MISQUAH — The bear is back on its rounds. The animal that spent early summer working its way up the town’s culinary ladder — the Daybreak’s dumpster in June, then the Northern Tap’s walk-in cooler in July, where it famously took only the imported cheese — paid its first call on the brewery Thursday night, drawn, all parties presume, by the bread smell that has hung over Second Avenue since the test batches began.

The visit was documented rather than witnessed: prints at the loading door Friday morning, a grain bin nosed but not breached, and a smear on the lower window that Jonas Holt identified, after study, as “where it looked in.” Nothing was gained. The Holts, who had followed the summer’s news like everyone, had fitted the loading door and the bins with self-closing latches during the build-out — “out of respect,” Annika Holt said. “We read the papers. We know who we’re dealing with.”

Deb Pavek of the Northern Tap, whose walk-in made the bear’s reputation, reviewed the evidence with the eye of experience. “It has a type,” she said. “First the cheese, now a brewery. That animal is building toward a tasting menu.” The Tap’s own latch, installed after July’s incident, has held; the bear has not returned there, which Deb attributes “partly to the latch and partly to pride.”

Dan Roux, the area’s DNR conservation officer, was consulted and was, in the department’s tradition, calming. “It’s doing rounds,” he said. “It checks what smells interesting, finds the town has tightened up, and moves along. Keep the latches latched and the garbage boring and it’ll get bored too.” Asked whether the bear posed any danger to the August 15 opening, Roux said no, then paused, then added that if the flagship beer ends up named for the bear instead of a lake, “I’d understand it, but I didn’t suggest it.” The Holts declined to comment. The canvas, as usual, said nothing.