Brandy Lake

Brandy Lake sits at the top of the Wisconsin DNR grading rubric with an A, a mark reached by the cleanest lakes in Wisconsin. Clarity, phosphorus, and chlorophyll-a all rate similarly, so there is no obvious single lever to pull on watershed management.

A TSI value of 23 puts Brandy Lake in the oligotrophic range, where biological productivity stays low and the water column remains clear. The lake bottoms out at 44 ft — a moderate depth that supports a warm-water fishery without the year-round cold refuge a deeper basin provides. The lake's 113 acres and partial shoreline records put it in the mid-range bucket — large enough for varied use, small enough that watershed inputs reach the whole basin. Brandy Lake sits at rank 143 of 202 in Vilas County, in the lower half of the local distribution.

Eurasian watermilfoil has been documented at Brandy Lake, requiring shoreline management to keep dense mats from crowding native vegetation. Walleye are documented at Brandy Lake, one of 5 fish species on record for the lake. Public access is available — the lake is on the Wisconsin DNR public-access list. Monitoring depth is thin here: the LakeGrade rubric is applied to a small number of sample years, and the grade will be revised as more data accumulates.