Thank you Old Chicago, or How I learned to stop worrying and love the hops.

I moved from the northwest suburbs of Chicago up to the Twin Cities in June of 2002, just after graduation from University of Illinois (Go Illini!) with a degree in Chemistry.  I left my family and friends and pretty much everyone I had ever known to move to Minnesota.

What was in Minnesota to make me go do that?

The University of Minnesota where my then girlfriend now wife was going to become a Ph. D student.  (She eventually got her Master's degree and jumped into industry, but that's a whole other blog...) 

At that point, I was mildly knowledgeable about craft beer, but I still didn't realize the amount I didn't know.  I was in the Guinness-Harp-Sam Adams phase of beer drinking. (Anyone who has gone from clueless to craft beer lover knows what phase that is; "Black and Tans are the best thing to ever happen to beer!" *sigh*)  Did I love beer at that point?  Nope.  Would I have even considered homebrewing, let alone dreaming of opening my own establishment, at that point?  Heck no.

My how things change, and it all started because of one dining and drinking establishment. 

Old Chicago.

For those not in the know, Old Chicago is a chain bar/restaurant/pizzeria scattered about the USA (although, somewhat surprisingly, not in Chicago).  One day, the wife and I, fresh off the proverbial boat from Chicagoland, see a restaurant claiming to be the embodiment of Chicago and decide to go check it out.  While the pizza doesn't hold a candle to Chicago deep dish, the main attraction was the 20ish beer taps and a similar number of bottled beer available.  Now this may not seem too crazy nowadays, but remember this was 2002; well before the near double-digit percentage increases in craft beer sales recently. 

The sheer number of beers, while impressive, by itself would not have been enough to push me towards craft beer lover.  However, they had a special beer drinker's card which got you swag if you drank x number of different beers.  So drinking 20 Sam Adams would not get you anything, but drinking one each of 20 different beers would get you a t-shirt or something.  If you drank one of every beer they had, you got your name engraved on a plaque on the wall. 

Now being a video game player and a slightly obsessive completionist when it comes to collections and free stuff, I very willingly fell right into their trap:  Asking the server for printouts of what beers I have on my record.  Planning my drinking such that I maximized the number of varieties I could drink before they were rotated out.  I didn't make a spreadsheet, but I was close.

I never got my name on the plaque, but trying such a wide variety of beers opened my eyes to the world of craft beer.  The experience taught me a lot about what I liked, what I didn't like, and ultimately what good beer tastes like.

Thank you Old Chicago.

Cheers.  Na zdrowie.  Gun bae.