<\/a>The beer menu from Stockholms.<\/p><\/div>\n
This is just to say that when I describe Stockholm’s raspberry ale as “tart raspberry air,” I mean that almost literally.\u00a0 It had the lightest body I can remember ever trying.\u00a0 I would love to do a chemical and density breakdown, just to prove that water is more dense than this beer.\u00a0 If you freeze it, it would very likely not just float but hover.<\/p>\n
Also, I just love the fact that they offer classes through the freaking park district on how to be a beer dork.\u00a0 Fantastic.<\/p>\n
Limestone:<\/strong> I checked out a bunch of places for this and talked to a bunch of people and the one thing I keep coming back to when I think about putting together this piece is “damn, I’d like to get back to Limestone.”\u00a0 Not to take away from any of the other places on the list, but this was some very good beer in a place you’d never expect to see it show up.\u00a0 (The word I originally used was “soulless” to describe the stretch of Rt. 59 that it’s camped out on.)<\/p>\nMaybe it’s because it was a hell of a long dry drive down I-55 to get there, maybe it was because it’s so inconspicuous from the outside, maybe because the service was just great, maybe it’s because their beer was really flipping good.\u00a0 You gotta love any place that’ll throw together a Russian Imperial in the middle of July, and then make a small stout out of the runnings, and that’s not even the oddest thing on the menu, and then have the balls to do it right in the middle of a chain-restaurant-populated desert.\u00a0 If the brewers there ever don’t feel appreciated by their Plainfield bretheren, please come downtown.<\/p>\n
Barring that, I’d like to direct Ryan and Andrew’s attention to the fact that they have a special Fantasy Football setup created.\u00a0 This means nothing to me, but apparently it’s a game they play somehow, so I’ll leave the rest to them – just thought you guys would want to be made aware of it.<\/p>\n
America’s Brewing:<\/strong> Ryan actually helped me out with some of the research for America’s (pretty sure I owe you a beer for that), as he checked America’s Brewing out at the Hoptacular down at the Aragon.\u00a0 I was on the fence about adding them in, until he told me about them dryhopping beers on-site through a sort of hops-pump.\u00a0 I had to know more.<\/p>\nTalking to brewer Mike Rybinski, he told me about the process of (and I hope I’m not giving away any trade secrets here, Mike) getting an actual industrial strength water pump from one of those home improvement big-box stores, playing around with the innards and using it to run beer directly through a container with a handful of fresh hop cones.<\/p>\n
Now, he told me that this was inspired by something that Dogfishhead has done previously, so perhaps this is common knowledge on other parts of the interwebs, but it kinda blew me away and I’m upset that I didn’t take the time to swing by the recent Oak Park Microbrew Review where he said he’d have the hops engine out and in play.\u00a0 Alas, maybe next time.<\/p>\n
Flossmoor:<\/strong> I just love the fact they started bottling on the 75th anniversary of Prohibition.\u00a0 I’m a sucker for Prohibition-related dates and anniversaries and things like that (and we’ll get into that Batch 19<\/a> stuff at a later date).\u00a0 Also, a bomber of Flossmoor’s Pullman Brown Ale is what was enjoying the night before my little TV date, for whatever that’s worth.\u00a0 (It’s very good.)<\/p>\nSo there you have it.\u00a0 I’m sure I still forgot a couple of things that I wanted to squeeze in that I otherwise couldn’t, but suffice it to say that doing the legwork on this was not exactly a chore.\u00a0 I got to check out some places that I’ve been meaning to, as well as enjoy some of the output of some very underrated brewers – and hopefully send a little business their way as well.\u00a0 Of course, thanks as well to Chicago Magazine for letting me sully the pages of their publication just for one month.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
A short supplement to my recent Chicago Magazine article about Chicagoland’s Best Suburban Microbreweries. How did I miss Lunar for so long?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":1413,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[21],"tags":[288,293,287,285,286,983],"yoast_head":"\n
Chicago Mag's Best Suburban Microbreweries | Guys Drinking Beer<\/title>\n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n\t \n\t \n\t \n \n \n \n \n \n\t \n\t \n\t \n