Day 9: Beer, brats and the Blue Egg brunch

"As everyone knows, the couch was made for…Miller Time."

Ah, our last day off before two endurance runs to the Least Coast. After sleeping in while Scott Lee wakes up early to go to the gym, we head out to the Blue Egg for brunch. The Blue Egg is operated by the same group that owns Maxie's and just opened earlier this month. Though the space was in an unimpressive strip mall, the food even surpassed last night, bumping off many meals on our best of trip list in the process.

Scott Lee ordered the Dubliner benedict, a mouthwatering combination of corned beef, leeks, poached egg and hollandaise sauce on top of rye bread. I had the seafood scramble, a melange of lightly fried seafood folded into scrambled eggs topped with a red sauce and aioli. While the food was great, it was the little things - the bottle of water left on the table, the bowl of grapes upon our seating in lieu of bread - that made this place worth writing about. if you are in Milwaukee, you can do a whole lot worse than this place.

Two activities were on the agenda today, order uncertain:  a Milwaukee Brewer's baseball game and the Miller/Coors brewery tour. Originally we had planned on doing the tour first since we got to sample three beers at the conclusion, a good baseline going into the game, but a longer than anticipated meal put us at Miller Park initially.

Good things about Miller Park: cheap parking, cheap brats, retractable roof, good seat layout, sausage races
Bad things about Miller Park: have to watch the Brewers, expensive merchandise, average brats, music played in-between pitches!

I know our respective teams are awful (D-Backs, Orioles), but watching Milwaukee play today was painful. The fact that it was the stupid Giants putting a beating on them for the second straight game made it doubly painful. The best part of the game were our seats - section 422, row 13, seats 7&8. I paid $1 for them on stubhub the night before (at the game as we were parking a horde of scalpers approached us and I asked them how business was - "bad" was the group response), but the best part about our seats occurred behind us when some kid with a neck tattoo proposed to a girl who looked to be around 18 via the scoreboard. His proud father, shirtless, looked happy. Amongst tears, she agreed.

Quick: what's the best free tour in the state of Wisconsin? Correct, the Miller brewery tour. Highlighted by the best 12-minutes of movie time I've seen in several days (a why Miller is great and why the moment your night goes from good to great is Miller Time propaganda-esque intro movie), the tour fascinated the John Gililian (= Free Beer + Supply Chain Awesomeness) in both of us. Did you know this particularly brewery (one of seven Miller plants in the U.S.) produces 500,000 cases of beer a day, most all of which is consumed by citizens of Chicago? Of course you didn't.

At the end of the tour everyone gets three samples of much needed beer; the first a mandatory taste of their best-selling Miller Lite, the other two drinkers choice. Scott Lee and I both incorrectly choose the Leinenkugel Summer Shandy, which is sweet and citrusy beyond most summer brews. Why is it that sweetness and fruit designate summer in the alcoholic beverage world? Order is quickly restored with a cold-filtered MGD and High Life. While we are enjoying our beers, a Miller worker comes by and attempts to sell us a welcome portrait they take of you before the tour begins, a la splash mountain climax shot. It is $21.change after tax. After we are done laughing at him, he tells us they probably sell 50 a day. We all laugh.

The final component of the tour is the gift shop, a smorgasbord of beer related merchandise and where Miller makes money by the handful. Of course, we contribute with me acquiring a shirt you'll see me wearing in Cleveland tomorrow while tormenting former fans of the local basketball team.

Like most everyone else on this planet, we are glued to the television at 9pm EST to see LBJ tear the hearts out of the citizens of Cleveland on national television. While disappointed neither of our predictions come true, we are giddy at the prospect of being in town tomorrow to 1) see the hatred firsthand, 2) buy cheap Cleveland James gear and 3) see Shaq try and crunch numbers to see if he can get a roster spot in Miami. Throw in the RnR HOF, grilled cheese sandwiches and a new road trip member and tomorrow will be a good, albeit long, day.

Meghann Glavin Highlight of the Day:

Scott Lee: Miller Time
Mike Ham: LBJ Death Blow

Tomorrow's Agenda:
Route: Milwaukee > Chicago > Toledo? > Cleveland
Estimated Distance: 432 miles
Estimated Time: 7 hours, 45 minutes