Kyle Nabilcy
I didn’t have much of a bachelor party before I got married. This was more or less by design, since a lot of the stereotypical bachelor party stuff isn’t really in my wheelhouse. So when I tell you that I was really looking forward to this last weekend and the scheduled trip to Chicago for a friend’s bachelor party, you can trust that it wasn’t for the usual debauched reasons. Beer would certainly be involved. And a meal we’d come to call Roof Meat, but I’ll get to that.
When I wrote about my Thanksgiving trip to Rhode Island last year, I mentioned that the entirety of that state is just smaller than Dane County. The thing that blows my mind about Chicago is that it has more officially designated neighborhoods (“community areas,” technically) than Wisconsin has counties. You can limit yourself to a pretty tight geographic area and still hit new breweries every time you visit the city.
With very few exceptions, our eight man crew stayed within the boundaries of the Lake View neighborhood. After wading through the home game crowd around Wrigley, we walked over to Corridor Brewery and Provisions to get our haze on. Corridor had become a favorite of mine, after only a couple pours, at last year’s Great Taste of the Midwest. I was itching for more and semi-strong armed the crew into checking it out.
The tap list is tidy because the brewing space is limited. Six visible tanks, six tap lines, and one (a Galaxy double dry-hopped IPA called Cosmic Juicebox) was already tapped out. But with names like Duke Juicem, Bendy Straw, and Wizard Fight, it didn’t matter how many were killed, we were ordering them all.
Corridor does hazy pale ales like nobody’s business, and Duke Juicem is kind of the flagship. It’s a real quencher, fuzzy and tropical. The raspberry version of Bendy Straw had been getting mixed reviews on the Beer Advocate forums, but the more I drank of it the more I liked it; I ended up bringing home a fresh-filled crowler. With an opaque pink body and plenty of vanilla, it reminded me a bit of of Candy Ghosts from Providence’s Long Live, but Chicago’s pink pale ale was better. The bucket of frites at Corridor is also very much worth ordering.
Technically, Burnt City Brewing sits just over the border in Lincoln Park, but it was so close to our Airbnb, who’s gonna nitpick? Since its name change and menu expansion in 2016, Burnt City had been on my radar for a visit, and this was the time.
We didn’t check out the bowling alley also operated by the brewery. As with all of the taprooms we visited, Burnt City is spacious and accommodating to groups large and small. Think Next Door here in Madison, but with even more floor space. The food menu is broad and caloric, and the taps were mostly summery: a cryo-hopped wild farmhouse ale, a pilsner, an IPA with hibiscus. A bonkers blueberry coffee stout stood out as an exception, but it still went over well at the table.
After some World Cup soccer, coffee via the amusingly-named Department of Coffee and Social Affairs and a delivered breakfast from Do-Rite Donuts on Day Two, only the one taproom that every beer geek in the squad wanted to hit remained: the shiny new Mousetrap from Off Color Brewing. Off Color head honcho John Laffler is a rakishly charming, pleasantly frustrating iconoclast, one of American brewing’s handful of Han Solo types. Of course he’d open his new tap room in the Goose Island ‘hood, after leaving that brewery shortly after the AB-InBev acquisition. Of course he’d make a wild ale version of High Life in collaboration with Miller. And of course he’d make a “tiki weisse” that tastes just like those highlighter-colored ones from Florida, but is so pale golden it’s almost off-white.
Kyle Nabilcy
But the taproom isn’t particularly ironic; in fact, it’s pretty damn classy. Polished wood, marquee bulbs, tilework mosaics, and ferns — ferns, in the brewing space, for Pete’s sake — make for a supremely appealing hangout. The taps are even more seasonal than at Burnt City, with light offerings like Koi (fermented on house-brewed sake lees), Beer for Tacos (a margarita-esque gose), and Ghost Lemons (made in collaboration with Allagash Brewing in Maine). With so many unfiltered beers, it’s hard to keep thinking that the hazy IPA trend came out of nowhere.
There’s a through line for everything. Back when my bachelor buddy was living in Texas, he fell in love with Texas barbecue, like any reasonable meat-eating human would. For this, his bachelor party, he wanted to give everyone else the same chance. He ordered some meats from Kreuz Market in Lockhart, Texas, and on the roof of our Airbnb, we drank Jester King beer (out of Austin, natch) and ate some of the most legendary barbecue in the country. Through beer and brisket, haze and smoke, we toasted our friend’s happiness and good fortune, in a way that felt uniquely right when assembled in the City of Broad Shoulders.
