Mequon Bars & Breweries: Inside Historic Foxtown

Mequon's drinking scene centers on Foxtown Brewing in the restored historic district, with The Ruby Tap for wine and a handful of neighborhood and sports bars around it. For a suburb, that is a decent spread: a real brewery with history behind it, a self-pour wine bar, and enough casual rooms to cover a Friday night without leaving town.

Where to drink in Mequon

The map of it is simple. Foxtown Brewing anchors the brewery end in the old brewing district, The Ruby Tap covers wine, and Homeplate and Spanky's handle the sports-and-neighborhood side. Where you go depends on whether the night is about beer, wine, or a game.

Foxtown: Mequon's historic brewery district

Foxtown Brewing sits in the former Opitz Zimmerman Brewery, a mid-1800s Mequon brewing site reclaimed as a brewery, restaurant, and event space. The name is the district's name now, and there is more clustered around the brewery than the beer alone.

The story is worth knowing because it explains why the drinking scene has a center of gravity here rather than scattered along the highway. This was a working brewery well over a century ago, and the redevelopment kept the bones and the name. Today the district holds the brewery, a lounge, an event hall, and a butcher, which is an unusual and genuinely local cluster for a suburb.

What that means in practice is that Foxtown works as a destination in itself, not just a single bar you drive to. You can start with a beer at the brewery, move to the lounge for dinner, and pick up something from the butcher on the way out, all within the same restored district. For a town where most things are a separate car trip, having a walkable cluster like this is rare enough to be worth planning an evening around. It is also the closest Mequon comes to a night-out neighborhood rather than a collection of individual rooms.

Rounding out the district, Foxtown Station is a restored historic building now used as an event space, worth knowing if you are planning a gathering rather than just a night out. And next door to the drinking, Foxtown Heritage Meats is the district's butcher, doing fresh cuts and house-made sausages, the kind of neighbor that makes Foxtown feel like a real quarter rather than a single bar.

Sports bars and neighborhood spots

For a game or a casual pint, Homeplate Asylum and Spanky's Hideaway are the local sports-and-neighborhood bars. These are the unpretentious end of the scene, where the point is the game, the wings, and a beer, not a night out with a capital N.

Homeplate is the straightforward answer for watching a game with a plate in front of you. For a slightly more food-forward neighborhood spot, Spanky's Hideaway is the easygoing pub-grub option, known locally for its wings and its French onion soup, with a patio for the warm months and a game on inside. Either one covers a low-key night without a plan.

A drink with dinner

Several Mequon restaurants double as good drinking spots, so the line between dinner and a drink is blurry here. Crave and Highland House do cocktails worth staying for, and the riverside rooms handle wine. In a town this size, that overlap is a feature: you do not need a dedicated cocktail lounge when half the good restaurants have a bar you would happily spend an hour at.

If the night is really a dinner that turns into drinks, you are better off starting from the food side and letting it drift. White Rabbit Bar and Grill is a bar and grill that works either way, comfortable whether you came to eat or to drink. The fuller picture of where to eat, including the rooms with the best bars attached and where the cocktails are actually good, is in Mequon's restaurants. And there is more going on around Foxtown than the drinking alone, from the event space to the cinema and the rest of the town, worth a look in what to do around Foxtown and the rest of Mequon.