Get Your Beer Fix in Natural Awakenings Magazine
My latest story on craft beer creativity, plus a little Chicago history
Four Stops on the Craft Beer Creativity Tour
I’m happy to share the article I produced for the March issue of Natural Awakenings Chicago magazine, which highlights four of our region’s craft breweries that go beyond great beer in purpose-driven manners.
The story focuses on:
Forbidden Root and its botanical beers (Cultivate at Forbidden Root hosted the first Local Food Forum Beer Meetup on Saturday, February 25).
Greenstar Brewing at Uncommon Ground restaurant, which was the first organic brewery in Illinois.
Broken Tee Brewing in suburban Highwood, which sought and found a farmer to recycle its spent grain as animal feed to reduce waste.
Eris Brewery and Cider House, a women-owned operation that puts its hard ciders front and center.
Click below to access the article.
Thanks so much to those I interviewed for this piece. The items on each brewery are short, but I am going to do longer takes on each for Local Food Forum that will link to the Natural Awakenings piece.
The theme of the March issue of Natural Awakenings Chicago is Food and Nutrition, so you’ll want to leaf through the whole magazine (after reading my story first, of course).
A Different Bird’s Eye View
I had a meeting downtown on Thursday in my contract work for Naturally Chicago, and was struck by this high-rise view of one of Chicago’s historically most important locations.
Wolf Point is located at the confluence of the three branches of the Chicago River: the main branch that runs through the heart of downtown, the North Branch and the South Branch. In the 1820s, it became the site of the first tavern and first store in the white settlement of Chicago.
Like most of the riverfront, Wolf Point was industrial through much of its history, with lumber yards, grain elevators, warehouses and rail lines. The first big step toward a post-industrial existence came with the 1930 opening of the Merchandise Mart, which, though not that tall, covers two city blocks and was the largest office building by square footage until the Pentagon opened near Washington, D.C. during World War II. (The Mart is the tan-colored building on the right side of the above photo.)
Nonetheless, change came slowly. I started working at an office just a couple of blocks behind the Mart in early 2016, and Wolf Point was still lightly developed. Over the four years before I left the neighborhood at the start of the pandemic, a city within a city grew at Wolf Point, with skyscraping office towers now surrounding the point on all sides and dwarfing the Merchandise Mart.
I love older buildings so my heart is with the Merchandise Mart, where I spent quite a lot of time when I worked nearby. But I have to admit this is one heck of a view. The photo below has a closer view of the Merchandise Mart and the main branch of the Chicago River with its many bridges. The skyscraper long known as the John Hancock Tower is in the background on the left, and if you look between the gap in the buildings at center, you can catch a glimpse of Lake Michigan.