By Mike Sula
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The local brewing industry doesn’t exist even as a memory for most people, and for years Skilnik, a 49-year-old former postal carrier, ignored his own recollections of its last gasps. But beer in general has always preoccupied him. In his early 20s, long before the home-brewing fad began, he’d discovered the raw materials for garbage-can brew in a Taylor Street hardware store. “They had the old cans of malt extract,” he says. “The hops were gray and shitty-looking, and your yeast consisted of little packets of Red Star. I did everything I was supposed to do, faithfully skimmed the scum off the top. But every time you open that up to stick your finger or utensils in there, you’re gonna cause a problem. We bottled it and opened up a quart of beer and it went off like a rocket, gushing all over the place.”
Skilnik’s brief career as a home brewmaster was cut short by a three-year stint in Germany as an army translator, nonetheless an enlightening experience. “The beers in Europe tasted different, funky, somehow,” he says. “Every little village seemed to have a brewery, and they all had something in common in that their beers were these thick, rich lagers. A lot of them were very malty. Some were very yeasty. You hear the expression nowadays, ‘I want a beer I can chew on.’ After three years you come to the point where you can drink the beer warm like they do. You come back here and start to drink your old favorites–your Old Style, your Schlitz–and it’s horrendous. You’ve got thin beer served in an iced mug and you start to think, ‘God, I don’t like these beers anymore.’” Skilnik read Charlie Papazian’s classic guide The Home Brewer’s Companion and began having more success making his own. He even started a home-brewing mail-order business as a sideline but eventually wanted something more.
Skilnik intensified his research and shaped it into a narrative beginning shortly after the birth of the city, when William Haas and Conrad Sulzer opened Chicago’s first commercial brewery in 1833, producing 600 barrels of ale in their first year. Lager breweries and saloons proliferated with the arrival of German immigrants and so did the first attempts to ban them, sponsored by the nativist Know-Nothing Party, which shut down saloons on Sundays and raised licensing fees in an attempt to keep “the business in the hands of the better class of saloon keepers”–by which they meant those who weren’t German or Irish.
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): photo/Jon Randolph.
