Silver Spruce’s Bicicleta
Bottoms Up
May 1 kicks off National Bike Month, and Silver Spruce Brewing is honoring it right. The Traverse City brewery, located just a few turns of the crank from the TART trail and easily reachable via the Eighth Street bike lane, has just tapped its Bicicleta beer.
Available this month only, this session IPA is ideal for thirsty cyclists. It’s a low, pedal-friendly ABV (4.6%) that smells like spring, with dominant aromas of pine and fresh-cut melon, and tastes just as refreshing, with only a hint of palate-perfect bitterness, thanks to the brews dry-hopped origins (in which dry hops are dropped in after the wort is boiled, making for a less bitter, more aromatic IPA).
Best of all, for every pint sold, Silver Spruce will donate $1 to Norte, supporting its mission to getting more kids on bikes. Have a kid that doesn’t have a bike? Egads. Make May the month you borrow one from one of Norte’s three bike libraries — in Traverse City, Elk Rapids, or Kalkaska. They’ll lend bikes to kids age 3 to 10, and it’s free and easy to borrow; all you have to do is show your driver’s license, and all your kid has to do is “promise to be awesome, to take good care of the bike, to ride it as much as possible, to be a positive Norte ambassador and to return it once [he or she has] outgrown it.”
Fill out the bike library application at elgruponorte.org/library/card, then toast to the coming of the best summer on two wheels at Silver Spruce, 439 E. Eighth St. (231) 252-3552, www.silversprucebrewing.com