A week before Christmas Josh Deth was at the bank, closing on his construction loan, when the phone rang. It was the insurance agent for the tenant vacating the two-story, yellow brick building Deth, owner of the Handlebar, had bought to house his new venture, Revolution Brewing Company. If all goes according to plan the brewery and bar should be up and running by the fall. Right now the space is 12,500 square feet of raw potential, the empty main floor dominated by a gleaming 15-bbl brew kettle—the lower wall of which, the insurance agent was sorry to inform Deth, the moving crew had just punctured with a forklift.
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The damage—annoying, but mostly cosmetic—was hardly the first setback in what at this point has been a ten-year odyssey. Deth’s been making beer for more than a decade—at home, at Logan Square’s short-lived Golden Prairie Brewing Company, and at Goose Island’s Fulton Street operation. He came up with Revolution’s punning name and logo back in 1998 and quit his job at Goose Island in 2000 because he thought he had a line on the Milwaukee Avenue building that’s now home to the Paramount Room. That plan didn’t work out—unsurprisingly, adds Deth, as “I didn’t have a lot of money, or a lot of experience running a business, or any financing.”
That loan officers might not share Deth’s faith in beer as a solid business plan isn’t that surprising. Craft beer may be booming—small brewers saw almost a billion-dollar spike in sales in 2007—but opening a brewery in Chicago is an uphill climb, given city bureaucracy, prohibitive capital requirements, and Big Beer’s powerful distribution network. Portland, Oregon, has 28 microbreweries; Chicago has, optimistically, six: Goose Island, Rock Bottom, Piece, Moonshine, Metropolitan (whose first batches of lager are fermenting away in Ravenswood and should hit the market in late January), and 18-month-old Half Acre, which hopes to start brewing full-time in its new North Center facility in late February. Even if you rope in the outliers—south-suburban Flossmoor Station, northwest-suburban Millrose Brewing Company, DuPage County’s Two Brothers, and Three Floyds in Munster, Indiana, we’re far outmatched.
Beer, he says, is like soup. “If you’re a chef, you like to use the tricks of the trade that you know that work. There’s a couple different mirepoix that a chef uses as a base, but they may vary that, and then they’ve got a stable of 20 or 30 key ingredients, and then there’s how you plate it, and so forth. There’s so many varieties.” That variety, he says, is what will get people in the door. A good time will keep them coming back. But first, he says, “I’ve got to get to work.”v
