Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
So should you care? Well, the folks at Destihl are responsible for the Saint Dekkera Reserve sour ales, which caused quite a stir at Denver’s Great American Beer Festival in 2011 and have since attracted long lines of nerds wherever they’ve appeared. These unblended single-barrel sours are spontaneously fermented, without a deliberate inoculation of yeast or other microorganisms, and spend anywhere from one to three and a half years aging in oak. I’ve had a few myself, most recently when Destihl tapped one at the Oak Park Micro Brew & Food Review—made with pineapple, mango, peach, strawberry, and blueberry, it was called “Hawaii Five-Ale,” and it gave me a pretty good idea what all the excitement is about.
But maybe you don’t like having to race a bunch of bearded geeks to a keg just to try a beer before it kicks. (I say this as a bearded geek, of course.) Maybe you just don’t care for sours. Fortunately, Destihl does plenty of other things well. The brewery’s Strawberry Blonde ale, for instance, won the bronze medal in the “Fruit Beer” category at last year’s GABF. And as it so happens, I found it on tap at Fountainhead this weekend.
Haymarket and Revolution are both getting Destihl kegs, says Potts, and when I called Molly Reilly at Chicago Beverage Systems, she provided a much longer list of local accounts—including DryHop, Twisted Spoke, the Long Room, Small Bar Division, Owen & Engine, and the Map Room.
I’m gonna call it a day with that, because most of the songs with “blonde” in their titles would just make us feel bad about ourselves and each other.
