I tried to look up Forbidden Root online, but their website was just their logo, with nothing to click on and no further information. There were just two posts to their Twitter page, so it didn’t seem like a reliable avenue of communication. But the list of brewers for the sixth annual Oak Park Micro Brew & Food Review on August 17 included Forbidden Root, so I figured if I headed out I’d be able to find somebody to bother in person. Surely the principals of a brewery so new wouldn’t skip their second-ever festival to let volunteers do the work.

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Fortunately, I was right. I located two of Forbidden Root’s three chief personages, brewer B.J. Pichman and “root master” Robert Finkel, without even using my flare gun. Pichman, an experienced home brewer who’s been a fixture in the Chicago beer-nerd community for years, is probably six foot three, with an impeccably groomed beard so thick you could lose your car keys in it. Thanks to Jess Straka from Revolution, I had a description to go on—he would’ve been easy to spot even without his Forbidden Root T-shirt.

Finkel jokes that the brewery has a “death wish” when it comes to ingredient costs. Fortunately he’s founder and president of Prism Capital and is personally funding Forbidden Root, which means it can operate “without the usual short-term cash flow pressures,” to borrow his words. (He also serves on the governing board of the nonprofit Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, which maintains the famous “minutes to midnight” doomsday clock, but that doesn’t seem as relevant in this context.)

  • There’s more than one way to enjoy a beer festival.

Sublime Ginger uses baby ginger, which lacks the brown skin and fibrous yellow flesh of the mature rhizome; it’s cream colored with pink tips, and its flavor is relatively mellow. (I’ve always assumed that sushi ginger is dyed pink to remind people of baby ginger, the way “wasabi” is dyed green to persuade people it’s not just mustard seed, horseradish, and starch—you rarely run into true wasabi in the States.) Baby ginger only keeps for a couple weeks unrefrigerated, and it’s way more expensive than the regular kind—I think I mentioned Forbidden Root’s “death wish” already. I don’t suppose I need to explain key limes or cane syrup, but if you’re like me, you didn’t know that honeybush is a South African plant used to make a fragrant and slightly sweet herbal tea similar to rooibos. (Its flowers smell of honey; hence the name.)

OK, an obvious one to wrap up. Brazilian giants Sepultura opened the 1996 album Roots with “Roots Bloody Roots.”