Chicago Craft Beer Week is back, and it’s as overwhelming as ever: the first night alone features more than two dozen tap takeovers, beer dinners, special releases, and other events. The length of CCBW has actually been scaled back slightly, to eight days (May 18-25)—down from the week and a half that’s been the norm for the past several years—but the events still number in the hundreds. Many perennial favorites, like Beer Under Glass, Goose Island’s Battle of the Breweries Dodgeball Tournament, and the Northwest Side Craft Beer Ride, remain unchanged (and are still good bets). This year, though, we wanted to focus on two newer and lesser-known festivals: the South Side Craft Beer Fest and Ultra Fresh II.
The Hop Review’s Ultra Fresh II was created to showcase the freshest beer possible: everything served at the festival will have been packaged within the last five days. This is actually the second edition, but organizer Tom White says it’s going to be much bigger than last year, when it was a small, last-minute affair at Bitter Pops, the beer store and tasting room where he works part-time. This iteration features 24 local breweries pouring styles that go far beyond pale ale and IPA (although there are plenty of those too): pilsner, lager, wheat, blonde, gose, and bock, plus a watermelon-and-kaffir-lime farmhouse ale.
