Wasatch Brew Pub

While it’s easy to forget this fact, what with the Bently-to-LeBaron ratio being what it is these days, but Park City is, at its heart, a ski town. The one immovable truth of ski towns? They're initially, and primarily, inhabited by ski bums drinking hazardous amounts of micro-brew that can’t hold steady jobs. While latter isn’t something Wasatch Brew Pub is prepared to do much about, the former is. Opened in 1986 by a Milaukee-cum-Utahan, Wasatch is Utah’s first, most formidable, brewery (it takes cajones to brew a beer in Mo-Town called The Devastator, clocking in at an alcoholic 8-percent), located in the king’s seat at the upper lot of Main Street. Food is solid—Wasatch BBQ ribs and New Zealand lamb always works—but it’s the suds that keep people stumbling back. Boilerplate two-level mountain décor (log pillars, big windows, pretty mountains—yawn) isn’t anything special, but The Pub itself is: It was Greg Schirf, Wasatch owner, who convinced the notoriously anti-fun Utah Legislature to make brew pubs legal in the state. Take that, state-sponsored sobriety! What’s not to like about a brew pub whose motto is, “Drinking our share and selling the rest?”