• Revolution’s 4th Year Beer by candlelight

On Saturday Revolution Brewing threw itself a huge sold-out birthday party at its Kedzie tap room and brewery, which opened in May 2012, a little more than two years after its Logan Square brewpub. The 4th Year Crazy Party, as it was called, featured 13 food-and-beer pairings, showing off not just the talents of Revolution’s brewers but also the considerable ingenuity of the kitchen staff at the pub.

He called Revolution the fastest-growing craft brewery in the country (a claim I’m no better able to fact check now than I was then) and announced that on Friday, February 7, it had signed a lease on the space immediately north of the Kedzie facility—which I’d later learn is being vacated for bigger digs by the Illinois office of wine distributor Winebow. Revolution hopes to expand into that part of the building by late summer.

The recipe for the 4th Year Beer includes five pounds of dried chamomile flowers, added after a prodigious three-and-a-half-hour boil—they go in during the whirlpool stage, which separates out any particulates left after the removal of the spent grain. I can’t say for sure whether I taste them or not. Their flavor could be contributing to the subtle, herbaceous bitterness in the beer’s finish—maybe they’re hiding among the hops (not the easiest trick, given that a quad tends to call for just a handful).

  • Hold 4th Year Beer up to the light, and it looks like this.

I think there’s a good argument to be made that some of these old three-tier regulations don’t properly serve the Chicago craft-beer scene—it’s not exactly suffering from a proliferation of tied houses. (“Tied houses” are bars compelled by a brewery to serve only its products, either by contract or outright ownership; they’ve been illegal in most of the U.S. since the repeal of Prohibition.) Admittedly, I don’t have a great sense for how things work in smaller markets, but around these parts, craft-beer dominance through that kind of vertical integration just isn’t possible—Revolution may be a big local player, but it’s small potatoes compared to the companies those regulations were written to rein in.

Philip Montoro writes about beer and metal, singly or in combination, every Monday.