Thirst for suburban craft breweries growing

Pollyanna Brewing opened in Lemont in 2014 and it's already more than three years ahead of the founders' business plan. This year, the brewery is doubling its capacity and adding a bottling line to meet high demand.

"The expansion we're doing this summer we planned on doing five years after we opened," co-founder and brewmaster Brian Pawola said. "The craft beer growth it hitting us pretty good."

Local craft breweries have only seen the thirst for their products grow in recent years, even as more businesses open to take advantage of the trend.

"You have a lot more breweries today than we did 15 or 20 years ago," said Andrew Burns, CEO of Emmett's Brewing Co. "It's just more prevalent, more present to the consumers. Most folks live pretty close to a brewery these days. Their access to local craft beers is a lot higher than it once was."

Burns links the growth of craft beer to another beverage: coffee. Starbucks made consumers rethink the drink and moved tastes away from mass-produced instant coffee while spurring an interest in learning where the beans in their drink came from.

"People are a lot more tuned into the origin and you even see that popping up in craft beer," said Burns, who has been tapping into the desire for local products by sourcing hops and malted barley from the Midwest.

Lisa Granger, co-founder of Itasca's Church Street Brewing Company, also sees the growth of craft beer as a counter to the emphasis on cost cutting and efficiency that dominated the '70s and '80s.

"There's a big push for local, for discovering something new," she said. "People are willing to take the time and pay the money to have something be an experience. There's just been a complete shift it what's important to people."

The Internet has also made it more convenient for smaller operations to get supplies.

"It's so much easier to get hold of things from all over the world," she said. "We use one source and get our grain from Canada, Germany, Great Britain, the Czech Republic and Poland. You just send a purchase order in an email on Wednesday and you have it by Friday. It just makes it easy to innovate."

The ease of trying new materials has also led to rapid growth in the different types of beers on the market.

"I'm seeing a lot more experimentation in the craft beer world these days," Burns said. "When we first got into craft beer, there was well over 100 predefined styles of beer, most of them historical in nature. A lot of craft brewers, including us, chose to adopt and follow those beers. Today we're seeing a lot of the lines between these historical categories starting to get blurred. Some brewers will use different spices, in some cases fruit, that were a lot less common five or 10 years ago. I think that the market has broadened."

Classic styles still have their place though. Gregor said she's been seeing increased demand for lagers, which has been a boon for her brewery since they specialize in the beer made from a type of yeast that ferments at the bottom of the tank and takes two- to three-times as long to make as ales.

"Everything goes in cycles," she said. "People grew up with lagers. In the last 5 or 10 years, IPAs have been the big thing. People like the hops and the different flavors you can get from hops grown in different places."

Cans are also making a comeback according to Pawola. While they're cheaper to produce and ship, the packaging had previously been largely limited to larger breweries because cans need to be bought in bulk and can take up too much of a microbrewery's space.

"The stigma of canned beer as cheap beer is going away and I think craft beer can be thanked for that," Powala said. U.S. Cellular Field carries canned and draft beer from Pollyanna and demand from the stadium has spurred their expansion.

Meanwhile, Church Street is expanding its taproom to add firkins, 10-gallon casks where they'll take some of their regular beers and add ingredients to change the flavor such as putting cocoa nibs in their Shony Scottish ale.

Summer is also bringing a batch of new six-pack bottle releases for Emmett's including World's End IPA and Peacekeeper hoppy American wheat beer.

"Being a brewpub, we are constantly introducing new seasonal beers and we find one that's really well received, it might be a contender for something that might wind up in a bottle for us," Burns said.