Half Acre Beer Company tries new approach with retail shop

After a year of construction and a blizzard of annoying paperwork, Half Acre Brewing's new retail store has an opening date: Oct. 7. The small retail shop at 4257 N. Lincoln Ave. will sport six tap handles and offer free beer samples. While the store can’t sell pints, it will be able to fill two-liter growlers full of beer straight from the taps. In addition, the store will sell bottled beer from local breweries like Three Floyds, Two Brothers, Goose Island, and Flossmoor Station.

The real appeal—aside from finding beers like those from Flossmoor that are otherwise hard to get outside the south suburbs—is what's on tap. Gabriel Magliaro, Half Acre's founder, expects those taps to change regularly as the brewery tries out new recipes and seasonal batches that may never make it into bottles. Why settle for the company's lager or English-style bitter, both available in bottles and on tap across the city, when you could fill up on its honey beer, which it produced for a downtown hotel this summer but has never distributed?

Half Acre has been growing steadily since its inception in October 2006, soon after Magliaro earned his design degree from the School Of The Art Institute Of Chicago. In its first year, the beer was actually produced by a Wisconsin brewery. Then came the brewhouse equipment from a Colorado brewery that was expanding, and Half Acre was able to set up its own shop.

It’s been a year since Half Acre took over the former electrical supply store (and stable long before that) where the new store will be. Magliaro and his business partners sunk thousands of dollars into upgrading the entire building, changing its zoning, and tackling the requirements for a host of different liquor licenses—all so Half Acre could make and sell beer in the same place. It’s the first time it’s been done in the city, Magliaro says. All those hoops have deterred other local brewers, like Metropolitan Brewing, though it also wants to start selling directly to customers.

Chicago has been a tricky town for brewers to navigate with its maze of rules and two power-wielding distributors that can make or break a brewery's success. That Half Acre has pulled off getting its beers on store shelves and in bars and is now ready to open its own store is no small set of feats. So keep that in mind while raising a glass.