I smiled the whole train ride back.

About twenty five miles south of downtown Chicago is Flossmoor, IL, a small bedroom suburb, that is known in the craft beer world as the home to the Flossmoor Station Restaurant & Brewery. The brewpub is actually located in the town's old train station, which abuts the current Metra Electric line stop. Flossmoor Station has been around since 1996, but it gained notice in the brewing universe when it took the "Small Brewpub of the Year" award at the 2006 Great American Beer Festival. If winning a medal at the GABF is like winning an Oscar for a film industry types, then that award is akin to winning Best Picture. It's the single-biggest honor bestowed upon a brewpub in the world. I visited Flossmoor in the summer of 2004 out of random chance, when I was in my sophomoric years of beer knowledge; today, I got to go back.

One of my classmates did an internship at Flossmoor last summer, and he arranged for anyone who wanted to to go down and get a tour with the head brewer there. Just after noon, I met Nick (the ex-intern), Joseba (one of the Mexican brewers in the course), and Adrian (the head brewer at the Bogota Beer Co), and we fought through the post-marathon crowds in downtown Chicago and got on a train to Flossmoor.

The trip south took a little over an hour, and as soon as we arrived, Bryan Shimkos, the head brewer and also a Siebel graduate, greeted us warmly. He let us settle in with some food and a sampler tray before starting the tour. The entire restaurant was packed--both the main bar area as well as the adjacent dining room. In Flossmoor, the brewpub was clearly fulfilling its purpose as the so-called "third place," in folks' lives.

The brewhouse abuts the main bar and is enclosed behind some floor-to-ceiling glass paneling; Bryan took us inside and joked, "I guess I should probably give you guys a more in-depth tour than I would to the normal crowds." "This is basically a glorified homebrew system," he explained, pointing out that all the grain is put into the mash tun manually and that their tool for dry hopping is a modified Lexan "Adventure Growler." The floor, which is the original pockmarked brickwork from the train station, is hardly ideal for a brewery and cleaning it sets the interns into a tizzy (as Nick pointed out).

Impressively, Bryan and his part-time assistant, whom we didn't meet, churn out enough beer on their 15 bbl system and four fermenters to keep 12 beers on tap and an ongoing bottle supply to the desirous Chicagoland market. He poured us some recently hopped amber ale from one of the fermenter's zwickels. It had the great mix of hops and crystal malt flavors of a solid American amber, and we got a few additional treats when we headed downstairs into their cold storage and barrel room.

In the basement, we sampled a several-year old bottle of De Wilde Zuidentrein, a sour ale made by Flossmoor Station's previous brewer (who now works in Eugene for Oakshire Brewing), which had lost some of its sharpness but still had a distinctive sour bite as well as Wooden Hell, a barleywine aged in bourbon-barrels from the distillery that makes Woodford Reserve bourbon. Wooden Hell is a rare and excellent beer; Bryan said he finds that it takes at least six months of aging time to get the coconut and vanilla flavors in a barrel-aged beer, and both those, as well as the classic dark fruit flavors and mild oxidation of a good barley wine were all present. It had a hint of woodiness that tasted almost dusty and grainy, which added to the complex flavors. It was a treat to get to try it and clearly a show of Bryan's generosity of his knowledge and beer with current and future brewers. He was also more than happy to answer all of our questions and talk shop about everything from the challenges of distributing in the Chicago market to the beers he had in barrels for Chicago's upcoming Festival of Wood-Aged Beer. Before long, we realized that we would have to run upstairs quickly to catch our train back north.

Revisiting Flossmoor threw into relief just how differently I approach and think about beer (and, well, my life) than I did in the summer of 04 when I was last there. At that point, I was just starting to really explore beer; today, I left re-affirming my belief that small-scale brewpubs can make world-class beers and thrive. The journey to get to that point is still both intimidating and seductive. And I'm not the only one that thinks so: Joseba admitted that Flossmoor Station is the type of brewery that he'd like to open in southern Mexico some day when he retires from brewing at Grupo Cuauhtemoc.