Kyle Nabilcy
I saw Chicago, it was rotting
Jazz ballads played low. No one saw me
Crawl like a gecko toward sunlight
So many fat crows with appetite
-“Plastic Skeletons,” Jealous of the Birds
And having answered so I turn once more to those who sneer at this my city, and I give them back the sneer and say to them:
Come and show me another city with lifted head singing so proud to be alive and coarse and strong and cunning.
Flinging magnetic curses amid the toil of piling job on job, here is a tall bold slugger set vivid against the little soft cities
-“Chicago,” Carl Sandburg
I’ve been listening to “Plastic Skeletons” a lot lately. It’s a catchy track, with shifts from verse to bridge to chorus so distinct in personality, I feel like I’m listening to Steven Soderbergh’s Traffic in song form. But that Chicago line has been bugging me. I like Chicago! A lot of people like Chicago. And isn’t its dusky industrial spirit part of what people like about it?
That’s certainly what Carl Sandburg liked about it. His poem “Chicago” gave the city its second-most famous nickname, the City of Broad Shoulders. (He never once mentions a breeze of any sort.) That poem also gave a much more interesting name to what was originally Chicago’s South Loop Brewing Company: Hop Butcher for the World.
I’d seen Hop Butcher cans on store shelves in Chicago, but hadn’t taken the plunge. I’d seen tweets from Milwaukee shops announcing limited supply of Hop Butcher beers, and felt a little envious. And then I came home a couple weeks back to find a box sitting on my front step, and inside were two mixed four-packs courtesy of Hop Butcher co-founder and owner Jeremiah Zimmer.
The Chicago beer forums have been abuzz with talk about Hop Butcher releases over the last few weeks. Galaxy Bowl and Double Grid are the most recent two, but just prior to those was a milkshake version of its Blazed Orange hazy IPA. I chatted with Zimmer via email to learn a little more about its hoppy lineup, which if you trace it back to South Loop’s origins, predates the current haze craze.
“Our first commercial release [in 2015] was actually a black rye IPA, which was followed by a hoppy brown,” Zimmer said. “So, even though our beers weren’t opaque and mega-super-duper-ultra dry hopped at the time, we were all about the hop-first mentality from the get-go.”
Blazed Orange Milkshake was one of the four beers I was able to sample, and it is easily the truest and most satisfying Creamsicle reference I’ve ever consumed in beer form. So good, in fact, that I tasked some friends visiting Chicago recently to try to track down another four-pack for me.
Zimmer told me Blazed Orange was originally destined for being consumed on Wisconsin soil. “We applied for and received our self-distribution license for Wisconsin and one of my early ideas was to release a Wisconsin-only beer, which at one point was going to be Blazed Orange. Get it? Deer hunting? Blaze orange.” As it turned out, it was too good and too popular to limit to one state.
This is no slight against Wisconsin, though; indeed, Zimmer has roots in the Badger State. He grew up in Sheboygan and went to school in Madison before moving to Chicago. Milwaukee does see occasional self-distribution partially because it’s easier for the Hop Butcher driver to get to and from in less than half a day, but there’s also a supply concern. “At this point, it’s more about being able to make enough beer that we can do it up the right way.”
As far as quality goes, Hop Butcher is already there. Stealing Signs is a big, hazy double IPA that features Galaxy, Simcoe, and the relatively unknown Moutere hop from New Zealand. The wonderfully aromatic Telehopic has the haze too, but feels more like a Midwestern American pale ale in its execution; think the XHOPS lineup from Toppling Goliath. Two-Flat is the least hazy of the four, but with a juicy and refreshing finish all the same.
Hop Butcher currently brews out of the Miskatonic Brewing Company space just outside Chicago (but, Zimmer points out, they do own their own equipment in that space) and hopes to eventually host that over-the-bar experience, replete with all the hazy beers the people demand, in their own taproom.
“We’ll get there,” Zimmer says. “But until we do, make no mistake, we’re having a freaking blast.” Or as good old Carl put it,
Bragging and laughing that under his wrist is the pulse, and under his ribs the heart of the people,
Laughing!
