Half Acre beer comes home
A new brewery rises at Irving and Lincoln
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Tommy Nicely and Gabriel Magliaro have the sort of problem that many beer makers only dream of: ordering twice as many hops as they needed to make their next few batches of beer.
Then again, the upstart owners of Half Acre Beer Company have a host of other challenges, too: mounds of liquor-license paperwork, walls that must be hand-painted with a moisture sealant, and half of a loft in their North Center brewery that needs demolishing. All that, and the two are hoping to start making beer with their recently acquired equipment by February.
“It’s going to be January, godammit,” Magliaro says one recent afternoon, leaning against a receptionist’s counter that will soon become a beer-tasting area for customers. The hideous counter is on its way out, he says, along with almost everything else in the gray-white room, which has the feel of an abandoned office once used to process invoices for a temp agency. When the building was built in 1907, it had stables in it. One hundred years later, it will have an explosion-proof wall.
That’s right, making beer is serious business. Soon Half Acre will have its own grain mill upstairs that will dump the malt into the waiting brewing equipment below. The wall will contain the dust from the mill and hopefully keep the whole neighborhood from going up in a plume of beer-gone-wrong.
The storefront of the new brewery.For now, the company’s beers are on tap at about 20 bars around the city. Its lager and an English-style bitter beers are made at The Sand Creek Brewing Company in Wisconsin. There are plans for a pale ale in the next few months, and Nicely, the brewmaster, has plenty of ideas for the extra 1,000 pounds of hops he bought—a stout brewed with cinnamon, maybe.
It’s one idea of many he has while sitting, beer in hand, at Sully’s House Tap Room & Grill. The bar just started carrying Half Acre, and will add its bitter Over Ale to the taps this week. Although the company’s beers have been available in bottles and on tap for only 15 months, it has started to gain a following. Having them made in Chicago will be a big step.
“I love that it’s local, because it gives me a story to tell people,” says Peter Adams, the manager of Sully’s. “We have Harpoon IPA right now, but it doesn’t resonate with people as well because they’re in Boston. When I say that [Half Acre] is made at Irving and Lincoln, people really get interested.”
Magliaro and Tommy Nicely at the recent Festival of Wood- and Barrel-Aged Beers.It also helps that the beers are well crafted and provide a nice complement to others from different brewers, which can be too hoppy and bitter for many drinkers’ tastes. “To be able to talk to the brewmaster and the owners of the facility whenever I want to is really nice,” Adams says.
At the Lincoln Avenue brewery, Magliaro walks through the warehouse, pointing out where the explosion-proof wall will go and where a walk-in refrigerator bigger than most living rooms will be built. Nicely paints the blue moisture sealant on the walls, perched atop a forklift’s raised arms. New concrete floors and drains are done, but the brewery equipment stands bunched in a corner. The tanks, some of them able to hold more than 900 gallons, wait thirstily for their first job.
Half Acre got its 15 beer-barrel brewhouse, enough to make 465 gallons of the good stuff at a time, from Ska Brewing Company in Durango, Colo. They trucked it to Chicago last month.
Gabriel Magliaro, the president of Half Acre Beer Company, and his black Labrador, Holden, at the Lincoln Avenue brewery.“It’s very incestuous in a great way. Everybody takes the hand-me-downs,” Magliaro says. This equipment has a good vibe, he adds, because Ska is so successful that it needed to upgrade to a bigger brewhouse to make more beer at once.
So what beers will Half Acre have on tap in the coming months?
“There’s tons of beers we’d love to make, but it’s a question of who we’re selling to and what they want to drink,” Magliaro says.
