LTHForum.com - Lagunitas Brewing plans to make Chicago its second city..
Lagunitas Brewing plans to make Chicago its second city..
LTH Home > Chat > Something to Drink > Lagunitas Brewing plans to make Chicago its second city..
Tony Magee, a Chicago native and owner of Lagunitas Brewing Co., put a head on the craft beer world when he announced plans on Twitter to open a brewery in Douglas Park, his first outside California.
According to my friend Tom Bergman (a crazy-knowledgeable beer maven), "Lagunitas Chicago will have a greater annual brewing capacity than Goose Island, Two Brothers, Three Floyds, Half Acre, Metropolitan, and the upcoming Revolution facility combined." Yowza!
Interesting how New Belgium and Sierra Nevada made big media splashes about where they'd locate new breweries east of their home locations; Lagunitas was quiet and just went about getting it done.
Apparently, Goose Island runs a 50bbl brewhouse -- this new one will be 250bbl. That's on top of the existing 250bbl brewery in California. Each brewery will be able to brew 600,000 barrels a year for a combined output of 1.2M barrels of craft beer/year. Sierra Nevada produced 860,000 barrels last year and they're kind of the ubiquitous craft beer wherever you go. So, yeah -- big*.
*numbers courtesy of posts on BeerAdvocate -- cannot personally vouch for the veracity!
Stick a cap on it — the first batch of Chicago-brewed Lagunitas beer is done.
Workers at the 300,000-square-foot Douglas Park facility are firing up the bottling line this morning and slapping on Lagunitas India Pale Ale labels. Once they flip the switch, the line will fill 500 bottles a minute.
I grabbed a couple of tickets for Saturday May 17th for this event at the new brewery. Looks like it will be good time.
As long as they keep making specialty beers like Born Yesterday and Waldo's, they can get as big as they want!