Wavelength Brewing Company

Literally steps from Mother Earth, this place is a fairly expansive, modern tasting room. Over a dozen on tap, available in flights for a reasonable price. Service is friendly and helpful. Beer quality was pretty weak though, with a few decent ones and a few real duds. Only reason to come here is due to its proximity to Mother Earth; otherwise, you can give it a miss.

We dropped in Wavelength while waiting for our table at Belching Beaver (across the street). The tap room is large and open and contains rockets and space paraphernalia, along with a streaming image of the sun and a countdown to the next time the ISS passes overhead. The couple of beers we tried were average with the Low Earth Orbit (Session IPA w/Mosaic) being the best. They routinely host scientists/professors for talks and also look through their large telescope at the heavens. This is a nice geek place but only attracts a small fraction of what nearby Belching Beaver and Mother Earth attract. The adjoining restaurants deliver food right to your table or bar spot.

Just a couple doors down from the Mother Earth downtown taproom. So, I guess if you go to one, you sort of have to go to the other.

Pretty large space with some sparse seating. They also have a set up for live music, which is cool. From talking to the guy at the bar, seems like the people who run the brewery are also audiophiles. Tame.

They had maybe ten to a dozen taps on. I tried a set of six beers and then the guy let me try their grand opening beer as well. I was not really impressed with the beers here. Most of the ones I had were not good and a number where very oddly smokey. Though, a couple of the fruited IPAs were okay...mostly due to them just tasting like fruit juice.

The guy working the bar was at least nice and friendly. But, I don’t know how often I’d choose to come back here given that I didn’t care for any of their beers.

Visited February 28, 2015.

This was meant to be a quick stop on the way to GT2’s place but between talking to the employees, checking out the Mother Earth homebrew shop, and buying 15 tamales at the Mexican market (as well as finding a sweet present for GT in the parking lot) I spent a fair amount of time in this complex. There are three ratable places in the same building here; two breweries and a homebrew shop. Mother Earth has gotten considerably better in the past couple years but Wavelength still has a long way to go. At the moment they’re in their soft opening phase so the walls are barren and they’re still building some things. They do have one wall that they’re intentionally leaving blank so they can project movies onto it. They have some interesting track lighting which is going to be used when they start having live music here (I guess there is some permitting still required for that). There are some tables scattered around the room and a long counter. Naturally I sat at the bar.

They had 10 beers on during my visit, 6 of which were IPAs. Kind of neat , except that all the IPAs tasted like cedar and in one or two cases smoked meat. Not a good sign. The woody flavor is likely just a yeast off flavor but the smoky flavor could very well be an infection. In any event none were overly enjoyable. The two fruited IPAs (pineapple and grapefruit) were the most enjoyable where as the regular and the black IPAs were the least enjoyable. Note that they do both a "regular" and a "west coast" IPA. They also have a rye double IPA. As for non-IPAs they have a rye strong ale, a Czech golden ale, and a brown ale. The bartender told me that they’re brewing on a 3 bbl system and judging by the flavors I’m assuming the fermenters are in a refrigerator rather than a proper glycol cooled steel fermenter.

The most enjoyable parts of the visit were the company and the slogan (So Good It Hz). That and the tamales at the market down the way. I’ll check back in a year to see if they’ve figured out the brewing, or if by some chance they get a big name music act in there that I want to see (and travel all the way to SD for).

Great atmosphere, great people, even better beer!