Kyle Nabilcy
Beer retail in Chicago means Binny’s, plain and simple. Yes, there are some excellent smaller shops, like Hopleaf or the recently-restored Fischman’s, but Binny’s Beverage Depot is so dominant, with its thirty-eight locations, it’s basically a Chicago beer meme.
I whirred my way through Chicago for 42 hours or so last week, with the annual arrival of the James Beard Awards. (I struggle to not call it a weekend, because it felt like one even though it was Sunday through Tuesday.) I visited a taproom (briefly), I met with friends for food and drink, and I even put on some fancy dress. But I can’t help myself; I almost always, whenever I’m in Chicago, visit a Binny’s. It’s so prosaic, so beer-dorky, but what am I gonna do, not buy beer in Chicago?
The draw, of course, is that Chicago still gets a lot of beer Madison doesn’t. Nationally, one of the first to come to mind was in fact the first beer I drank during this most recent visit: Allagash White. It’s damn near a perfect Belgian wit, hazy before hazy was cool, made to step lightly on the palate but utterly quench thirst. I found it on tap at Wood, a stylish fire-centric concept in the Boystown neighborhood, but it’s not difficult to locate in the greater Chicagoland area.
Also not difficult to locate: last year’s James Beard winner in the Outstanding Wine, Spirits, or Beer Professional category, Sam Calagione of Dogfish Head. I ran into Sam at two different James Beard events, and he was part of a third, unrelated event that I wished I could have made it to: a panel discussion led by Josh Noel from the Chicago Tribune on May 7. Dude was everywhere, handing out SeaQuench cans like he was the Johnny Appleseed of beer.
Shortly after returning to Madison, I’d be chatting up Noel about Goose Island, hazy IPAs, and pastry stouts at Funk Factory for his book talk there as part of Madison Craft Beer Week. The beers I picked up at Binny’s from Hubbard’s Cave definitely tick two of those boxes. The Une Annee spinoff brews a series of imperial IPAs named “Fresh” that are Midwestern standards of the hazy IIPA style. I don’t think any of those have arrived in Madison since Hubbard’s Cave started showing up on shelves, so I couldn’t help myself.
The bottle of Coffee and Cakes (which also just tapped at Dexter’s near the end of Craft Beer Week) was a similar impulse purchase. Show me aggressive amounts of maple and coffee in an imperial stout and it’s gonna be really hard for me to walk away. In this case, I walked away with a bottle in hand, and only got as far as the Mikerphone section before the Adjunct-HypeMonster bit me again.
Hazy IPAs are pretty cool right now. Milkshake IPAs are still pretty cool right now. Piña colada IPAs are, weirdly, cool right now. (Like, who decided that was a thing? And that it could actually work?) Mikerphone, in its Mikerphone-ness, just mashed all three of those things together and gave it a great, ridiculous name: Oye Coco Nut, a piña colada milkshake double IPA. Almost as ridiculous was the pink, be-ponied label on a bottle of Brony, a double dry-hopped double IPA from Chicago’s Illuminated Brew Works that I brought home thanks to the cousin I was staying with. If you don’t know what a Brony is, I don’t recommend Googling it.
The haze didn’t stop at the Binny’s on Grand parking lot. It wafted all the way over to Ravenswood, where I was on a quest to bring beers home for some good friends. The beer, a collaboration between Begyle Brewing in Chicago and Galway Bay Brewery in Ireland called Goodbye Blue Monday, is an oatmeal IPA with a big sweet malt bill. It hadn’t made it to Binny’s delivery dock yet, but Begyle’s taproom cooler was fully stocked with it, along with a new refreshing American pale ale called Ghost Man on Third. I didn’t spend much time there, but from prior experience, Begyle is a solid neighborhood brewery, with a cool industrial taproom and a growing barrel program.
As with so much of Chicago’s beer scene, it’s worth checking out whether you’re in town for a weekend. Or just a “weekend.”