Yesterday was a cool beer day for me, even if I didn't get to drink much. My buddy is starting up a new brewery in Chicago called Empirical. We didn't think we'd have time to go up there since they were pouring at Hoptacular but they had some mornings they needed to attend at the brewery so we ventured up there to check it out. They are a small operation right now but have tons of room to expand. They plan on opening a taproom once it gets moving along. We tasted they four beers and three were good: wavelength wit, atomic amber ) honey hypothesis), and infinity IPA (IBU overload). After the tour and the tastes, we were scheduled to head out to a really nice lunch downtown but my buddy asked if we wanted to sit in on a management meeting and then grab lunch at a bar nearby. How often does that happen so I said sure. The meeting was basically an interview for a brewer (they plan on having more than one). He brought it 4 different beers, one IPA that was phenomenal and 3 offshoots of that. We then spent an hour throwing out ideas for new beers, some marketing ideas, and they took a lot of feedback from my wife and I as we are more on the consumer side of it all. We followed all that up with a New Glarus Serendipity Happy Accident Ale (cherry, Apple, cranberry) and a Revolution Very Mad Cow milk stout. I found out that Half Acre is expanding and moving in close to them (along with a few other new breweries) so tht area should be a cool destination for beer lovers. It was a very cool morning.
At that point I was pretty hungry so they took us just down the street to Hopleaf, a bar I've always wanted to visit but always missed because I would run out of time or would get just too drunk to make it up there. The food was great and I had a tast of the following beers:
Pipeworks Ninja vs Unicorn (f yeah...actually orders a 4oz pour of this one)
Goose Island the Muddy-awesome
Ten Ninety the Ogen - farmhouse ale with pumpkin and spices. Pretty good but not blow me away good. Better than they're cayenne stout though.
At that point, it was time for my actual monthly full glass of beer. I didn't want to **** around and this 2011 vintage looked good to me...
We also saw some Pipeworks that my buddy thought I might want to try so he bought this for the table:
It was a cool morning. It was nice to have a typical "BSD" Chicago trip even if I did remain sober and spit out a lot. I laughed because we bought some Cherry Truffle Abduction from a liquor store next to Hopleaf and we are walking around with beer glasses (gifts from Empirical) and several bottles of beers looking for a cab. All this before 2:00pm. I guess some things never change.
Oh, and late night post dinner drink was a Three Floyds Dreadnaught sample once I saw the Aggie score.