When I hung out with the Aquanaut guys in Bowmanville to write last week’s column, we got to talking about the Half Acre facility going in across Damen, and they mentioned another new neighbor—Empirical Brewery, seven blocks away at Foster and Ravenswood. The neighborhood seems to be turning into a sort of brewers’ row; if it weren’t for the Metra tracks, you could pretty much hit Metropolitan with a rock from Empirical’s loading dock. Not that you’d want to, of course!

  • Empirical’s 30-barrel Sprinkman brew house and twin 60-barrel fermenters can turn out 3,650 barrels of beer annually at full tilt.

You might’ve noticed that I didn’t mention a brewmaster. That’s because Mehta and Hurley hired one from outside: Wisconsin veteran Art Steinhoff, who earned a stellar reputation (and won an armload of awards) as a home brewer, then went pro in 1999. Most recently he spent six years running the brewery at Flatlander’s in Lincolnshire, which closed in early 2012. Steinhoff has been making beer for 32 years, and he brings with him a portfolio of road-tested recipes more than 50 deep. He also helped design Empirical’s computer-controlled 30-barrel Sprinkman brew house.

  • Empirical’s grain mill lives in a little cave, presumably because it has been naughty.

The taproom will also address what Mehta characterizes as a widespread disregard for the proper serving temperatures of various styles—he says that too often, a stout that ought to be enjoyed at 55 degrees is poured at 38, the same temperature at which it’s stored. “There’s a reason you brew black tea at 205 degrees and green tea at 175,” he explains, by way of analogy. The taproom will keep beer in three different temperature “zones” to minimize the time that finicky patrons (guilty!) need to sit on their hands waiting for a glass to warm up.

Empirical’s newest recipe, IBU Overload (6.5 percent alcohol), earned a spot in my headline today mostly because it’s so self-consciously audacious I’m tempted to call it “gonzo.” As far as Mehta and Hurley are aware, it’s the only single IPA to reach 105 International Bittering Units, near the practical upper limit of the scale—roughly the same count as Stone’s Ruination, Avery’s Maharaja, Lagunitas’s Hop Stoopid, and other famous double IPAs. (Plenty of beers claim to have far more IBUs, but humans can’t taste anything beyond maybe 120, so the really big numbers are basically marketing gimmicks.)

  • Mehta got this Motorhead tattoo in India when he was 15.

Next up is a version of the brewery’s Atomic Amber called Honey Hypothesis; one 30-barrel batch uses 100 pounds of honey, harvested from Steinhoff’s own apiaries. Empirical hopes to start selling beer in bottles by the end of 2014—perhaps by leasing a bottling line, which on off days it can rent out to other breweries—and Hurley and Mehta think they might start off with a smoked chocolate-cherry porter called Cold Fusion.