- Jeff Cagle
- Penrose Brewing’s first three year-round beers: Proto Gradus, P-2, and Navette
Penrose Brewing of Geneva, Illinois, threw a Chicago launch party last Monday at a lovely Humboldt Park studio space shared by Michael Kiser of Good Beer Hunting. Because that was a week ago, Karl Klockars at Time Out and Chuck Sudo at Chicagoist have beaten me to the punch, and their posts both include a fair amount of the brewery’s backstory. So I can skip that stuff, can’t I?
- Jeff Cagle
- The Penrose taproom in Geneva opened on Tuesday, March 18. Big thanks to its manager, Jeff Cagle, for all the photos in this post.
As Hobbs told Mash Tun in issue four, “The hardest thing about brewing is doing something very simple, very clean, making it well, and being consistent.” Korder, who has a background in mechanical engineering, started brewing professionally at Anheuser-Busch, so it’s safe to say he’s had “simple, clean, and consistent” beaten into him from day one—and even the most egregious beer snob will admit, if only under duress, that A-B macro lagers are formidable object lessons when it comes to crisp, drinkable beers whose balanced, unflashy flavor profiles leave absolutely no room for error.
As you’d expect from a beer this color, Navette is roasty and a little bitter—strangely, I’m also convinced I can taste toasted pepitas dusted with curry powder. I can’t pick out the coriander, but as Korder said on Hop Cast, “If you can immediately tell what spice it is, you’re probably using too much of it.” There’s also cocoa and pumpernickel, plus some subdued fruit—mostly more dried apricot. This is the fullest-bodied beer of the three, and the only one that feels warming, rather than cooling.
Philip Montoro writes about beer and metal, singly or in combination, every Monday.
