Our newest homebrew club spotlight features Brixie’s Brewers, which is one of the closest suburban clubs, relative to the city. This near west club meets at Brixie’s, a hidden gem of a beer bar in Brookfield (of zoo fame). We highly recommend checking it out if you’re in the area. Founded by Brett Semenske and Dave Fetty, who live in the near west suburbs, the club has over 50 paying members (annual dues are $10). The club offers homebrewers an online forum to air questions, concerns and collectively discuss their love of beer and brewing as well as an array of offline services and activities, including a communal library and a myriad of social outings.
A relative new kid on the block when it comes to homebrew clubs, Brixie’s Brewers is just about to celebrate its 3rd anniversary this summer. However, they have already done several barrel collaborations, including a tasty stout that they tapped at the meeting we attended. At April’s meeting, around 30 people shared everything from a PB&J beer to a delicious first timer’s IPA while discussing plans for AHA’s National Homebrew Day. Chicagoland Winemakers, a wine and beer making supply store, will host the club as they brew 3-4 different beers to serve at their club picnic in July.
In addition to group brews, the club participates in AHA Club Competitions, organizes group tours each Fall to local breweries, holds monthly social meetings at various beer bars in the Near West ‘burbs and organizes technical talks on a range of brewing techniques. In April, the club tackled kegging your homebrew. They meet on the second Wednesday of every month at Brixie’s for the club meeting and their next social meeting is at Lunar Brewing in Villa Park on May 23rd – learn more by checking out their website or stopping by a meeting.
To our fans, friends and supporters -
Our announcement yesterday has raised some questions about whether our leaving The Plant was due to significant problems with the building’s redevelopment. That’s not the case.
The Plant, led by founder, John Edel, and Director of Operations, Melanie Hoekstra, is an innovative project, which we felt lucky to be part of. Whatever brewery (or any business) that becomes part of The Plant will be a welcome element of a spectacular organization in a remarkable building.
Thanks for all the support and encouragement we’ve received since our announcement – it means so much.
After a lot of thinking and soul searching, we have decided to move out of The Plant. We can’t tell you how disappointed we are to leave our friends and neighbors in the Back of the Yards neighborhood. The vision and ambition of The Plant is unprecedented and we were excited to be part of it.
We feel that it is our responsibility to our investors, our distributor and you, our consumers, to ensure that we continue moving forward toward launching New Chicago Beer Co. on time, as expected. We wish John Edel and everyone else involved with the project nothing but the best. We hope to be able to drink beer there in the future.
As for where we will be brewing – we are working on finalizing a location and we promise to keep you posted. No matter what, we have a plan in place that we feel confident will ensure our launch as planned later this year. Please feel free to email abigail@newchicagobeer.com with any additional questions or concerns about the brewery.
At this time, know that our priority has always been and continues to be making amazing beer and getting it into your hands as soon as possible. Thank you all for your support, encouragement and patience as we move forward past this transition and toward launch.
Sincerely,
Jesse, Samuel and the rest of the New Chicago Beer Co. team
Urban Knaves of Grain (UKG) is one of the more established homebrew clubs in Chicagoland – getting ready to celebrate its 19th anniversary next month. The oldest homebrew club in DuPage County, UKG started when students taking homebrew classes at College of DuPage decided to keep the fun going after classes concluded. Their professor, Chris Campanelli, organized it and about 20 people attended their first meeting in 1993. Last month’s attendance was easily twice that and annual membership was around 100 at the end of last year.
Club activities are robust – with social nights, club meetings and technical meetings occurring individually each month. Social nights are an effort toward geographical diversity for a group whose membership comes from a wide area of Chicagoland. Club and technical meetings meet in Warrenville and Winfield respectively each month. The latter are more educational in design, covering topics ranging from homebrew techniques to beer styles to tasting/judging practices.
The group conducts club-only competitions, but also annually hosts the Drunk Monk Challenge (DMC), a homebrew competition open to all homebrewers. The 2012 DMC had over 850 entries and required more than 100 volunteers to act as stewards and judges. UKG is fortunate to have almost half of their membership be BJCP certified, due to a club dedication to BJCP education since UKG’s inception. Fun fact – at the club’s first BJCP exam in 1995, both Jim and Jason Ebel, of Two Brothers Brewing, took the exam!
The next major event on UKG’s calendar will be a celebration of the American Homebrewers Association Big Brew Day, hosted at Two Brothers. If you are out west and want to learn more about the club and it’s activities, check out their website.
As promised, here is the second installment of our Homebrewer Mailbag:
Question 1: I have heard a lot of different opinions about secondary fermenters. Some claim it is necessary with almost every beer, others only if you are adding stuff (fruit? hops?), and yet more claim its almost never necessary (just toss additives into the primary!) unless you are doing some really/odd crazy beer. What are your thoughts on it?
You are right, there are loads of opinions on this topic. Good beer can be made both ways, and the major differences are largely cosmetic and may not greatly impact the flavor of the beer on the scale of a home brewer. In general, you can improve the clarity of a beer by using a secondary, which may be more important for lighter beers. I generally use a secondary more because with my brewing set up it makes dry hopping easier (I use a 5 gal corny keg with ½” cut of the dip tube as a secondary). Based on what I have read, the general rule of thumb is that you do not need to use a secondary fermenter if you do not plan on having it in the primary for longer than a month (the amount of time is greatly debated). Clarity can be improved by using a secondary but careful siphoning from a primary will also result in a very clear beer as well.
Question 2: I wanted to start coming up with my own recipe and buying the individual ingredients (still specialty grains + extract at best) from a local brew shop. However, I am a bit overwhelmed by all the options available. While this is an incredibly general/vague question…what is your process or how do you go about creating a recipe? How do I know which extract is the one I want or which hops will give me the taste/aroma I desire?
This is a great question, making your own recipes is a great way to expand you knowledge of brewing. I will also say that recently the quality and variety of homebrew kits available locally and online has greatly increased. I mention this for two reasons: 1) the kits will give you a bit of variety both in beer style but also brewing techniques and may even cost less than building your own recipe… buy one every now and then to keep you on your toes. 2) In my opinion brewing kits, or at least the recipes, are a great way to start designing your own recipes. My favorite dark IPA recipe was developed this way. Pick a style you like and decide what elements you would like to add or change. More/different hops, color, flavors, etc go nuts just keep good notes! But this leads to the second part of your question…
How do you know the difference between the different types of grains, hops, and malt extracts? There is plenty of literature on the different types of hops and malts and while reading up on the types of ingredients is great, that pales in comparison to trying them. Consider trying out classic styles while understanding what ingredients go into those beers. Brew Your Own magazine has a section in each issue that is dedicated style profiles. It looks at a certain style and gives information on what ingredients go into that beer. They tell you everything from the ABV range to the percentage of specialty malts to types of hops in the brew. Once you have a good idea of what should be present in that style, you’ll have a better idea of what you should add to get the flavors your trying to achieve. Brewing Classic Styles by Jamil Zainasheff and John Palmer is also another fantastic resource on classic styles. Lastly, learn from other homebrewers mistakes. Register on Homebrewtalk.com forum and ask for opinions on the current recipe your putting together. There are more than enough enthusiastic homebrews out there that are willing to put in their two cents.
Another option for designing recipes is using a brewing software program. There are lots of free and paid programs available which are very helpful for both extract and all grain (although they are much more useful with all grain recipes). Most good programs will have the general beer style guidelines from BJCP embedded in them that allow you to compare your recipe to the guidelines.
Question 3: Ever heard of this: www.partypig.com? As someone that recognizes that he will probably never (or at least not for a long time) get into true kegging, do you know/think this could be a fun alternative?
While we haven’t tried the Party Pig, we admit it looks cool. Our one hesitation is its cost for the size of the system and the fact that you have to pay for a proprietary expansion pack ($5 each) for each batch. If you do try it, let us know!
That’s it for our Homebrewer Mailbag! We stumbled across this article a few weeks back and thought it was a great reminder for all homebrewers. As always, let us know what you think and keep the questions and tips coming!
What officially opened in August of last year was really two years in the making. SkyyGreens, the second aquaponics company to open in The Plant, is dedicated to expanding the options for Chicagoans to find locally produced greens and other vegetables. Galen Williams (pictured at left) is the CEO and day-to-day face of SkyyGreens. After many years working as an adviser for entrepreneurs and startups, most recently at Morgan Stanley, he was asked by one of his clients to help out with SkyyGreens, joining the team last summer. He sees the market for locally and innovatively grown food to be ripe with opportunity (pun intended). “I don’t think anyone can perceive what (the industry) will be in 18 months,” he says.
Currently, Williams is working on developing scalable and sustainable growing systems – experimenting with cycle times, several types of greens and different seed varieties. It’s all in an effort to perfect indoor farming in their space at The Plant, which has it’s own unique microenvironment. In addition to the specifics of growing, Williams works with Chef Advisors, including Scott Walton of Market House Chicago and Daven Wardynski of 676 Restaurant. Both chefs are involved in local food sources and provide a connection to the greater Chicago restaurant and food industry.
As soon as the City of Chicago signs off on how to designate indoor farming entities for purposes of licensing and business permits, SkyyGreens hopes to sell their produce across the greater Chicago area. In the meantime, we’re all working together to figure out which beers go best with arugula and the other tasty greens they are growing!
Stay updated on SkyyGreens by liking them on Facebook.
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