The Daily Parker

Welcome to stop #60 on the Brews and Choos project.

Brewery: Revolution Brewpub., 2323 N. Milwaukee Ave., Chicago
Train line: CTA Blue Line, California
Time from Chicago: 14 minutes
Distance from station: 200 m

I've enjoyed Revolution beers for such a long time I can't really review them like I do the ones I've just met. When I met some friends for dinner at their brewpub (cf. the Revolution Taproom on Kedzie), I did try a new (to me) beer, the Hazy Pitch New England IPA (5.0%).

Like the rest of their lineup, it has excellent flavor and balance, and I'm glad I got to try the limited-edition brew.

I also had a very tasty hamburger, and cheese curds with homemade Buffalo sauce.

Beer garden? No
Dogs OK? No
Televisions? Two, avoidable
Serves food? Full pub menu
Would hang out with a book? Yes
Would hang out with friends? Yes
Would go back? Yes

The Tribune yesterday reported that local breweries have started producing more lagers as people get tired of IPAs:

Lager accounts for most of the beer sold in the world — including the 16 biggest-selling brands in the United States — but it has rarely been a recipe for success for craft breweries, which often default to ratcheting up experimentation, flavor and intensity. Lager, by contrast, tends to be approachable and predictable. Think Miller Lite. Michelob Ultra. Modelo Especial.

While tropically fruity India pale ales and boozy stouts remain engines for the nation’s small breweries, the industry has increasingly embraced lager in recent years. And consumers are rewarding them with surprising demand.

Around Chicago, the shift can be seen in the growing number of lager-centric breweries, including Goldfinger, Kinslahger in Oak Park, and Metropolitan and Dovetail on the city’s North Side.

Established breweries, including Hopewell, Revolution and Maplewood, are increasingly incorporating lagers into their portfolios while newer breweries, such as Art History in Geneva, have opened with an embrace of lager that would have required a leap of faith a few short years ago.

For Art History, it is already paying off; open just 18 months, the brewery is planning a new, larger production facility, due in large part to its lagers, which account for three of its four top sellers.

I typically evaluate a brewery by its mainline IPA, but in some cases (notably Dovetail), I'll go with their flagship lager. And I have yet to visit most of the breweries the article mentions, so I'll take their advice.

I was pretty busy today, with most of my brain trying to figure out how to re-architect something that I didn't realize needed it until recently. So a few things piled up in my inbox:

• David Corn is reporting that US Senator Joe Manchin (D-WV), who has basically halted his party's own progress to, well, progress, threatened to leave the Democratic Party if he didn't get his way.
• Part of the President's agenda includes starting to build a 320 km/h rail line from New York to Boston that includes a tunnel under the Long Island Sound. That would bring the US up to the level of technology enjoyed in Europe 20 years ago.
• Europe may bring back the Trans-Europe Express trains that could almost entirely replace short-haul flights within the continent.
• Rep. Liz Cheney (R-WY) tried to talk sense into her party about the January insurrection, but as predicted, it had no effect whatsoever.
• What brought about the current labor shortage? Ask a psychologist.
• The US intelligence services have started to get serious about Havana Syndrome.
• Last winter proved we can vanquish influenza, but only if we want to.
• Thieves scammed Amazon out of $1.5 million by stealing rental textbooks.
• Rolls-Royce successfully tested an aircraft engine that runs entirely on biofuel.

And finally, Whisky Advocate has four recipes that balance whisky and Luxardo Maraschino cherries. I plan to try them all, but not in one sitting.

Oh boy:

• Voters have defeated billionaire, populist Czech prime minister Andrej Babiš through the simple process of banding together to kick him out, proof that an electorate can hold the line against strongmen.
• A school administrator in Texas told teachers that "if they have a book about the Holocaust in their classroom, they should also offer students access to a book from an 'opposing' perspective." Because Texas.
• Oakland Police should stop shooting Black men having medical emergencies, one would think.
• The Federal Railroad Administration and Amtrak have released plans for new passenger train routes from Chicago to other Midwest cities.
• Meanwhile, Illinois Governor JB Pritzker (D) has proposed hundreds of millions of dollars in tax breaks and incentives to encourage electric-vehicle production in the state.
• New Republic's David Klion says Denis Villenueuve's upcoming Dune adaptation "is the adaptation Frank Herbert's novel deserves," and I can't wait until it comes out on the 22nd!
• As Chicago has stuck to June-like temperatures for the past two weeks, an active jet stream has given the Rocky Mountain upwards of 750 mm of snow and temperatures as low as -10°C.
• Researchers have demonstrated how to reverse-engineer fake photos generated by generative adversarial networks (GANs), a common type of AI.
• Archaeologists have gotten closer to figuring out who massacred a village off the coast of Sweden around 400 CE, and why.

Cassie has bugged me for the last hour, even though we went out two hours ago. I assume she wants dinner. I will take care of that presently.

Welcome to stop #59 on the Brews and Choos project.

Brewery: District Brew Yards., 417 N. Ashland Ave., Chicago
Train line: CTA Pink and Green Lines, Ashland
Time from Chicago: 6 minutes
Distance from station: 400 m

District Brew Yards is just up the road from All Rise Brewing, but that road is Ashland Avenue, you have to go under a dark and scary railroad bridge to get from one to the other, and the Fulton Industrial District doesn't inspire feelings of warmth and happiness at night. I recommend you go, though. And try at least one beer from each of the four breweries on site. Oh, and Lillie's Q has a kitchen there, so grab some brisket to go with your beers.

When you arrive, they swipe your credit card and hand you one of theirs. You slip the beer card into a slot, pour your own beer, and watch the charges add up. And add up they do: most beers cost 50-70¢ per ounce (about $15-20 per liter), and the cups they provide hold almost half a liter.

Those higher-than-expected prices pay the bills. Each brewery has a five-year lease on wall space, and the Yard collects 50% of every beer sale. So of my $10 pint of Juice Pillow, $1 goes to tax, $4.50 goes to the Yard, and Burnt City collects the remaining $4.50. But, Burnt City doesn't have to lay out half a million dollars for brewing equipment. They just have to give the recipe to the Yard's brewers and buy the ingredients. It socializes most of the risk of microbrewing. 

I tried one small pour of each brewery's New England-style IPA, then went back and had a pint of my favorite. I started with Around the Bend's Juicy Trials Hazy IPA (7%, 35 IBU), a maltier-than-expected, well-balanced example of the style, with a clean taste and good finish. Then on to Bold Dog's Hazy Boi double dry-hopped IPA (7.4%), which had a big nose (SWIDT?), excellent balance, vanilla notes, and a crisp finish. Third: Burnt City Juice Pillow Hazy IPA (7.4%), which my notes tell me had a very drinkable "big flavor - Citra explosion" and a clean finish. I finished up with Casa Humilde Cerveceria's Nebula IPA (5.7%), a straightforward, very hoppy (yet very tasty) ale that (again, notes) "dice ¡soy IPA!" And because I only had about 50 mL of each beer, I went back and tried Humilde's signature Firme  IPA (SWIDT?), which had more IBUs than their Nebula but still a solid, well-balanced flavor.

Of the five, I liked Juice Pillow the best, but I also had a full Hazy Boi pour while sitting next to a fire on the patio.

Two more notes. First, four Metra lines and Amtrak's Milwaukee and Empire Builder services run past the patio just to the south, so if you like trains, you'll have plenty to watch. Second, they love dogs outside, and they plan to keep the patio open all winter, so Cassie will get to visit at some point. 

Beer garden? Yes (all year!)
Dogs OK? Outside
Televisions? No
Serves food? Lillie's Q on site
Would hang out with a book? Yes
Would hang out with friends? Yes
Would go back? Yes

Welcome to stop #58 on the Brews and Choos project.

Brewery: All Rise Brewing Co., 235 N. Ashland Ave., Chicago
Train line: CTA Pink and Green Lines, Ashland
Time from Chicago: 6 minutes
Distance from station: 200 m

In terms of breweries and distilleries accessible from one Metra station, mine (Ravenswood) tops the list. But the single densest train station of any kind is actually Ashland on the CTA Pink and Green lines. Two stops from Clinton, which is close to both Ogilvie and Union Station, and three stops from the Loop, you have an easy walk to 11 distilleries and breweries.

The Fulton Industrial District also has a lot of factories, as its name implies. You won't get a warm and fuzzy feeling from the neighborhood after dark like you would from the more-residential Ravenswood area. And as you might expect, the first brewery you come to in the zone feels like a real dive.

OK, it's a real dive. But they make good beer.

From right to left, and for $11 including tip, I tried the Hooligan Bitter, the Cease & Desist Lager, the Sell Out New England IPA, and the Wonder Beer No-Coast IPA. I liked them all. The Hooligan (4%) had a lot of malt flavor but also a good hop content, coming in on the American side of the English bitter taste spectrum. The Cease & Desist (4.4%) tasted like any decent lager, like what the mass-market beers try to be. I found it a bit sweet, but I find most lagers sweet. The Sell Out (6.5%) had a lot of grapefruity Citra flavors rounded out with a nice bitterness on the finish that I enjoyed. And the Wonder Beer (6.2%) was not too bitter or not too malty, with a bit more complexity than I expected.

I'd go back, and I'd bring Cassie. I still have to try the food.

Beer garden? Yes (summer only)
Dogs OK? Outside
Televisions? 2, avoidable outside but not inside
Serves food? Full menu
Would hang out with a book? Maybe (it's loud)
Would hang out with friends? Yes
Would go back? Yes

Today marks the 150th anniversary of the Great Chicago Fire, which burned for two days and left 100,000 people homeless. But only for a short time; by 1874, when the city had a second big fire, our population had already grown by about that number.

Flash forward to now:

• Time Out rated Chicago's Andersonville neighborhood second-coolest in the world, after Nørrebro, Copenhagen, and beating out Leith in Edinburgh; Chelsea in New York City; and Dublin 8, just to name three.
• A pre-pandemic article from the Australian Broadcasting Company (ABC) provides some context about why the Australian Navy decided to sink its deal with France in favor of buying submarines from the US and UK. Hint: Australians do not like people coming 15 minutes late to 30-minute meetings.
• CTA Red Line service paused briefly this week when a huge crane toppled into an alley. One person had minor injuries. No word on whether the mishap will set back the RPM project at all.
• David Brooks warns against the essentialist mindset, but of course someone like him would. (That was a joke, y'all.)
• Andrew Sullivan defends Dave Chappelle.

Finally, last night I attended an actual live theater performance for the first time in 19 months, and it was amazeballs. If you live in Chicago, right now you need to go to the Chicago Shakespeare Theater website and buy tickets to As You Like It, which plays through November 21st.

So many things this morning, including a report not yet up on WBEZ's website about the last Sears store in Chicago. (I'll find it tomorrow.)

• Jennifer Rubin advises XPOTUS "critics and democracy lovers" to leave the Republican Party.
• Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) completely caved against a unified Democratic Party and will vote to extend the (probably-unconstitutional) debt limit another three months.
• An abolitionist's house from 1869 may get landmark approval today from the Commission on Chicago Landmarks. (It's already in the National Register of Historic Places).
• Could interurban trains come back?
• Arts critic Jo Livingstone has a mixed review of No Time to Die, but I still plan to see it this weekend.
• 18 retired NBA players face wire-fraud and insurance-fraud charges for allegedly scamming the NBA's Health and Welfare Benefit Plan out of $4 million.
• Even though we've had early-September temperatures the past week, we've also had only 19% of possible sunlight, and only 8% in the past six days. We have not seen the sun since Monday, in fact, making the steady 19°C temperature feel really depressing.
• Two new Black-owned breweries will go on the Brews and Choos list soon.
• Condé Nast has named Chicago the best big city in the US for the fifth year running.

Finally, President Biden is in Chicago today, promoting vaccine mandates. But because of the aforementioned clouds, I have no practical way of watching Air Force One flying around the city.

Update, 12:38 CDT: The sun is out!

Update, 12:39 CDT: Well, we had a minute of it, anyway.

The Union Pacific Railroad, which currently operates about 35% of all Chicago commuter trains, has won a major ruling from a Federal judge that clears the way for it to stop operating those trains:

UP wants out of the commuter business, saying it wants to focus on its its freight service. It has noted that almost all other Metra service now is operated by the commuter rail agency itself, sometimes on tracks it owns itself and at other times on track leased from freight railroads. 

Metra’s position is that in the absence of a discontinuance agreement, UP had to continue to run the trains and ancillary services, such as ticket collection, under “common carrier” provisions that governed railroads nationally for more than a century.

Both sides asked Judge Jorge Alonso for summary judgement. Last week he ruled against Metra.

Effectively, Alonso held, common-carrier rules were substantially eased after the creation of Amtrak, the national passenger carrier, and other deregulation actions by Congress in recent decades. Any remaining common-carrier question that requires federal approval would under the law cover only freight, not passenger, service, he added, but UP is moving to stop only commuter service, not freight.

In a statement, Metra said only that “We are reviewing the ruling and our options.”

UP in its own statement promised not to do anything abrupt that would interfere with service.

Well, that's fun. In 2019, the three Metra lines UP operates had about 27 million of the entire network's 74 million passenger trips, including (I estimate) about 300 of mine, so there is no way the lines will simply shut down. Metra will almost certainly take over operations and pay UP for track and signal use, just like they do on other lines. We'll see how this plays out.

Yes, that Guinness. They've found a derelict railway building in the Fulton Market area and plan to open a new stop on the Brews & Choos Project:

Chicago developer Fred Latsko has struck a deal with Irish beer brand Guinness to open a brewery and beer hall in a long-vacant Fulton Market District building while he lines up plans to build what could be one of the former meatpacking neighborhood's tallest office buildings next door.

Guinness is poised to open the venue as part of a revival of the graffiti-clad former Pennsylvania Railroad Terminal building on the eastern edge of Latsko's property at 375 N. Morgan St., according to sources familiar with the plans. Separately, a Latsko venture aims to develop a 33-story office building on the vacant western edge of the property near the corner of Morgan and Kinzie streets, according to a document submitted to City Council this month by 27th Ward Ald. Walter Burnett.

Details of each project remain unclear, and Latsko and Burnett couldn't be reached for comment. A Guinness spokeswoman declined to comment.

A lot can happen before this becomes real. But Guinness opened a brewery in Baltimore three years ago, though they don't brew their iconic Stout there. Instead, the taproom sells experimental beers brewed on site and Stout brewed in Dublin. I expect the Chicago iteration will have the same strategy.