In This Issue
• DryHop Brewpub at 8: Smart Cookies
• Take A Quiz
DryHop Brewpub at 8: Smart Cookies
Part 1 of 2
Though a veteran journalist, I was a rookie craft beer scribe when I met and wrote about Lakeview’s DryHop brewpub, its owner Greg Shuff and master brewer Brant Dubovick. Our first meeting in July 2012 took place in their bare-to-the-walls storefront at 3155 North Broadway.
It took 11 months to do the buildout and navigate Chicago’s regulatory system — not what they desired, but it turned into a case of the power of anticipation. The Lakeview East neighborhood had no brewpub, the buzz built, and when they opened the doors on June 13, 2013, there was a line around the block to get in.
The mastery of Brant and his fellow brewers in creating a wide variety of craft beer styles — plus a menu that includes a cheeseburger touted in national publications as one of the nation’s best — resulted in DryHop being packed daily for almost seven years. Then COVID hit, challenging not only DryHop but also the rest of their group: Roebuck, an adjoining pizza restaurant; Corridor, a brewpub on Southport Ave. opened about a mile west in 2015, and Crushed by Giants, located just off downtown’s Magnificent Mile and opened right in the teeth of the pandemic.
But with a devoted clientele and some agile pivots, the DryHop team has powered through and is celebrating its eighth anniversary with a specially brewed beer named The Oat, The Malt, and The Cookie. While some of their creative beer names are a bit cryptic, this one is explicit: It is an oatmeal cookie IPA (India Pale Ale) with three types of malted oats, three types of oatmeal cookies and 2 types of flavored oatmeal, with three types of hops, Saigon cinnamon chips and French cocoa nibs.
I sat down with Brant, now director of brewing operations for the whole DryHop group, and Steve Adams, head brewer at DryHop, for an interview so wide-ranging that this is the first of two excerpts. This one focuses on the beer; the second on the food menu and the choices the team made to weather the pandemic.
Final note: There are several references to Hazy IPA, a style that has gained popularity over the past few years. The haze comes from suspended hop and yeast particles that maximize the hop aroma, even though they are far less bitter than many beers during the hoppy beer craze early last decade.
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Q: Eight years ago, what were your expectations for DryHop?
Brant: I thought Chicago was destined to be the new Portland of craft beer, the new Seattle, the new San Diego, the new Denver, or at least that version in the Midwest. We've far exceeded what I thought we were going to do.
Q: Lakeview is my home community. It really needed this. It really wanted it. Even as optimistic as you were, what did you think on opening day when the line went around the corner?
Brant: It was everything we wanted. I expected it being like craft beer sort of gaining a lot of traction in the Chicagoland area, and Lakeview didn't have anything. It was mostly Wrigleyville mass-marketed beer, which is fine, it's great. But there weren't really any craft beer options whatsoever, especially on Broadway… Maybe not around the corner did I expect the line to form… We found a nice little home in Lakeview and have been really well received and appreciated.
Q: One of the things that I think made an immediate impact... I think people were used to breweries specializing in one kind of beer. The range that you presented right from the get go. So many different styles.
Brant: I pretty much come from a lager background… at Church Brew Works in Pittsburgh… I love lagers. But I also love IPAs and that's one of the reasons why I wanted to come to Chicago was to have my say in the brewing process as opposed to it being at an already established brewery where lagers are what we have to brew because that's what people expect… I wanted to start DryHop with Greg Shuff and start out brewing what I loved. And what I loved was lagers and especially hoppy beers though. And where we sort of made our bones was in the hoppy spectrum, and that's what people want…
Fortunately we were allowed to get great, great hops, great, great barley, and Greg gave us the opportunity and said just go for it. Do what you need to do and we pulled it off.
Steve: It's really exciting to brew here because my previous breweries I worked at, you kind of had six or seven flagships and you typically brewed those year-round, you might do one-off here and there. So it's fun to constantly try new styles I haven't brewed before, have a constant changing lineup.
Q: For a while there was some pushback about IPAs. Obviously the style is still vibrant. Was that carping criticism or did you have to rethink things?
Steve: I think the pushback was from how bitter IPAs were. There was a need for hoppy flavorful beers that weren't especially bitter or astringent or what have you. That's where a lot of the Hazy IPA craze came from was trying to fit that niche of crazy hoppy juice bombs but not with the bitterness… It’s a complete 180 from how IPAs were five or six years ago, everyone wanted it super bitter. You know 150 IBUs, what have you. Now they're trying to do everything they can to limit that.
Q: So the Hazy IPA is really one of the biggest developments of the years since you guys got started. Explain that, what is a hazy IPA?
Steve: So hazy IPA is a very hop-forward beer… And they tend to focus more on, you know, tropical citrusy flavors, as opposed to West Coast which tends to be more grapefruit, more pine. Your Hazys tend to be more pineapple, mango, berry, stuff like that. We have a crazy collection of hops upstairs. So it's pretty easy to make new flavors because we have so many combinations that we can do and make a new Hazy with completely different hops from the previous time. It keeps it interesting.
Q: We talked about hazy IPA, Farmhouse ale was another thing that came along and you bet on it [at sister brewpub Corridor]?
Brant: That's a bet we lost. Corridor’s all Hazy now.
Q: So why didn't that work?
B: I don't know. I mean it was working and we're doing fine. Corridor was doing well not as well as DryHop but we were doing good businesses on Southport. I want to say that you could stick six IPAs on and they're not going to cannibalize each other, but if you have six Farmhouse ales on, they tend to cannibalize each other. So we did make a conscious decision to go into the Hazy realm when we saw it take off… Steve came on and we sort of said, “Hey, this is taking off over there. Let's maybe not have two or three Hazys on that we have at Corridor but let's always have a Hazy on at DryHop.” Shark Meets Hipster [a Wheat IPA] is still our number one seller, our flagship, which has been on since 2013, but number two, or number one at times, is always a Hazy and an easy drinker.
Q: We’ve talked about a lot of beer styles. Is there anything that's kind of like starting to roll to become the next big thing or we are just kind of in a place where we left off.
Brant: From a beer geek standpoint… slow-poured pilsners and side-draw pouring of pilsners seems to be one of the newer, I hate to use the word fad, but seems to be the phenomenon people are really enjoying…. The sweet stouts, pastry stouts for again lack of a better term, and the Hazys don't seem to be going anywhere.
Q: Do you have any special events planned ?
B: We are doing a couple of festivals that are returning this summer. All three [of our] breweries will be participating in the Oak Park Microbrew Review [in suburban Oak Park] in August… We're going to be doing the Beer and Barbecue Festival in Old Irving where you're paired with a pitmaster and you release a beer, so that one's coming back the first week in August. So we're excited to be starting to get back to festival season even if we're I guess just dipping our toes in the water with two of them. We'll have some collaborations hopefully as we get back to a hundred percent capacity.
Take a Quiz
Which state produces the most hops?
a) Idaho
b) Michigan
c) Oregon
d) Washington
Answer: d) By a wide margin, the majority of hops in the United States are grown in the state of Washington. Idaho and Oregon are the only others in double-digit percentages. Despite a revival of Michigan’s long-dormant hops-growing sector, the state produces only 1 percent or less of the nation’s hops.