I realize it doesn’t feel much like spring at the moment, but the fact is, winter ended more than three weeks ago, and Spiteful Brewing is celebrating the thaw with its newest beer, an English-style barleywine called Dibs Are for Dummies—a dig at the Chicago postblizzard tradition that presumes some sort of parking-related equivalence between lawn furniture and a car. Bomber bottles shipped late last week.
Spiteful currently has a modest two-and-a-half-barrel brew house, with seven five-barrel fermenters. It installed its first seven-barrel fermenter last week, and it’s got four more coming, all built by Chicago firm Corcoran Fabrication & Design; once they’re all in, the brewery’s capacity will have doubled. But “doubled” is a relative term, of course—Pipeworks, itself a pretty small operation, lists roughly 160 Chicagoland accounts on its website, while Spiteful ships to just 42 liquor stores and eight bars. Spiteful cans are available only within the city limits, at least for now.
In fact, it wouldn’t hurt to buy your bottles of Dibs Are for Dummies now and lay them up till barleywine weather comes back, especially since Spiteful has some summery beers in the pipeline. (I’m operating under the assumption that we’ll eventually have a summer.) The extra capacity from its new tanks—and the small batch sizes made possible by hand-labeling cans—will give the brewery the flexibility to try more novelties and one-offs. In the next few months we can expect a traditional German-style hefeweizen and a French-style saison, both in four-packs of 16-ounce cans, plus a gruit beer in bomber bottles. (“Gruit” is a blend of botanicals that was used to flavor and bitter beer before the widespread adoption of hops in the 12th century, and Spiteful’s version will use bog myrtle, yarrow, and mugwort, among other things.)
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