Jack Schaller is a hops man. That’s not what you might expect, considering the breweries he’s worked at: Hibernia, which during his tenure there put out its malty Eau Claire ale, and Falstaff, where he helped develop the less malty but still rich Ballantine India Pale Ale. Nevertheless, in the world of specialty beers–where connoisseurs can be divided into the malt crowd and the hops crowd–Schaller knows where he stands.
“When you get a full boil going, it’s almost hypnotic,” says Steve Dinehart, Chicago Brewing Company’s founder. Dinehart, a senior economist at the Board of Trade, wanted his own brewery for years. Two years ago, he finally got started–looking for a brewery site, getting a staff together, rounding up equipment, and working on a recipe. Over the months, with the help of the Siebel Institute (the nationally known brewing school and research center on Peterson Avenue), he and Schaller came up with the lager recipe they call Legacy Lager. Brewing started in a converted Beatrice canning plant near Armitage and Elston in April, and Chicago Brewing’s first shipment went out to liquor stores in early July.
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If the copper Pullman kettles, which date from the 1950s, are the most traditional equipment at Chicago Brewing, the fermenting tanks are the most advanced. Chicago Brewing’s beer is fermented in unitanks, 12 of which Dinehart was lucky enough to acquire secondhand–from a recently closed New York State brewery. Unitank technology is only about ten years old, making it a relatively new development in the industry. The neat thing about the tanks (and the reason for their name) is that they are self-contained: the outer shell of a unitank is filled with a layer of ethylene glycol, the same refrigerant used in antifreeze, and each tank is equipped with a thermostat. Because they’re insulated and self-contained, unitanks eliminate the need for a refrigerated fermenting room, and they also make it possible to brew several different beers at once, says Dinehart: “We can have this tank doing a lager and this tank doing an ale while this tank over here is doing a porter.”
Right now, Legacy Lager is Chicago Brewing’s only product, but Dinehart plans to introduce an ale sometime next year, and he’d eventually like to produce holiday beers too: “Come Saint Patrick’s Day, we can run off one batch.” An on-site pub is also in the long-term plan, and Schaller wants to open a miniature lab, where home brewers could experiment with their own recipes using commercial equipment.
After all the right enzymes have been released, the hot liquid gets siphoned into the lauter tun, which sits right next to the brew kettle. The lauter tun looks just like another brew kettle from the outside, but on the inside spins a dangerous-looking apparatus, something like an eggbeater with teeth. As the mash spins, the teeth keep the grains from clumping together so all the color and flavor in the barley can seep into the water. The liquid–called the “wort”–is pumped through pipes, in and out of the lauter tun again and again, to extract as much from the barley as possible. Meanwhile, Schaller is one floor down, taking samples of the brew from a spigot attached to one of the pipes. When he’s satisfied with the wort’s density, he’ll give the word and the liquid will be pumped back into the brew kettle for hopping.
Ale wasn’t completely out of the picture; Adolph and Henry Mueller started an ale brewery in 1850 on the State Street site that’s now Marshall Field’s, and with their earnings they eventually opened two more. But most of the dozen breweries that opened over the next two decades were lager makers. By 1855, Chicago residents had become so loyal to their neighborhood taps that when temperance-minded mayor Levi Boone proposed a city ordinance that would close taverns on Sundays and raise the cost of a liquor license, there was rioting in the streets. On April 21, following a series of smaller confrontations and the arrest of several saloon keepers for selling beer on Sunday, thousands of residents tried to rush the Cook County courthouse. Two hundred city policemen and three state militia units were called out, shots were fired (though no deaths were reported), and 100 people were arrested. The Lager Beer Riots went down in the history books, and Mayor Boone was not reelected.
Then they tried to find components that were similar to what was used back then. They found a good two-row barley, which–because it produces fewer kernels per plant–is more expensive and better than the six-row variety. They got their hands on a special hybrid hop grown in Washington State. The yeast they use is German, and Dinehart thinks they’re the only brewery using it in this country. Even the people at the Siebel Institute were wowed by it, he says: “They put it under the microscope and said, ‘I’ve never seen yeast like this before.’”
