John Steinbeck is widely regarded as one of America's finest writers for many reasons; to me, one of his most overlooked skills was his ability to write about beer. To describe a character's worsening depression in his 1954 novel "Sweet Thursday," Steinbeck penned, "the first long pull of beer from a frosty glass was not the joy it had been."

I am forever chasing that glorious first pull when I drink beer, something I've been doing a lot of lately as part of IndyStar's Beer Bracket. With half of our brewers off the board after the Sweet Sipsteen , we are now looking toward the somewhat less smoothly named E wheat Eight.

The first round yielded mostly chalk, as the higher-seeded brewer with more locations and wider distribution received more votes than its smaller opponent in nearly e

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