The Grumpy Troll Brewery was a surprisingly upbeat kind of place. But then, the Packers were whuppin’ on the Lions that Sunday afternoon.

In an effort to go “beyond the games” this season, I will visit area attractions, or at least places that interest me, during my road trips. I chose to check out small-town Wisconsin, which brings me to Mount Horeb, 40 minutes from Madison, and the self-proclaimed “Troll Capital of the World.”

The owners of the Grumpy Troll are tourist savvy with T-shirts and mugs on sale and resident savvy (Packers on TV). It’s a good place to eat if you’re not dieting, with a concept of fine dining you may only find in Wisconsin.

A featured dish is “Troll in the Hole,” which is a sausage-and-cheese lined bread bowl filled with vegetable stew for $13.95 and is only available after 5 p.m. It is fine dining after all.

After such light fare, you can head down Main Street, aka. “The Trollway” to the Mustard Museum. The story behind the museum is that former Wisconsin assistant attorney general Barry Levenson, a lifelong Red Sox fan, decided to pursue another obsession after the 1986 World Series.

His collection began with a few samples and has since grown to more than 500 examples organized by state and country. He found mustards any which way he could. Levenson was about to argue a case in the U.S. Supreme Court one morning when he spotted an unusual mustard on a room service tray at his hotel. He pinched it and the mustard was in his pocket during his successful prosecution. The story is displayed in the museum along with the sample-size jar.

There are samples aplenty at the back of the store where you can try unique flavors such as raspberry jalapeno and apple mustards, all Wisconsin made, which taste better than they sound.

An inordinant amount of mustard puns and an anti-ketchup and mayonnaise bias are evident. A reprint of an article with the headline “She left to buy ketchup and the house burned” from the Madison newspaper was displayed about a Racine woman who left the house with her kids, hamburgers still frying on the range, is an example.

One place you won’t need to leave to find ketchup and tartar sauce is the Friday Night Fish Fry at Nora’s Bar in Deerfield. There, under the fluorescent lights, the one-man band of Jerry Stubler, 80-something, played polka classics and new and old-style country for all ages on his synthesizer, trumpet and saxophone.

Uff da.

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