Patrick Donohue is the proudest Indiana native you're likely to find. Seriously. No one is prouder to be from a state that so many people know relatively so little about than he is. Patrick is a native of Terre Haute and a graduate of the Ernie Pyle School of Journalism at Indiana University. Knowing this, you might think he’d be a huge John "Cougar" Mellencamp fan, a man considered by some to be the Hoosier State's poet laureate. But you'd be wrong. In a major way. | 
When I first moved to this area nearly fours ago, I was surprised — and sort of appalled — by the lack of a great local, or even regional, craft brewery.
The few local selections I did encounter at my neighborhood supermarket and liquor stores bordered on pungent — think Samuel Adams Boston Lager with a Dumpster full of hops tossed in for good measure — and not really worth celebrating or patronizing.
I resigned myself to believing that as long as I lived in the Lowcountry, I would be drinking beer from somewhere else. Frankly, beer from anywhere else was better than the smattering of half-hearted, lackluster microbrews available locally.
But then, as if it were fated, the beers of Westbrook Brewing Co. from Mount Pleasant came into my life.
With two year-round beers — an India Pale Ale and the increasingly popular White Thai — and several adventurous and downright gutsy small-batch, limited edition seasonal brews, Westbrook is a brewery that all Lowcountry beer lovers can be proud of and embrace as our own.
I mean, that they recently named a dark, spring seasonal “Covert Hops” is reason enough to love what Edward and Morgan Westbrook are doing at the other end of U.S. 17.