our walk to work today

Nothing will stop us from brewing beer. Not even a historical midwestern snowstorm that has pretty much the entire city of Chicago shut down. Behold, I documented for you what it was like to walk to the brewery today. Before we even left the back gate...


At first we tried to walk down the sidewalks. The winds caused incredible drifting and the sidewalks were nigh unpassable.


Phelps took to leaping through the drifts, which probably wouldn't have lasted long before his tiny heart gave out. So we moved out into the street. We didn't see any cars ourselves, but we were able to walk in tire tracks, so someone managed to get where they were going this morning.


Neighbors were out all over the place, starting to dig out.


We worked long and hard for many years to have this privilege of living just a few blocks from work. We almost never drive our car. And today, no one else is driving their car either.


This is the west side of our building. Huge drifts. Fortunately, the snow had drifted off of the sidewalks on the north side of the building (our side).



Phelps once again engages his leaping skillz to get into the brewery door.


See the joy on this face? Beer does that.


Our first mash-in for the day. No snowstorm can keep us from puttin' some Krank in the tank!

Krankshaft! Flywheel!

Summer is here, if our beer sales have anything to do with it. Krankshaft and Flywheel more than doubled in sales over the past 2 months. Whoo HOO! You drink it, we'll brew it. We promise.

For a short time, we had a Spring seasonal available, I-beam, an Alt-style beer. We loved this beer and we were sorry to see it go. But, our tanks are churning away with Krankshaft, Flywheel, and Dynamo right now. We'll let it ride. Don't give up on I-beam, though. You'll probably see it again.

Doug was allowed to flex his creative muscles recently. The Craft Brewers Conference (held here in Chicago) in April and Chicago Craft Beer Week in May both were great reasons to try brewing some unique beers and give birth to our Urban Evolution Series. Stay tuned for more. He's just getting started.

Brewing cherry, consider yourself broken.

Yesterday was our first brew day, people! We offered a play-by-play account on Twitter and Facebook all evening, so some of you were sorta there. Hilarious mishaps were also in attendance, see the photo to the right for how not to open a 2008 lb super-sack of grain.

We have more photos to share, but they are presently in the queue for a major update to our website, Facebook, etc. We'll get to the web updates as soon as the tanks are full of beer. Believe us, the beer (!) and the website will be worth the wait.

Our good pal Rob was at the brewery for a while yesterday, helping out and shooting photos and video. He loaded the videos to YouTube. Short video 1. Short video 2. Short video 3. Enjoy!