lansing MBC is pretty much your only option for a craft beer pub.

I currently reside in Lansing, Michigan, and Michigan Brewing Company (MBC) is the only local game in town. The actual brewery is located about 20 minutes out of town in Webberville, but that's another story. After many visits to MBC, I think my original review was from a very hopeful person who wanted nothing more than to live by an outstanding brewpub.

MBC lacks anything stellar to set it apart from the other couple hundred places I've been - including the other 33 in Michigan - and they suffer from a lack of service. The food is quite good, but you won't find anything you can't find in 20 other restaurants around town and the perch is from the ocean instead of one of the four lakes that border the state. The beers are all solid, but none of them will inspire you to come back again and again. If you do find yourself here, however, the High Seas IPA, Superior Stout and Peninsula Porter are the closes to exceptional you'll find.

The problems come in cost and service. The beers are often $5 and there isn't any happy hour really to speak of. If everything was $3, I'd say it was well worth the trip and money. But it's not. I can get better stuff for cheaper elsewhere. So I do. Also, the service is typically slow and not overly friendly. I once walked into the place and was the only person there, and could still barely get three words out of the staff.