Metropolitan Brewing has long been one of our go-to breweries for incredibly solid, well-crafted lagers, and in the constant rush of stories about This Week’s New Craft Brewery some of the news about their expansion seems to have gone unnoticed. It was just under a month ago that the Red Eye published this story about the plans to find a new location, with an intent to quadruple their brewing capacity over the coming years. Back then, the line seemed to be drawn pretty solidly: No pub, no tap room, just a production brewery, thank you.
At the time, drinks reporter Kate Bernot (who has probably the best job in the city) wrote this:
Hurst has long maintained that Metropolitan Brewing will not open a pub or tavern, but will remain a production brewery with Chicago as its home.
That seemed pretty cut and dry, right?
Well, today we get an interesting new update from Mark Schipper and the Inside-Booster with what seems like a potential change of heart – at least, that’s what we’re hoping. Posted to the publication’s Facebook page here (strangely, this is the only place the hyperlocal news outlet publishes its content online), it looks as though somewhere down the line, a tasting room or even a taproom could be somewhere in the cards.
Maybe. We hope.
Metro’s Doug Hurst told the Inside-Booster the following:
“We would like to have a tasting room,” said Hurst. “Which I differentiate from a tap room, right away, which is what Half Acre started with. It would be a place where you essentially taste beers, where you can get a growler filled and buy beer to go. In a long term expansion plan I would like to have a tap room where you can come and drink the latest beer and that’s about it. But that’s much further down the road.”
While Metropolitan doesn’t create the constantly-changing churn of unique one-offs that breweries like Half Acre and Revolution do, Metro does occasionally release beers like coriander-spiced Krankshaft or an India Pale Lager, among others, and we’d love to see Metro stretch their legs a little more in that direction – though we’re pretty sure the Metro team is perfectly happy cranking out barrel after barrel of top-quality lager beer, and they’re well within their right to keep doing what they’re doing. It certainly seems to be working well for them.
Should a tasting room or taproom ever open, we’d be happy to hand them our cash directly for their beer, whether it’s for a unique growler or a pour of ultrafresh Krankshaft. We’re not holding out breaths or anything, though.