Taco Shop or Brewery? Why Not Both?

Happy’s Taco Shop expands to beermaking

For over a decade, northern Michiganders have known Happy’s Taco Shop as a destination for fun, creative menu items, like their lamb cheeseburger taco, choriqueso rangoons, and Crunchwrap Royale. Last summer, however, The Happy’s team quietly added another line to their collective resume: beermaker.

Unless you were paying close attention to their Instagram feed, you probably wouldn’t have known that they’ve been pouring their beers out of a converted shipping container at their Boyne City space for about a year now. When they started packaging and selling cans of their Happy’s Lager and Happy’s Dark Lager in a few select locations (including at their former TC home, The Little Fleet) a few weeks ago, however, we knew it was time to check back in on this new chapter for Happy’s.

One Really Good Lager

Tacos and beer are one of life’s true perfect pairings, but with so many other lagers and other breweries in Michigan, why add this to the to-do list for a small restaurant? Like many things, it stemmed from the urge to be master of their domain.

“We wanted to bring things home, focus on a space of our own [where] we could control the atmosphere and have full control over the experience,“ explains founder/owner Drake Nagel. “And that’s where the idea of wanting to brew some beer to go with the tacos came from.”

Having a trained brewer on hand also helped to inform that decision. Aaron McCarthy started homebrewing a couple of decades ago and worked as a production brewer at Beards Brewing in Petoskey shortly after relocating to the area with his wife. Happy’s also operated out of Beard’s for a few years, but McCarthy didn’t cross paths with Nagel until another Beards employee joined Happy’s as a sous chef. (Two beer and taco ships, passing in the night.)

That mutual friend invited McCarthy along to do a little extra work at Happy’s when COVID-19 slowed down the world of production brewing significantly.

“So I started to help in the kitchen a little, and I jived well with these guys, and eventually, when they brought up the idea of starting up a beer project over here, I jumped at the opportunity and made the move,” McCarthy says.

“The idea of brewing beer came after we had the truck set up out here. We got to thinking, it’d be nice if there was something more here we could offer—something to make it a more full experience,” Nagel says. “The idea at first was, we wanted to brew just one really good lager. And from there, the idea expanded as we talked to Aaron.”

Two Really Good Lagers

Today, instead of brewing just one really good lager, they have two (a dark lager and a light lager) plus a Kolsch-style beer (which is lager-adjacent).

“I feel like it makes sense to pick your lane and then stay in that lane,” McCarthy says. “We really wanted to focus on lager because it’s what we all enjoy drinking.”

And while macro-lagers are traditionally identical every time, “they lack that little extra something that makes you go, ‘hmmm,’” McCarthy adds. “Just making beer on a small scale … there’s a little bit of variance, batch to batch. It gives your beer a little bit of soul, you know, which is fun.”

That small scale helps keep the brewing process lean—“There’s just one employee on the brewing side; it’s just me,” McCarthy shares—and they built it from the ground up specifically for making lager.

“We’re probably one of the only breweries around that has horizontal lagering tanks,” McCarthy says, “[and] we also have four stainless serving tanks. Rather than kegs, we serve directly out of those. They live right behind the bar,” meaning the beer they pour you this summer has traveled a grand total of just a few feet from where it was made.

Speaking of pouring the beer, how they serve those lagers also comes with a little bit of extra attention.

“The central tap handle at our pub is a Lukr side pull. You typically see them in the Czech Republic,” McCarthy says. “They’re becoming more popular because you really have a lot of control over not only the amount of foam that goes into the glass, but the type of foam, which is the most important part. It produces a wet foam, which is really, really, really delicious.”

If you see someone in the beer garden drinking from a full glassful of that foam, that’s a purposeful decision.

“There are pours that they do in the Czech republic that are 100 percent wet foam, and it’s absolutely delicious. From the beginning, when we were designing the bar, I wanted one,” McCarthy says, with Nagel adding that “they’re super cool. I definitely hope this summer we can do more of the ‘milk’ pours this summer and get people into that. We totally love them.”

Three Really Good Lagers?!

While there are some summer plans for additional beers and beer cocktails—a session pale ale should make a return, as well as a pineapple shandy and a michelada—one of their newest beers comes to Boyne by way of New Mexico.

“I just got back from a trip out west with my wife and I had a beer from a brewery in Albuquerque called Bow and Arrow. It was a lager made with blue corn and it blew my mind,” McCarthy says. “This beautiful corn flavor was in that beer, and that obviously is a really solid pairing for a taco.”

Now that the beer side of the business is up and running, and even though their canned beers have entered the world, don’t expect to see a massive expansion into a production brewery any time soon. “We’re pretty committed to doing everything here,” McCarthy says.

“We’re not going to do much distribution at first—keep it local, so it’s a little special for places to have it,” Nagel agrees.

“We’ll make as much beer as our customers make us make,” McCarthy concludes. “Right now, we just want to keep it as simple as possible.” Tacos and beer. Sometimes simple is exactly what you need.

Happy’s Lager can be found in cans at Toski Sands Market & Wine Shop in Petoskey, Provisions and The Back Lot in Boyne, and The Little Fleet in Traverse City.

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