Harmony Brewing Company introduces local lunch menu

Harmony Brewing Company introduced a new lunch menu last week, featuring sandwiches and salads with a local flair.

Every menu item contains multiple local ingredients. Sandwiches begin with a baguette from Nantucket baking company which is toasted in a wood fired oven. It is then loaded with ingredients ranging from pulled pork from S&S farms on the Wilcox Pork Sandwich, white cannellini beans from Winter Calico Field Farm on the (vegan) Sid Delicious Sandwich or basil from Vertical Paradise farms on the Southeast Side Sausage Sandwich. Michigan’s summer produce is also the star in all of the new lunch salads.

For those a bit uneasy about having beer for lunch, they have also introduced a new Grand Daddy Rapids cream ale with 4% alcohol. It was advertised as a "straw colored beer that has a malty nose, a light crisp body and a touch of sweetness. It’s a light beer that will satisfy the tastes of microbrew connoisseurs.

I tried the Wilcox Park sandwich on Friday, which is a pulled pork sandwich featuring house made barbeque sauce, mozzarella, caramelized onions, and cilantro for $9.50. It is served with chips and a pickle. The sandwich was excellent, with very pronounced cilantro flavor. The chips and pickle were only adequate - it would be great to see house-made chips and pickles sometime in the future.

The Grand Daddy Rapids cream ale was very good - I'm not a regular cream ale connosseur but the description seemed to fit and it complemented rather than competed with the flavor of the sandwich. Note for those who have to return to work for the afternoon: 4% is on the low side for microbrews, but it's on par with most macrobrews. So one needs to keep that in mind when deciding how many to drink.

Overall, it was a great lunch experience. One suggestion for Harmony would be to lower the volume of the music during lunch hours so that people who are having a working lunch meeting can hear each other better.