St. Louis’ Six Row Brewing Company Coming To Chicago

In Beer News by Ryan

A brewery we first introduced Chicagoans to during our one-time-only Chicago Craft Beer Week event, “South of 80,” has officially inked a deal to bring its beers to Chicago full-time.

Six Row Brewing Company’s beers will begin heading out to bars and retailers beginning in early December.

Six Row was one of four breweries located in downstate Illinois and St. Louis, whose beers were relatively unknown to those of us north of Interstate 80, featured at our event at The Green Lady on May 22nd.

Here’s a snippet from our profile of Six Row, written in a lead-up to “South of 80”.

Part of the growing craft beer scene in St. Louis, Six Row opened in October last year and has quickly grown to be one of the most prominent brewpubs in town, with local food magazine Sauce even calling their whiskey barrel porter an instant “gotta-have-it beer.” We managed to get our hands on that whiskey-barrel porter and can back up Sauce’s big talk; it’s very smooth and chalked full of whiskey flavor while clocking in at an easy drinking 6% ABV.

Named for both the six people involved in created the brewery and the sixrow style of malt used in brewing, Six Row distributes around St. Louis and in the Metro East area of Illinois, and can even be found as far north as Effingham – but for one night only, the beer, the brewer and one of the owners will be north of 80.

Among the Six Row beers poured that night were the Double IPA (both tap and cask), their flagship Whale and a cask vanilla porter, with the two cask offerings receiving high marks.

And how about those cask beers? Boy, did they impress once they warmed up. All that vanilla in Six Row’s porter really popped in a way we hoped would happen but couldn’t be sure of until it actually emerged. We also saw a lot of people trying the Double IPA and dry-hopped Double IPA on cask, side-by-side, with the cask version seemingly being a favorite of the two more-often-than-not.

Their regular bottle lineup, in bombers, includes the Double IPA, Whale (a wheat pale ale), Porter and Honey Weizen (brewed with Missouri honey). Six Row also has a number of rotating taps and seasonals at their home base in St. Louis, some of which will hopefully find their way up here at some point.

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Chicago Beverage Systems, who we worked with to bring Six Row and most everyone else’s beers to the event, will be distributing Six Row’s brews.

Once we find out what beers will be available here, and in what form (bottle or draft), we will most certainly pass it along.

According to Chicago Beverage Systems, we’ll see the four aforementioned beers in bombers starting in December with yet to be determined draft offerings after the first of the year.

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From we Guys, Drinking Beer, to the guys and gals at Six Row, we’re pleased to be the first to welcome you back to Chicago.

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Ryan

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Equal parts beer nerd and policy geek, Ryan is now the curator of the Guys Drinking Beer cellar. The skills he once used to dig through the annals of state government as a political reporter are now put to use offering unique takes on barrel-aged stouts, years-old barleywines and 10 + year verticals.

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