I love making beer, truly I do. If ever there was a way – perhaps a reality-augmenting piece of stainless machinery – that would allow me to curl up close with my beer making and kind of snuzzle my junk up and down on it’s leg all the time, i would totally be in to that. But, unfortunately, that technology is at least a singularity or two away from happening. In the interim, I’ll just attach one of those flashlight pussy things to my brew rack and buy it dinner every couple of weeks. I’ll name it for a french whore, like Fantine or Inara, and together we’ll grow old together, slowly falling apart, drinking too much and always humping like fat, feral dogs in mud. It’s not perfect, but then, neither was Don Cornelius.

But until I can horse glue a flashlight pussy to that filthy lipped, castor strutting, rusting piece of sticky industrial slut I’ve got sleeping in my garage, I’ll use reading to hold me over between brews. With that in mind, I’ve found, time and again, that Gordon Strong’s “Brewing Better Beer” and Randy Mosher’s “Radical Brewing” are my two favorite pieces of bathroom trash that I return to over and over again. They are both very different books in approach, but both work towards a similar end of prying free the detritus of pedantic mimicry that inevitably comes after an initial investigation into something as byzantine as brewing.

Mosher attacks from a kind of joy-filled revelry, combining history, technique and an artist’s notebook to undo the scale of many intimidating crests, juggling probabilities to reveal that the true nature of brewing really is art or, at least, at turns as equally elusive and accessible.

But where Mosher sings Gordon Strong whistles along. There is a zen simplicity to Strong’s approach as he unhinges the mysteries with systems analysis as opposed to Mosher’s poetry. He gently guides the reader into re-examining what is truly important when it comes to the brew day and uses some solid recipes to deliver his message home.

Both are equally effective, rich with information, and indispensable for me on my journey. There’s definitely other resources I use – I love the Brew Strong and Can You Brew It podcasts, Ray Daniels Designing Great Beers is fantastic, the interwebs never fails me, as well as BeerTools and more than a few spreadsheets – but when I think of two books that I lean on more heavily than any other, I always seem to be coming back to these two.

A co-worker just hit me up with the news that Alan Lake is going to be the new chef at Chief O’Neil’s.

About two days ago, Lake told me he took the full-time chef position at O’Neill’s. What cinched the deal for him, he said, was his experience at the famous Shelbourne in Ireland, where he earned the kitchen honorific Underpants O’Malley (I have no idea what that means, but it sounds Irish and a little naughty).

“My goal is to elevate the food at O’Neill’s,” Lake told me last night, and he has plans to cure his own corned beef and take the native simplicity of the cuisine and see what he can do by sourcing locally and applying to this traditionally simple food the skills of an accomplished fine dining chef.

As Achatz had his way with Thai street food, Lake wants to see how far he can push Irish pub grub toward a kind of haute Hibernian.

Hopefully this means they’ll be adding some decent beers to their draft list as well!!

I’ve slowly come to realize while building our brew system that the tools and techniques compiled to create our beer are as much a part of us and our creation as the finished beverage that comes out of it. And, like every good work of art, this one, too, will never be finished. Transcended, maybe – most likely abandoned – but definitely never finished.

It will also never be pretty.

I spent a lot of time before we built this beast looking at really sharp, elegant systems on line, fantasizing that that is what our set up would someday look like. Lots of polished stainless, clean enclosures for electronics, switches, blinky lights and maybe even some finishing wood that could compensate for so many generations of this scotch-irish curse. Thumbing through all that beer nerd porn I bedazzled my foggy head into believing those shallow lies about my fleeting attention to aesthetics.

Now, working out of a garage that’s got surge protectors for switches and air-exposed pumps half-bolted to rusting metal that sets below huge volumes of open and hot liquid, honesty about my approach is a bit easier to come by. My system won’t ever win a beauty contest – or instill much confidence in the unimaginative – but, I wouldn’t fuck a Howitzer either and that seems to do just fine.

We got most of the parts for our kettles from weldlessfittings.com. And for the most part I’m very happy with what they have provided. The high-heat washers and bulkheads stand up as promoted and the construction was remarkably simple. Their instructions weren’t always the best, but the guys at weldlessfittings.com were always quick to answer emails when the instructions were a bit lax.

One hole in the plan came in trying to get our diptube to set aligned and through the false bottom on our mash/lauter tun. We got our false bottom from Climax Homebrew (wait, what?) at a great price for the piece, but we cut our hole in our kegs just a bit higher than we really wanted to in order to get it to go through the false bottom. Not a big deal, I just cut about a 4″ piece of 1/2″ hose and slid it onto the diptube. This added an easily telescoping end to the tube which allowed us to get as close or as far away from the bottom of the kettle as we like.

Unfortunately, this didn’t solve the problem of keeping grains out of our sweet liquor when we moved it to the boil kettle. To solve that problem we started buying 3 packs of stainless steel brilo pads and wrapping one around the tube every time we brewed. This worked OK for the first half dozen or so brews, but we could see that the half-life on this jury-rigged hack job was not very long.

With each brew we started having more and more issue with our prime and saw more and more air moving into the hose during recirculation. Finally, last week when I had to dig around in 155* water to try and reset our lame ass filter during the mash, only to get my rubber gloves full of hot water over and over, I made a serious commitment to upgrading our mash/lauter tun’s filtering capabilities.

Enter the mash/boil screen, or, as I’ve mostly seen it referred to, the Bazooka Cage. This thing screwed right into the bulkhead and, with no issue at all, made my life and my brewing time so much easier. No air, no grains, no pain or issue at all and it uses the grain bed like a straw to help you get every last bit of sweet liquor into your boil kettle.

I love a simple solution to a problem and this little bastard is just that.

Cuz I can get 4 of these bad mammy jammies for what I’d pay for 1 of those wicked Kratwerk sweaters.

Sweater blog!

Hiya.

Don’t worry, I still love you even though we don’t hang out as much anymore. Really, I do.

And don’t be so insecure, it’s making you seem fat.

Or maybe it’s the other way around.

Either way, knock it off.

While I’ve been traveling the finer end of the seasonal shifts and enjoying these waning days of humanity’s intrepid fuck show, I’ve discovered a few things. Yes, a few things have come to light those smug, little glow worms in the dark corners of my mind and I have every intention to make good on the oath I have made and relay them on to you. So pour yourself a beer, reheat that dungenness crab pancake in the back of your fridge and make yourself comfortable, it’s gonna be a long night.

Part of the reason I haven’t bloggered in so long and, when I have, have done it so infrequently, is because I’m kind of sick of writing about beer and brewing. I keep waiting for something else to come along and help me prove to this mirror I stare at all day that I have more than one method of expediting my death. But cigarettes aren’t that great to write about and this pill addiction has really hampered my motivation. So I guess I’ll write about this Freebord thing.

A friend turned me onto this video the other day and, while I’m skeptical that I’d be able to be so graceful or look so damn good riding it, I must admit that it does have me intrigued. After all, it was a need to hold over my snowboarding jones that got me back into hurting myself on a skateboard again and this seems right in that thick desire’s wheelhouse.

Yeah, that is pretty freaking sweet. Now if Chicago only had hills.

But Chicago is flat and full of fat, vacuous, whitebread, mouthbreathers so I’ll just write about beer. You like beer, right?

So I saw this fancy gizmo on morebeer.com the other day and was intrigued, the Speidel Braumeister, a kind of all-in-one electric brewer. The cost isn’t terrible at $2950 for a 13 gallon system considering I think we’ve got every bit of $2k in our home built weldless gas powered keggle system, not to mention time, frustration and more time. The main complaint I’ve been coming across is that it’s very difficult, if not impossible, to sparge on these things. To do so requires another vessel to heat the water in and some fandangling. Another equally valid point is that maybe these all-in-one systems take away some of the magic that is brewing, by over-simplifying the process. Maybe.

There’s another system like the Speidel Braumeister on the market from Brumas, a bit more elegant looking, but I think even less extensible.

But really the reason I got into brewing beer in the first place is because I’m a tinkerer. I require things to fuck around with to help keep me from really hurting myself. And there’s really nothing quite like homebrewing to sate an incessent need to be curious, solve problems, make messes and potentially blow something up or burn something out at any given moment. So that’s probably why the DIY all-in-one BrauBushka, as inspired by the Cebulon, seems so much sexier to me.

If it’s worth doing, it’s worth doing the hard way and the long way. Period.

There’s not a lot to these machines and, at their heart, they’re pretty brilliant. The most compelling thing to me about the Braumeister at this point is the grain tube that it uses. I’m already sick of cleaning out my mash/lauter tun and some kind of grain hopper seems like a brilliant way to solve that problem. Now I just need to figure out a way that a grain hopper will live nicely with my thermometer and swage tube. I see a stainless hose in my future. We’ll see, but I promise you, lover, you’ll be the first to know anything.

Local Option is like the black tar Heroine of Chicago beer bars. It’s dark, effective and it doesn’t fuck around. Case in point is this Friday’s event, “The Great Taste of the Local Option”, featuring 31 of the most well programmed beers you’re bound to find in any bar, let alone any bar in Chicago.

1. Boulevard Collaboration No. 2 White I.P.A
2. Dieu du Ciel Péché Mortel
3. Evil Twin Ashtray Heart
4. Evil Twin Before, During, & After
5. Evil Twin Biscotti Break
6. Evil Twin Katz Pis
7. Evil Twin Ryan & the Beaster Bunny
8. Evil Twin Soft DK
9. Evil Twin Wet Dream
10. Firestone Walker Parabola
11. Founders Devil Dancer
12. Hopfenstark End of the Trail Pale Ale
13. Jolly Pumpkin Bam Bier
14. Jolly Pumpkin ES Bam
15. Jolly Pumpkin Luciernaga
16. Jolly Pumpkin Oro De Calabaza
17. Local Option Dampf Loc
18. Lost Abbey Angel’s Share
19. Lost Abbey Ten Commandments
20. Mikkeller 1000 IBU
21. Port Older Viscosity
22. Three Floyd’s Amon Amarth Ragnarok
23. Three Floyd’s Apocalypse Cow
24. Three Floyd’s Arctic Panzer Wolf
25. Three Floyd’s Eben Emael
26. Three Floyd’s Gorch Fock
27. Three Floyd’s Shark Pants
28. Three Floyd’s Thick White Freeks
29. Three Floyd’s Zombie Dust
30. Three Floyds Moloko
31. Xbeeriment Black Force One

If that’s not enough, you can also bear witness to Tony and Noah’s German engineering with the Dampf Loc (vaguely translated as ‘vapor headed’):

…We will be debuting our very own Local Option Dampf Loc which is a modern interpretation of medieval Bavarian peasant ale brewed by the Local Option’s very own Tony Russomanno and Noah Hopkins at Dog Brewery in Baltimore. Dampf Loc is warm fermented with Bavarian weisse yeast and an all barley grist.

And if that’s not enough, you can stroke that fanboy bone of yours by chatting up Jeppe Bjergsø, of Evil Twin fame, who will be on hand to drop some new beers across your pickled brain for the very first time in the Middle West.

Come to the Local Option and find out why that death’s head on their logo warns that they’re “Your best friend or your worst enemy.”

Earlier this season I put a fire pit in my back yard. Actually, that was the first thing I put in my backyard. A firepit, surrounded by dirt on all sides. Eventually we got around to putting in some grass and some stone work to gussy it up a bit, but the first effort was to install the pit.

I was anxious to get that firepit in the ground for two reasons. The first and obvious was so that we could enjoy our evenings around a fire. There’s nothing like getting drunk on good rye with your wife and your dog while a fire bends the night. The second reason we added the pit was to experiment with open pit BBQ.

A few weeks ago we made the acquaintance of our next door neighbor who happens to be the sous-chef at a tasty Catalonian restaurant in Chicago. His passions tend toward urban gardening, the cured meats and, as luck would have it, the farm to table movement. It wasn’t long before we were talking about my fire pit and making plans for our first foray into whole animal BBQ. This past week, those plans took flight. Zack, our fearless neighbor and chef, was able to secure an organically fed kid goat for a reasonable cost from a local farm. We were already having friends over to do some sensory training with the kit from Siebel, so I figured this was a perfect opportunity to jump right in on this baby goat.

Let’s be clear about this, there is nothing that can compare to having a whole animal in your house which you work with, over days, to prepare and then cook. Nothing. I am now completely spoiled on cooking. And by cooking I mean, procuring, preparing, transforming and devouring the full carcass of a creature that once drew the same air that I breathe and was compelled by many of the same instinctual drives that I find myself chasing, whatever the interface.

I can say definitively that I have never felt closer to my food then this past week and by that lame abstraction of “closer” I can only explain it as almost having a crush on my meal. Seriously. As I would work on the animal I would get excited butterflies not dissimilar to those you get when you are first falling in love with a significant other. When I was away from it I would think about it in the way you think about a new found lover, your head all busy with bugs chirping away, filling you with that electric surge of compulsion, excitement. My eyes would well as I stared across my yard to watch applewood smoke drifted across it’s tanning meat.

The act of bringing an animal into your house and the violence of cleaning, cooking and eating it are an intimacy that really can only be paralleled by sex. How about that? Now I’ve never formally fucked a goat – per say – but, should I, I honestly couldn’t imagine it bringing me as close to this animal as last weeks activities did. Which isn’t to say this was some sanctimonious circle jerk where we wept over the goat by candlelight or put it in a dress and implored it to godliness in it’s next life (do I protest too much?), but there is a certain inescapable connection that occurs when one mammal of flesh and muscle and hair and bone uses their own still vibrant hands and some well crafted tools to physically dismember and eat another mammal. It seems to me that it would be impossible for any self-conscious being to see the parallels between itself and the creature it was indulging in and not be affected by that. Frankly, you’d have to be kind of retarded to not have this ignite your nervous system in some of several ways.

So, yes, deboning it was intense. Cracking the ribs apart, carving each bit of bone and lardo out, discovering the different structural elements inside the animal. This was incredible – and the au jus we made was brain bending (I’ll discuss this in a minute) – but, in retrospect, I wouldn’t debone an animal before putting it on the spit again. By deboning it and rolling and trussing it like a big pork tenderloin, essentially, I felt like there were too many different kinds of cuts in any one bite. When it was ready and rested we cut the goat in cross-section slices and this gave you a loafed piece of goat that would have the cracklin/jerky like texture of the outside, some ham like pieces of delicious smoked meat, some fat and then some other just straight tender chunks of goat. To eat this you needed to pick your pieces apart and eat them separately which took a minute or two to figure out and by then you were almost done with your food. While distracting on the initial round of eating, this has been a good revelation for left overs as I just pre-cut my piece, chop it up good and make a smoked goat sandwich that could raise the dead (smoked goat, au jus, apple slices, arugula, a fried egg, and goat cheddar cheese on toasted grain bread, anyone? I’ve also mixed my goat/au jus with fresh blueberries and goat cheese for a pretty remarkable combination as well).

Like I mentioned above, the au jus was insane. Essentially, we made a goat demi-glace that was cooked down over about 2 days. We took all our bones from the goat, put it in the broiler at 500* for about an hour (we stopped only because the house was filling with smoke and the alarms were going off), added our cellery, carrots, onions and garlic and filled with water and a shitload of fresh rosemary and parsley, letting simmer for about 24 hours. After a little over 24 hours I strained out the bones, etc so I just had liquid. I then made a fond – 1 can of carmelized tomato paste deglazed with red wine – and added that to our stock. I then cooked that down over another 24 hours. I pulled the fat off the top and strained it again before putting it in the fridge. When it was time to serve it, I heated it back up and put in about 3/4 a stick of butter. If you could taste this demi-glace you would believe in Sorcery.

For the rub, we made a sala (pronounced sal-ay) which was about 10oz of peppercorns, 10 lemon rinds, and a cubic fuckton of fresh rosemary. There was a large amount of salt in there as well. We ground it all up in a food processor and rubbed it on the inside of the critter. Once it was trussed up, we rubbed it on the outside as well. This was a powerful rub, probably too powerful for some, but the spice from the peppercorns really brought the muskiness of the goat into it’s own. I’ve always felt the muskiness of goat was almost intractable, more a sensation then a flavor, almost like it was a fogginess that hovered around your face and brain than it was a flavor that sat on your tongue. The sala only made this more pronounced. If you were willing to submit to this rather odd sensual experience it was pretty remarkable. It was truly unlike anything I’ve ever had before.

Cooking the goat was the easiest experience I’ve ever had in preparing meat outdoors. I got a 4′ 5/16″ stainless rod from a friend and we ran that down the center of the animal. We then wrapped it in chicken wire and raised it above the fire pit by about another foot. There was about 2.5-3′ ultimately between the fire and the animal. I rotated every 30 minutes for about 4 hours and it was cooked. For heat I started with 3 chimneys of charcoal and then rested one log of applewood on top of that. The applewood was soaked for about an hour or so in water to keep it’s flaming to a minimum. I had to replace the log about every hour and added about 15 brickettes of dry charcoal about every 30 minutes. Twice I added a new chimney and I probably only needed to do that once. Once the goat was over 170* we pulled it off and let it rest for about 45 minutes. Sliced it and we were onto culinary bliss. One trick I picked up while researching for this is that 325* (the temperature you presumably want your fire at for a spit) is measured by holding your hand about 2′ above the flame. You should be able to hold it there for at least 8 seconds but no more than 12 seconds. Remember that.

We also kept the head and cooked that in the oven. The head had some sala on it as well and did just fine for itself in a turkey pan in the oven at 210* for about 6 hours. It probably could have come out a couple hours earlier, but that’s ok. Eating the head was kind of the coupe de gras of this whole experience, if at no other time were you aware that you were dining on an animal, you became keenly aware of this intimacy as you held its staring skull in your hands and pulled meat from it’s face with your teeth.

The meat on the cheeks was a bit over cooked so we cracked the jaw off to get at the inside. Inside the meat was very tender. But what we really wanted was the brains.

I wasn’t quite sure how to get at the brains, so I spent a good ten minutes or so physically tearing apart the skull, which, my compliments to the designer, is well made enough to keep a gorilla about 6 times the size of the goat from really penetrating it’s inner sanctum with much ease or grace. I finally noticed there was a soft spot on the top of the skull which, it being a kid, made a lot of sense. We were then able to stick a knife into the soft spot and pull out the rich, creamy, iron-flavored brains for those adventurous eaters to taste.

This was a trip for sure and there was certainly some monkeys dancing around the skull for a few minutes before Beth bravely jumped in. But, once Beth made the leap, the rest of us followed.

The white, mousse-like pudding that draped across the knife was, not more than a week ago, the central processor for this animal whose head I held in my hands and whose body had given myself and my friends so much delicious pleasure that evening. That sank in like a magnet. In a very real, but very strange way, I felt like I was finally a citizen of the material world.

Pritchett chewed on the spinal cord that swung from the skull like a long limp pecker. Then he and Sean enjoyed themselves an eyeball each as well. We later cooked up the heart and the surprisingly large liver on the grill. The heart was quite good, beefy with just a slight liver muskiness which could probably be attributed to it sitting in the same milk as the liver for a couple days.

We enjoyed several different saisons with the meal which paired nicely with the goat; Stillwater’s White Sage Saison, The Bruery’s Saison and Brooklyn’s peppery delicious Sorachi Ace. As the evening disintegrated and the guests left, I sat around the table late into the morning with Matt, my brother-in-law and Zack the Chef toasting a rare Hansen’s Lambic, raising our glasses to a great evening, a tasty beast, and a harem of lunatics unparalleled in the world of indulging in life and, it should be said, properly preparing death.

Although, I’ve been a denizen of the Windy city for near on twenty years now, I cut my teeth in the hardscrabble hills and endless prairies of South Dakota. Not a glamorous place to be from nor one that gets a lot of press, save the obligatory American pilgrimage to  Mount Rushmore and the hell, as long as we’re here and there hasn’t been a reason to stop for 300 miles attraction that is  Wall Drug.

That being so, I was understandably excited when I picked up this month’s edition of Beer Advocate and found a story about a South Dakota brewery. Crow Peak Brewery is located in Spearfish at the base of the Black Hills.  It’s truly beautiful country out there, far more beautiful than the far eastern border of the state where I was raised and where no one has ever visited unless of course your into gigantic bird feeders.  What we lacked in attractions we made up for in character and resolve.  Anyway, Crow Peak has ended a commercial brewery drought in South Dakota that lasted 69 years beginning  with the closing of the Dakota Brewery in 1942.

The Dakota  brewery, interestingly enough, or perhaps uninteresting enough was located in Huron, a town not far from where I grew up and one which most notably and unfortunately greets visitors with a frightening and confounding odor, it’s a gasping, nose pinching, shirt over face inducing  admixture of sulfur and sewage that is so pernicious and ubiquitous that one has trouble believing that they’re not either being poisoned by some ill-intentioned overlord or about to come face to face with Old Scratch himself.  I remember inquiring about the stench quite regularly as a child, usually on the way to the State Fair (also confoundingly held in Huron), and vaguely remember some illusion to the town water supply, a possibility which may go a long way to explaining the closing of the Dakota Brewery if not South Dakotan’s mistrust of locally sourced beer.  It may also speak to the aforementioned stoic character of my people that they’ve chosen to continue to not only inhabit such a place but to hold a yearly gathering showcasing the best and brightest the state has to offer in such environs.  Ah well, home sweet home,  I have digressed…

So, the good news there is now another reason to go to South Dakota, one that is far from Huron and that can get you drunk.  It is wonderful to see craft beer culture has spread to the hinterlands.  If you want to check out reviews of Crow Peak’s beers you can do it here.

I’m so bloody tired all the time lately it’s driving me up a slippery wall. I’ve had to learn the hard way that, despite my doctor’s recommendations, I apparently can’t replace a 6 hour R.E.M. cycle with pure amphetamine salts and vick’s vapor inhalors. That’s the last time I trust a surgeon I meet at a truck stop. Period.

But, despite my nagging ailments and swelling lack of ambition, I will steer this filthy steed forward, lack of will be damned.

First things first. I stopped by Jack’s Tap last night to have a drink before a work party and noticed a new offering from Lagunitas on their menu. Zephyr is a collaboration between Lagunitas, Big Star and the Publican that is being promoted as a pre-prohibition Lager. I’m not totally sure I know what that means – and the internets isn’t so sure either – but what I can tell you is that “No” it’s apparently not named after the Zephyr skate team (much to my dissapointment), but “Yes” it’s as tasty as tits on a fish. Perhaps, dare I say, tastier.

It’s crisp like a lager with out the subtle fruit after-tastes you find in most bottom fermenting beers. It is, however, possible that that late lager fruit finish is hiding behind that Lagunitas hop onslaught that marches across your tongue and man-manages your after-tastes. But fear not, the surprising use of the nelson sauvin gives the hop-heaviness an earthiness which lives quite well with the lager yeasts.

Weighing in around 7.6% ABV this delicious little mutt is worthy of dedicating the night to drinking and the next morning to shake loose the heebie-geebies acquired in the process.

Stone is doing a 5 course dinner for the Brewniversity series at the Public House. If this menu doesn’t give you tongue boners you should probably have a chinamen look under your hood and make sure your neo-cortex is still passing signals properly.

And one last thing before I lay my head down on my desk and slip cozily into yet another hypnogogic revelry involving Bjork, the Alphabet People and several stuffed animals from my childhood. The Empty Bottle is running it’s free concert series at the monument in Logan Square again this summer. The line up is pretty good, but what’s most important is that there is yet another series of opportunities to pursue several modalities of intoxication under the city lights and stars of your fair city with all of your good friends and enjoy some laughter before everybody dies. My recommendation is to pursue that pleasure.

Thank filthy Jesus that Chicago Craft Beer Week is over. It was great and full of great beer, but my aging corpus can’t take an 8 day bender like it used to.

But, it was awesome. Certainly, one of the best parts for me was breaking from my well-worn routine and finding new places to drink. And what’s better than living in Chicago for almost 40 years and still discovering new parts of this our glorious and gluttonous city? Nothing I say, nothing.

But despite all the great beer and great places and great food I had, you know what ultimately turned out to be the most stand out part of the week? The customer fucking service. How about that, eh? Put that in your pipe and smoke it.

Really, I had some of the best experiences with bartenders, waitresses and managers I’ve ever had consistently in this city. And customer service is so important. Especially today, in this day and age, when you can get so many exceptional beers in so many places, if somebody treats me like a second class citizen while I’ve got my wallet in my hand, I can promise you I will never be back in that establishment again. But, like I said, last week that wasn’t ever the case.

So, THANK YOU, to all the hard working, hard living, hard bitten and imminently decent citizenry who busted their asses to help my endocrine system slither a little slower last week. If the whole world were like you we wouldn’t need murder weapons or salad bars. Nope, just beer, some competitively priced prescription meds and real good times. Here’s to that, eh?

Moving along, it turns out there’s still great beer to drink despite my efforts to finish all of it last week. The Bavarian Lodge in Lisle – which is, hands down, the best beer and food experience you can get in the suburbs – is hosting a pretty remarkable event on Thursday June 9th:

Evil Twin: & Mikkeller: Yin & Yang Release Night!

A special evening celebrating the beers of Evil Twin & Mikkeller.

We’re proud to announce the midwest debut of Evil Twin Brewing… the brainchild of Jeppe Jarnit-Bjergsø, beer geek extraordinaire! Following much home-brew success in Denmark, Jeppe opened a world-class beer shop in Copenhagen, collaborated with world-famous lambic brewer Cantillon, and most recently founded Evil Twin Brewing. Worthy of note, of course, is that Jeppe is the brother of Mikkel Borg Bjergsø, the driving force behind Denmark’s famed Mikkeller Brewing Co.

Our first two exclusive Evil Twin offerings will be a very special release of two beers meant to be served as one. Yin & Yang (a 10% Imperial Stout and a 10% Imperial IPA, respectively) can be enjoyed separately, but were brewed to be blended together, half & half, to create a glorious imperial black & tan named Taiji.

Of course, what’s an Evil Twin without its other half? We’ll also be featuring a pair of rare beers from Mikkeller that too represent the Yin & Yang. “Not Just Another Wit’, a white ale taken to another level. Very strong and extra-hoppy… the world first IPW, perhaps? We’ll also be tapping the highly sought-after “Beer Geek Brunch Weasel”, an imperial oatmeal stout made with Vietnamese ca phe chon coffee, one of the most expensive coffees on earth. An exotic brew to say the least…

Be sure to stop in and try these fantastic, rare, ultra small-batch beers from Evil Twin and Mikkeller.

Available On Draft:
- Evil Twin Yin
- Evil Twin Yang
- Evil Twin Taiji (Imperial Black & Tan)
- Mikkeller Not Just Another Wit
- Mikkeller Beer Geek Brunch Weasel

I will be there in my prettiest dress and my dirtiest panties.

We live to die another day, godspeed.