Beer and Brewing in South Bend and Elsewhere

Ok...
Been living in South Bend since August, talked to a number of people about beer and brewing. Sent long messages to some of them. Hopefully, didn't scare them off too badly... ;-)
Thing is, there's a lot of resources for/about beer and brewing. Here's just a few to get people started. And once you get started, well, anything can happen.

Local/Regional

Relevant for North Central Indiana and some other parts of the MidWest

• Legends of Notre Dame
Beer pub on Notre Dame Campus. The site has their beer menu...
• Mishawaka Brewing Co.
Michiana's only brewpub, at this point. They have some limited brewing supplies.
• Zeke's Beer pub in Dowagiac, MI.
• Indiana Beer
A site about beer events in Indiana.
• Great Lakes Brewing News
A beer newspaper which is distributed for free at Legends and MBC. Jim Herter, business manager for Notre Dame's food services, writes for the Indiana section.
• Chicago Beer Society
Group of beer lovers and homebrewers. They do cool events like "Thirst Fursday" the first Thursday of each month.
• Grape and Granary
A mail order brewing supply shop which has a good selection and ships to Northcentral Indiana pretty fast. There are other homebrew supply shops, including online, but this is the one that my friends in town have been using.
• Theta Ridge Coffee
Importer of green coffee beans. As other beer lovers seem to enjoy fresh coffee, I thought I'd mention this one.

In my humble opinion, the best liquor store for beer in South Bend is City Wide Liquors' downtown location:
109 E. Jefferson Blvd. (Across from Keybank, down the street from Century Center) South Bend, IN 46601 574-287-8652

General Beer Sites

Lots of information about homebrewing

• Palmer's How to Brew
A homebrewing book available online for free.
• Papazian's Complete Joy of Homebrewing
A good, inexpensive brew book for beginners and intermediate brewers.
• HomeBrew Digest
A mailing-list for homebrewers and a "library" of brewing information. Some of the library's stuff is a bit old but the mailing-list is a cool place to contact brewers.
• Beertown
A site for different brewing associations, including the American Homebrewer Association
• Real Beer
A general site about beer with a lot of information about brewing.
• Bodensatz
A site with lots of info about homebrewing.

Miscellaneous Beer Sites

• Beer Judge Certification Program
The most useful thing, IMHO, are "style guidelines" that are used for homebrew competitions. I hope people won't get too stuck on the details as some of it is very arbitrary. But it's a good way to get information about some styles, like "Irish Red Ale" or "Dunkelweizen"...
• Rate Beer
A site where one can rate beers they try and/or read people's comments about beers. Some of these comments are a bit strange and those people tend to like specific types of beer, but it's sometimes a good way to choose a beer you want to try. Hops are liked by raters and so are strong full-bodied beers but the best-rated beer is in fact a Belgian Trappist...
• Michael Jackson the Beer Hunter
The best-known beer writer, not the youngest member of the Jackson 5.
• Beer Advocate
I mostly use it to look for beer pubs across the US and in other places, especially when I travel. Many places have lists of brew- and beerpubs and may even do pubcrawls for beer geeks...
• PubCrawler
Another site listing beer pubs in the US and elsewhere. Actually, I was confusing PubCrawler with BeerAdvocate. They accomplish similar goals...
• All About Beer
A brewing magazine.
• Siebel Institute
A very serious institute where you can get a degree in brewing technology. Education you can actually use!