Indy beer

The 20-year-old brewery hopes to hit legal drinking age in Fountain Square when it opens in spring 2019.

Since we last raised a glass to Central Indiana’s best beer in 2014, dozens of taprooms have opened here. In service to you, thirsty reader, we drank at all of them. What follows is a sampler of the area’s most sippable new suds. Who’s ready for the next round?

In a market crowded with pedigreed brewers, a place founded by three law-school students and their friends with a little homebrewing experience sounds like a recipe for Imperial Disaster. (Not actually an esoteric beer name. Yet.) But the owners of Black Acre in Irvington have had their day in court, and we’re ruling in their favor.

With ales and stouts as artfully crafted as their literary inspirations (the name is a nod to the Gone with the Wind protagonist, and the owners are avid readers), it shouldn’t come as a surprise that one of Scarlet Lane’s proprietors tells a great story about how craft beer knocked her head-over-heels.

If you’re new to the genre, Belgians can take some getting used to. For one thing, almost all of Taxman Brewing’s beers weigh in at 7 percent ABV or more.

Although it opened in 2009, Big Woods didn’t add Quaff On Brewing Company for bottling and restaurant distribution until 2012. And that’s when both the beers and the business took off.

When Kevin Matalucci opened Twenty Tap in SoBro a few years ago, the former Broad Ripple Brewpub brewer said he had no immediate plans to make his own beer there. We knew better.

In the process of paying homage to his forebears of froth, Ray Kamstra created one of the handsomest taprooms in town, marking every box on the industrial-chic checklist.

Tow Yard opened in April, relying heavily on local guest taps for the first few months, which allowed head brewer Bradley Zimmerman to slowly roll out a short list of hoppy, unfiltered “Pacific Northwest–style” craft beers.

For all of his success as the owner of Brugge Brasserie (famous for its Belgian-style ales), Ted Miller was too savvy a businessman to witness the American-style craft-beer boom here without thinking, “Why not me?” Outliers, on a once-forgotten block off of Mass Ave, is his answer.

Loyal customers don’t seem to mind making the effort to seek out this “hard-working beer” at its source.

Since opening in 2012, Union Brewing has featured cask-conditioned ales—one of only about a dozen outfits in the U.S. devoted to a method popularized by the Brits.

With wisps of toasted coconut in both aroma and flavor, Scarlet Lane’s Dorian tastes surprisingly light for a stout. It’s actually better than Flat12’s popular version.

See the roster of five bars that have the greatest number of taps, and which one boasts 100-percent-local brews on draft.

Central Indiana’s first craft-beer wave broke a couple of decades ago. Though several of those breweries didn’t survive to witness today’s larger flood of openings, their brewers—and their stuff, and their legacies—are still floating around.