May 13--Walk into any half-decent bar and you're sure to find a menu featuring at least a handful of Chicago-made beers. The list of local breweries has swelled to about 60 -- with more growth on the way -- which makes drinking beer made in and around the nation's third largest city practically routine.
But it's easy to forget how anemic Chicago's beer production once was. A mere 10 years ago, the local brewing industry largely amounted to three outfits: Goose Island, Two Brothers and Three Floyds.
The maturation of Chicago brewing will be on display during the annual Chicago Craft Beer Week, which begins Thursday. To check in on the state of Chicago brewing and the craft beer industry in general, we assembled a roundtable of industry experts for a chat one afternoon at legendary beer bar the Map Room.
The participants were Randy Mosher, who is a partner in local breweries 5 Rabbit Cerveceria and Forbidden Root Brewing Co., a longtime beer author and an industry consultant; Gabriel Magliaro, the founder of Half Acre Beer Co.; John Barley, co-founder of Solemn Oath Brewery and the president of the Illinois Craft Brewers Guild; Laura Blasingame, co-owner of the Map Room; and Bob Collins, president of Windy City Distributing, who has worked in the Chicago beer industry for nearly 30 years.
The following conversation was edited for space and clarity. In some cases, answers were expanded with follow-up questions asked at a later date.
Q: Describe Chicago's beer landscape before the current wave of breweries.
Randy Mosher: Pre-Goose Island, craft brewing in Chicago was littered with spectacular failures. The whole landscape was one false start after another. People were just making it up back then. They are today, too, but at least you have a lot of successful examples to look at, and you know you can make it. The quality back then was really awful.
Bob Collins: There were a number of breweries that started brewing in the '80s and '90s for the pure passion for quality beer -- Three Floyds, Two Brothers, Goose Island, all of which are still strong today. Others may have had a dedication to quality but ran into some hard luck that caused their quality to suffer, like Golden Prairie and Chicago Brewing Co. -- neither of which is still in business. Others entered as a marketing play and did not have passion for quality, like State Street Brewing, which is also no longer in business. You may be able to categorize many of today's breweries the same way.
Laura Blasingame: All of those early breweries came into the Map Room to try selling their beer. We sold Golden Prairie for a while. It was good until they ran out of money. Some Chicago beer back then was good, and some was not so good. That's still the case today. It will always be the case.
Q: And now? How does Chicago stack up nationally as a place for brewing and drinking?
John Barley: There isn't anywhere in the country right now that's seeing things like what's in Chicago. You've got more mature markets on the West Coast, but maybe they don't have the innovation that we do, or they're stuck in some ways. The East Coast is playing catch-up in some areas. In Chicago, we're staking out our ground as a place of innovation and variety, and I don't see anything else happening like it nationally.
Mosher: What I love about Chicago is that everyone isn't trying to make the same beer. Floyds, Two Brothers and Goose Island each have their approach. And then there's this newer wave: what we're doing at 5 Rabbit, Jared Rouben's food beers at Moody Tongue, the Off Color guys doing some interesting things and Metropolitan doing German lagers and other things. We've got a market that embraces a lot of points of view. That's what I'm always talking about when it comes to Chicago: We've got all kinds of beer. If you walk into a bar, even if it's all local, you're going to have so many different choices.
Q: Is that unique to Chicago? Does it define us as a beer-making, and beer-drinking, city?
Mosher: It's not the case in Portland, which is making very uninteresting beers in my opinion. It's not the case in Colorado. It's certainly not the case in San Diego. I hate drinking in San Diego. I enjoy drinking my first beer there -- it's an India pale ale, because that's what they have. But unless you want to drink IPAs all night -- which I never do -- it's hard. Variety is something we have a lot more of than any other market of our comparable size and development. I love the fact that a lot of people are getting into this business with no idea what they're doing. They feel like this is a place that they can do that. The market here rewards breweries for taking risks.
Gabriel Magliaro: Even early on, Goose and Floyds were pushing the boundaries of brewing, though in different directions. That put something in the DNA of Chicago. People are pushing pretty hard in every imaginable direction in town at this point.
Q: Gabriel, you quit your job in magazine advertising almost 10 years ago to start Half Acre, when the beer scene amounted to a handful of breweries. Did you have any inkling that this is what local brewing would eventually look like?
Magliaro: I had no idea what I was getting myself into. Craft beer didn't exist really at that time. You had Goose in the city and Three Floyds and Two Brothers in the suburbs, and for the magnitude of this city, it just seemed like there wasn't much beer that was being made here. The challenge then was that people just didn't care very much. Bars were interested in having beer on tap that they knew they could sell, which back then wasn't about what was new -- it was the opposite. What was proven was what was successful. Now the attitude is, "I've never had that and my customers have never had that. Let's get that on tap right now!" Back then it was, "Well, I'll give it a shot, but I doubt it's going to pan out."
Mosher: Can I tell him what your original plan was? I did a little bit of work for Gabriel back then, and he told me, "Yeah, we're going to make this lager. We're going to call it 'Lager.'" I was like, "You'll be making other beers later." He was like, "No, no, no -- this is it." And you were really adamant about it.
Magliaro: I was scared to fail more than anything else, and lager was something that I felt was a good idea. But we very quickly re-engineered our approach to do what we wanted, and to work our ideas outward rather than just to do what we thought might sell.
Mosher: That's the essence of craft beer, I think. If you do market research and you decide what the market wants, and you make that beer only, then you're not really a craft brewer. If you make beers you find interesting, tasty and that you want to drink -- and you think there's a need for it -- then you're a craft brewer. To me that's the only definition of craft beer that really makes sense.
Q: John, how helpful was it to have a handful of Chicago breweries, like Half Acre and Revolution, come before you to figure out what the local market wanted? Because the answer was probably hop-forward beers like Daisy Cutter and Anti-Hero more than it was a lager called "Lager." Was there advantage in the trial-and-error of breweries that preceded Solemn Oath?
Barley: Definitely. There was an inherited knowledge base, and that made our risks much more manageable. We didn't have a huge fear of failure because we had learned from what other people had done before us. And now, Gabriel and I probably talk once a month about some business decision or about some piece of equipment.
Q: How often do Chicago brewers talk in terms of sharing advice or ingredients or trading professional knowledge?
Barley: Constantly.
Magliaro: You have your network of people that you can go to.
Mosher: You're always looking at the breweries just ahead of you on the curve: "Tell us about your centrifuge, because we're kind of interested in that."
Barley: I've made that exact phone call.
Q: Despite the sense of comradeship, to what degree does it feel like you are competing against each other? Because you are, right?
Barley: We are, mostly when it comes to tap handles. A lot of little guys have started up during the last 12 months, and as long as they're making quality beer, I guess it's for the best. That market is only going to get more challenging, but competition is healthy. It will weed out who is serious and who is making quality product, and it will correct itself at some point.
Q: There's a lot of talk about the market correcting itself, both here and nationally, and the idea of a "craft beer bubble" that will burst. What's everyone's take on that?
Collins: We are still in our infancy in the Chicagoland market. There's lots of room to grow and lots of opportunity. There are lots of consumers who are just starting to experiment. And the person who might shop at Binny's or have a beer at Map Room is going to be buying aspirin and whatever else at a convenience store and they'll want the opportunity to buy a Half Acre or Solemn Oath while they're there. There's a lot of room for growth in terms of sales opportunities.
Blasingame: I feel like there will be too many breweries soon. The ones with the best business plans and the better beer quality will stick around. It just seems like there aren't enough bars or stores to consume all these different things. Even though there are some people making great beers, I don't think everyone will last. Not everyone has the same business savvy. Not everyone is equipped for this adventure.
Mosher: You have to have quality beer, you have to have great ideas and you better have a solid overall point of view and great execution on your marketing materials and packaging. It's a complicated business. But in terms of the volume of liquid, there's plenty of room to grow. Like in sports bars. That's where the new volume for craft beer is.
Collins: There's a couple things that play really well for craft brewers. For example, my son is 22 years old. More than half his beer consumption is craft beer. This next generation, they don't drink what we were drinking when we were 22 years old. That's a positive thing. Seven years ago, Windy City had 800 accounts (such as bars, supermarkets, liquor stores). Last year we serviced 3,500. In 2015 we're expecting to service 4,500. We're gaining somewhere between 70 and 90 accounts on a monthly basis. A lot of that growth is due to breweries across the country looking at the demographics and population of Chicago and deciding that they want to be here. There are challenges that come along with that, with the limited number of tap handles out there. But overall quality will be the key behind it.
Q: Despite all the growth of local breweries, SweetWater Brewing, of Atlanta, and 21st Amendment Brewery, of San Francisco -- very large breweries with relatively large distribution footprints -- just started distributing here. What is the appeal of Chicago to national breweries like these?
Mosher: A brewery that's trying to grow can go to 100 markets like Dayton, but it's a lot easier to go to a place like Chicago -- a big market with big distributors.
Collins: Local breweries are increasingly plentiful, but by San Diego standards (which has more than 100 breweries), we're still at the very early stages of growth. Bigger brewers see opportunity to gain some velocity here as nationally known brands. The pure demographics -- a large market, a growing market, an established market and a relatively beer savvy market, plus a phenomenal food scene, makes for a very attractive place to sell beer.
Mosher: That's a really important point about the food scene. It speaks to the variety in Chicago beer. People who tend to be open-minded about food tend to be open-minded about beer.
Q: From the brewery perspective, what does the Chicago beer industry boil down to these days?
Magliaro: "More." There's a lot of "more" right now. I used to feel like I had a pretty good handle on everything happening in the industry around us, and I made it part of my job to know that stuff. I've recently made it part of my job not to know that stuff.
Barley: You just can't keep up.
Magliaro: Yeah, and I've found it's negative to a certain degree to worry too much or to think too much about all this stuff that's happening because it becomes noise for my own mind and our business, and I think other people might be feeling the same thing across the industry. You just don't have the time to field the calls, or to care as much, because there are so many new breweries popping up.
Mosher: Mike Roper (owner of the Hopleaf bar) says that every couple of days he's got someone up there saying, "Sell our beer, please."
Magliaro: On every single level of our business, there's just so much more. Some of it's great. Some of it is not great. Some of it is just noise. The sheer volume is more than anyone one person can consume.
Mosher: The market is demanding that variety. At 5 Rabbit, we're re-brewing some of the big-bottle beers we made last year and there isn't as much interest the second time around. It's like, "Give us something new."
Q: I assume that the growth of "more" means it's more competitive for a brewery to get picked up by a distributor than five years ago?
Collins: Absolutely. We've had to turn down five or six different breweries, both local and national, that five years ago we would have brought in the fold. We have a limited amount of time that we can promote breweries. Some of the breweries we've had to turn down make solid beer, but when we looked at the different aspects of their business plan, and how it fell into our overall plan, sometimes it just didn't mesh. The bar has just been raised for getting distribution.
Q: Laura, when the Map Room started 22 years ago, you were one of a handful of bars in Chicago dedicated to craft beer, be it local or imported. You really haven't deviated much, continuing to have a healthy balance of beer styles from a variety of places -- far more than the average bar, and possibly to your detriment, since imported beer has less cache than it did 10 years ago. Has it been hard not to give into the trends of local and IPAs?
Blasingame: Well, we're the Map Room -- we're supposed to be about beer from around the world. But it's true that we do have so many more choices now with both locally and nationally produced beers. It's just amazing how far America has come in terms of being the greatest brewing nation in some ways now.
Barley: How do you make those decisions, as far as what local beers get on tap here?
Blasingame: We try to switch it up and we try to represent everybody. Basically if it tastes good to Jay, who buys our beer, and a couple other people, then we'll put it on. We really do try to represent everyone, but the beer that sells better is going to be the beer that shows up most often. We always have a sour beer on, we always have an IPA, a double IPA, and we always have some German-style beers. Only two breweries are always on: Stiegl and Three Floyds. We were Floyds' first account. Randy, I remember you and Ray Daniels (founder of the Cicerone beer certification program) talking about Alpha King when it first went on tap. I remember you saying that it was great but that it would get more balanced because it was such an extreme beer at the time.
Q: Half Acre is essentially doubling production with its new brewing facility. Does that feel like a risk, Gabriel?
Magliaro: It feels like a huge risk in terms of what it means for our business. We'll sell the beer; the demand is there for it. We're fortunate in that way. But it's a huge risk in terms of the culture of our company and what it feels like to work there. It will totally transform my business in a way that I can't say I understand right now.
Q: I think it's incredible that you can double production and know that it will sell. It seems to me that there aren't a lot of industries with that sort of appetite-in-waiting.
Magliaro: During the last two-plus years we've said "no" to a lot of people: "We'd love to give you beer, but we can't do it." So there's pent-up demand. Then we'll be in a place where we again have to be very conscious about how we grow our business. At what point is growth no longer a good idea? Because that exists. That's real. Do I want to sell beer at Costco? We do not, because there are too many other places that speak to our vibe much more.
Q: How would you describe that vibe, and how does it tie into Half Acre being sold at some places, but not others? I imagine it's a discussion that's frequently being had in the craft beer industry.
Magliaro: We're not a small brewery, but we don't use "more" as our only guiding light. Because our volume and goals aren't endless, we need to be sure that we're selling beer at the places we sincerely like and reflect us in some way. We're not only selling beer at local bars with five tap handles or at small husband-and-wife-owned shops. But Costco represents the exact opposite end of the spectrum. It's all about "more." I'm not knocking "more," but it's not a lever we're looking for or need at this point in time.
Q: What are some things that trouble you about Chicago's beer industry?
Blasingame: There are some issues with pricing. I don't think that's good for beer. Some local breweries are charging a lot for a product that's 6 percent alcohol by volume. I don't want to single anyone out, but it's not these guys (motions to Magliaro and Barley). I don't want to have an $8 pint on my menu unless it's for a pint of something from Belgium that's special. I don't want an $8 pint from Chicago.
Q: Funny you say that because I just saw Three Floyds' Zombie Dust on tap downtown for $10, and it was the most expensive thing on their menu. I asked why a local pale ale cost so much, and was told "supply and demand" -- they could sell it at that price. If the market will support that price, why is it bad for beer?
Magliaro: A $10 pint of Zombie Dust is a really bad thing, and it's not brewery driven. It's a huge discrepancy between brewer and retailer and consumer. And often there's confusion from the consumer that it was not a choice by Three Floyds to do that. That's doing a disservice to everyone in that process and really, it's a choice made by the retailer. Anything that gives people sticker shock or gives them reason to shy away from craft beer is a negative thing.
Blasingame: A lot of bars are just overcharging just because they can.
Q: Laura, does that mean you will you pass on a keg for no other reason than you feel it's overpriced?
Blasingame: Yes. Some things that are very highly priced we will buy because it's special or rare. But some stuff we won't because we don't want to pass that cost on to our customers. It started with this latest wave of brewery openings, maybe three years ago.
Q: We have people standing in ever-longer lines to get rare beers like Goose Island's Bourbon County Stout and other things, like Zombie Dust, that are unable to stay on shelves for more than a few hours because they have an almost cultlike status. Does that mean craft beer has become a success or is it something to worry about?
Mosher: It's a scary thing when beer turns into a status symbol or a luxury item. People are buying certain brands that are highly rated on the Internet so that it turns into this whole thing where a brand can have cache far beyond its quality. I'm a marketing guy -- I like cache. But when it gets to the point where people are buying something only because of cache, that's bothersome to someone who cares about what's in the glass. It becomes a little like collecting Pokemon cards. People who believe this is a better beer because it has a higher score on the beer websites, sure, to them it will taste better. That's the way our neuropsychology works. But as a producer, you want people to be clearheaded about what they're drinking.
Q: What happens if they're not clearheaded?
Mosher: Newer enthusiasts to the hobby have less certainty about their own ability to judge quality, so they defer to other people to help them make that decision. There's a certain point where that becomes flawed, and it maybe becomes the only thing you care about. You have a lot of breweries that make equally good beer that have a harder time selling it than they should. It's crazy how much we're influenced by factors other than what's actually in your mouth. It's a symptom of becoming a luxury market where some people are only really concerned with pedigree and psychological value. It's silly.
Blasingame: Hype leapt into beer. But I've got it good. I can't complain too much.
Magliaro: I think we should all feel pretty lucky, honestly. People don't give a crap about all kinds of things but they happen to give a crap about this. We should cherish it. There are some downsides to it for sure, but people could wake up tomorrow and not care and we're having a very, very different kind of conversation.
Q: So what's next for beer in Chicago?
Barley: We're in the midst of what I consider a permanent revolution with Chicago beer. At first, a lot of newer Chicago breweries were throwing all sorts of crap against the wall to see what stuck. But as companies, we're maturing now and getting more serious. During the last 12 months, we've gotten our house in order at Solemn Oath. It's the next chapter in our business. It started out as, "This is cool -- we're making beer!" Now we're trying to make sure we can continue to grow, make sure the people that work for us are happy, that the customers are happy and that the distributors are happy. I'm an entrepreneur. This is what I want to do. Growing our brewery is the next phase of that, and that's happening across the industry. We'll continue to see more and more innovations from both existing breweries and new concepts from ones we don't even know about yet. What I think is most impressive is that we all feel like we're just getting started.
Magliaro: I think due to both merit and consumer interest, we'll see some of today's essential craft brewers continue to grow and edge out big producers in areas like street fests, music fests and stadiums. There's a lot of creative progress happing right now, and I hope that the amount of creative and intelligent people pushing on it will yield a seismic event. I don't know what it is, but an eye-opening shift that turns the beer industry upside down would be great.
Mosher: Chicago could become the Belgium of the United States. Let's have a goal -- let's have an extreme, crazy goal. How good can beer be? How fantastic, how varied? We've got a lot of great resources: a great brewers guild, a great beer society, the Cicerone program and the Siebel Institute. It's that Chicago thing: Make no small plans. We could be the most famous city in the world for great beer if we wanted to do that. So let's do it.
jbnoel@tribpub.com
