Chicago Beer Tour

We had a day and a half to spend in Chicago before we boarded our train for Los Angeles.  Last year while staying in Chicago we went on a beer tour, which is a walking tour around one of Chicago’s neighborhoods, visiting various bars while sampling local beers and learning about the history of the area we walked through.  We had so much fun last year that we decided to do it again, this time in a different neighborhood.

We checked in to our hotel the night before, staying at the Renaissance in downtown Chicago.  We were given a complementary upgrade to a larger room with a really nice view on the 25th floor.

View from the room

Our tour did not start until 1:30 and we were awake full from our breakfast at the hotel’s restaurant, and ready to go by 11:30.  Since it was a nice day and we had some time to kill we decided to walk part way and perhaps take the subway the remainder of the way to the meeting point of our beer tour in the Lakeview section of the city, about 3 ½ miles outside of downtown.  We started walking, mostly taking our time.  We passed by an interesting bar on our walk, the Green Door Tavern.  The building was built just after the Great Chicago fire of 1871 before new building codes went into place prohibiting the construction of wooden commercial buildings.  Shortly after the building was built, it started settling and it has been that way, leaning slightly to the right, ever since.  We continued walking and it wasn't too long that we realized we probably would not make it to the first stop on the bar tour.  We had a little over a mile still to walk with under 20 minutes to get there.  We decided to just hail a cab because we did not want to have to hurry and risk being late.

When we entered the first bar, Harrigan’s, not only were we the first from the tour to arrive, we were also the only patrons in the bar.  We ordered a couple of beers while waiting for the remainder of the tour group and our leader to arrive.  Our tour group consisted of only 7 people, which turned out to be   a good sized group.  It wasn’t too big and it wasn’t awkwardly small.  After trying 4 different beers at the first bar we headed for our second stop, Paddy Longs.  

Paddy Longs is a beer and bacon bar.  If you’ve never heard of a beer and bacon bar then where have you been?  Our tour paired three different kinds of bacon with 3 different kinds of beer and it was like we were in heaven.

Good news!

Irish bacon

Peppered bacon

Jowl bacon

Our next stop was at a craft beer and liquor store, rather than the traditional bar.  The stop, at a place called Bodega Ramos, included a small demonstration on the beer making process.  While we have certainly seen this before it was nice to have it shown to us in a small group setting.

After leaving the Bodega, we went to a place called Atlas Brewing Company, a small craft beer brewery that brews their own stuff.  Like each of the other places, we sampled a few different brews including one 10.5% APV porter.  As is usually the case with darker beers, Chris drank Jackie’s.

We then headed next door to our last stop, Delilah’s, which is a punk rock bar plus has a selection of over 300 different kinds of whisky!  We had our obligatory beer sample but also got a sampling of whisky to wash it down.

By this time we were starving.  When we were last in Chicago back in May of last year the taxi driver who picked us up from one of the touristy pizza restaurants told us of a much better pizza place a little out of the way that many locals enjoy.  We vowed to visit this place the next time we were in Chicago, which was today.  Since the restaurant, Peouod’s Pizza, was only about a mile and a half away, we again decided to walk.  Once we got there we enjoyed some delicious deep dish pizza.  We couldn’t really say if the touristy spot was better or not, but the pizza really did hit the spot.

After a nice meal, we were longing for our hotel room so we pulled up an app that Chris had downloaded which told us the quickest way to get between addresses using public transportation.  What the app did not tell us was what the train schedule was.  The app told us to go to a nearby train station but it failed to mention that on Sundays this particular train line only had a train every 2 hours or so.  So we decided that we would take a taxi or a bus, which ever we saw first.  After walking about a block we hit a bus stop and soon after a bus came by.  We knew we would have to transfer to a subway but we had walked so much that we just needed to sit down.  We had a small amount of money left on one of our transit passes and Chris was lucky enough to have the exact change ($2.25) for the other fare and we rode the bus about a mile to the subway, which we took to our hotel.  We then enjoyed some cookies and juice in the hotel’s lounge before heading up to our room.