Lay of the Land: Sizing Up Chicago Beer Culture, Part 1

This was the first weekend that I had free to explore Chicago, so I finally feel more comfortable with the different neighborhoods of town. Admittedly, the south side remains a great unknown expanse that I've only ventured to once; all the great beer bars and brewpubs are north of the river, after all. As I've traveled around by bus, cab, and train, I've spent a lot of time thinking about how Chicago and Portland compare to each other. And clearly, there's some asymmetry here: Portland, the 29th largest city in the US, is roughly five times smaller than Chicago. But this is a beer blog, and in that realm there's asymmetry too.

As far as beer culture goes, Chicago just simply can't compete with Beervana, and my brew school friends will be the first to tell you that not a day goes by where I don't talk (at length) about how superior Portland's beer culture is to Chicago's. Comparisons are odious, so I'll spend some time talking about my experiences traveling the Chicago beer bar and brewpub scene, which isn't all that bad once I stop comparing it to what we have out west. It is the home of beer school, after all.

So, how is Chicago's beer? Or, more precisely, how is Chicago's beer culture?

For now, I'll give some general observations and in future posts delve into more depth about some of the specific bars, restaurants, brewpubs, and breweries that make and break Chicago as a beer destination.

Chicagoland has a handful of great local breweries: Goose Island, Three Floyds (in nearby Munster, IN), Half Acre, Metropolitan, and Two Brothers, which is in Warrenville, put out consistently good beers. This is especially true for Three Floyds (FFF in beer geekese). Three Floyds is famous for it's annual Dark Lord Day, the single day of the year where they release their much lauded Russian imperial stout. Beer lovers from around the country travel to Munster to share and trade rare beers and get a bottle of Dark Lord. They routinely get labeled the Picasso or Pollock of the craft brew world by fawning writers. Their beers are aggressive, hoppy, and alcoholic; most of them are also excellent.

Goose Island is the hometown favorite with a production brewery and two brewpubs--one of which happens to be across the street from Siebel. Their Belgian-style beers are especially impressive: Sofie is a relatively new saison that was partially aged in wine barrels and fermented with the bacterial yeast brettanomyces to give it a dry, "barnyard" character. It's one of the best new beers in the US market that I've been able to try. And Metropolitan and Half Acre are upstart operations in Ravenswood and North Center that have put out some solid first brews.

Beyond the great local breweries, Chicago has access to and distribution from many of the best regional craft breweries in the US. Bell's, Founders, Tyranena, Great Lakes, Southern Tier, Southampton, Brooklyn, Surly, New Holland, and Dark Horse all have great tap and bottle presence here that makes us West Coast beer nerds drool. The day that New Glarus gets distributed in Chicago will be the day that it goes "from good to great" as a beer city.

The distribution system seems to favor packaging breweries here, and many bars have a good variety of tap offerings. The better "beer bars" (The Map Room, Hopleaf, The Local Option, The Bad Apple, The Long Room, Risque Cafe, Sheffield's, Delilah's, Clark St Ale House) all have a solid, rotating selection of beers, averaging 15-25 taps and many bottled offerings. Even bars that aren't nearly as beercentric seem to offer at least one or two alternatives to macro beer with New Belgium, Goose Island, Sam Adams, or Sierra Nevada often available.

Perhaps the most unique and healthy facet of Chicago's beer scene is the preponderance of German bierstubes. Given the city's ethnic heritage, this isn't surprising (there are plenty of Irish bars as well, though their crowd is more car bomb than craft beer), but it does also seem to have spawned an interesting reaction from non-bierstube beer bars, which choose to pass on German beer in favor, sometimes exclusively, of Belgian or American craft beers. The Hopleaf, for example, keeps Belgian beers on tap that can't be found anywhere else in the city; Risque Cafe, Jerry's Sandwiches, and Local Option deal almost exclusively in American craft beer. It's a de facto balkanization of ethnic beer cultures that I've never seen so pronounced elsewhere.

The shortcomings in Chicago's beer culture, however, aren't hard to spot. Some of the hiccups include widespread price gauging, limited distribution for brewpubs' beer, lack of social media around beer culture, outdated/limited information online from different breweries, and a paucity of one-off and reserve beers seeing tap action around town. The first three of these can be small gestures that promote beer appreciation. The lack of one-offs is probably a function of having fewer really small breweries (in general) and fewer brewpubs that distribute any beer beyond their home pub. For now, Chicago seems to be a city with great beer but not great beer culture, all structure but no superstructure.

That is a two-week, snap judgment. Perhaps as I spend the next five weeks exploring the city more, I'll find that the culture of beer runs deeper than I think. I would be happy to suffer that surprise, and the only way to do that is to keep exploring.

Prost!