CHICAGO — For a guy who doesn’t drink beer, I have a surprising number of friends who drink a lot of beer, write about beer and are passionate about beer.
There’s my Tribune colleague Josh Noel, who compellingly charts the city’s beer business, especially the energetic, innovative segment known as craft beer which, as I understand it, is the liquid product made by independent brewers.
There is the prolific local writer June Skinner Sawyers, whose latest book is the delightfully informative “Chicago Beer: A History of Brewing, Public Drinking and the Corner Bar,” in which she tells us that this book “got its start as a guide to craft breweries’ before it morphed into its current form. .
Then, there are the charming and smart women named Liz Garibay and Laurin Mack.
Garibay grew up in Old Town, the youngest of four children and the first in her family to be born in the United States instead of Mexico. She went to St. Ignatius College Prep and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. With a Bachelor of Arts in anthropology, she worked as public programs manager at the Chicago Historical Society (now the Chicago History Museum); began a blog and later a website, History on Tap, which focused on history and culture as observed through the lens of booze; and began conducting popular History Pub Crawls for the CHM and then went off on her own.
She has formed a nonprofit organization and gathered a board of directors with the intention of opening a museum dedicated to beer, to be called the Brewseum. She orchestrated fascinating and entertaining exhibitions, including one that ran at the Field Museum from 2018 to 2020.
“Our nation is one built by drinkers,” she says. “Our city too.”
She adds, “I truly believe that alcohol and taverns are valuable and genuine topics to discuss history. People become incredibly interested in history if they have a drink in hand. It makes it less daunting, a lot more accessible, and interesting. Many years ago I developed the saying that alcohol is the lubricant for history, and it’s true.”
Mack is the great-great-great granddaughter of Conrad Seipp, a name that had sadly faded into history. But what a marvel he was, a success who deserves a spot alongside such other business owners as Marshall Field or George Pullman. From Germany, he came to Chicago in the 1850s and founded the Conrad Seipp Brewing Company on the South Side in 1854. It would become, as Sawyers writes in her book, “one of the largest and most successful breweries in the United States … (and) the largest brewery in Chicago from 1854 to 1933.”
A few years ago Mack, who works in the health care industry, began deeply examining her family’s history and that inspired her to ambitiously contemplate resurrecting the Conrad Seipp Brewing Company.
“I had heard so much about it and him when growing up,” she told me. “It was part of me but I had never been able to taste the family’s beer.”
She met Garibay, who loved her idea and introduced her to Tracy and Doug Hurst, who have since 2009 operated Metropolitan Brewing, an acclaimed Chicago craft brewery. The couple was more than receptive. Not only did their brewery specialize in making German-style lagers, but they also had a deep appreciation for local beer history. And they were happy to help a pair of women, a vastly underrepresented group in the beer biz.
Their first collaboration took a year, in part because they had chosen to revive Seipp’s “Extra Pale” Pilsner. It had been one of the company’s top sellers but there was no written recipe. The group pieced together a beer from other Seipp archival records and also based the brew on what other breweries of the time might have made and what ingredients were available then.
“The idea was to be respectful of history but to create something for modern tastes,” said Mack. “To use history to connect us to each other and ourselves.”
The beer debuted in 2020 and people who drank it loved it, a few even grabbing the meaning deeper than its taste. As Mack puts it, “In having a sip of Seipp’s beer, they were getting a taste of the city’s history.” For her, it was even more. She says, “Bringing back something that (Seipp) created was a very poignant moment for me.”
Empowered, the group next created Seipp’s Columbia Special Release, their version of a Bock beer specially made for the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair. That was followed, earlier this year, by Chicago’s Very Own Golden Lager, a limited release brewed for WGN Radio’s 100th anniversary. Another limited edition followed with Seipp’s Bavarian Traditional Hefeweizen.
There is now a thriving company, with the slogan “The beer that built Chicago,” and its beer is available at many taverns and stores.
There are plans for more beers and soon comes the Brewseum’s digital and in-person Beer Culture Summit conference. Taking place from Nov. 9-12, it will feature an almost dizzying but informative series of events, from “The Beverage Industry Through the Latinx Lens,” “Patsy Young: American Brewer, Fugitive from Slavery,” and “How Beer Media Has Evolved, Where It’s Going and How Breweries Can Use It.”
“The day events are all virtual,” said Garibay. “That way we can tap into audiences and presenters from all over the world. We really do think of the Brewseum as an international organization. But every night there will be in-person gatherings that will feature, yes, some drinking.”
Mack and Garibay often meet at the Old Town Ale House. “It’s really like our office,” says Garibay. It’s a cozy spot, overseen by proprietor Bruce Elliott, a committed beer drinker, writer, painter and raconteur. I have written about this tavern plenty and Sawyers in her book writes that it is “both dive bar and literary hangout.” It serves beer and maybe one of these days or nights I might try one.
