The first thing you notice when you step into Revolution Brewing on North Kedzie Avenue is that, regardless of whether you’re in the public brew hall or the brewing and packaging areas in the back of the building, you can always hear Motörhead, Van Halen, Slayer, or other hard rock and metal artists playing over the sound system. Revolution is a company that feels less like a place where people go to work, and more like a place where beer enthusiasts come to create great brews together.
John Carruthers, the communications manager at Revolution Brewing, along with brewery manager Glenn Allen and process engineer Adam Basalay, gave me a tour of Revolution’s main brewery in the Avondale area of Chicago. They also told me what it’s like to work at Illinois’ biggest independent brewery. In essence, it is a fun, highly-collaborative atmosphere where every employee is free to pitch ideas for new beers. “Everyone is sort of intertwined,” Basalay said. “Everyone sort of relies on each other.” Carruthers agreed, saying that everyone at Revolution is expected to do their part and help “because if you’re not going to, then there’s no-one behind you. And you know, people work here because they like it.”
“And because they love beer,” Glenn Allen added. “Yes,” Carruthers said. “And they LOVE beer.”
Revolution’s brewers seem to strive consistently to think unconventionally in order to create new, interesting flavor profiles. Carruthers told me that Revolution has a honey farm on the roof - which is maintained by a separate company - so that they can have their own supply of fresh honey to brew with. Revolution regularly makes specialty, small-batch, and seasonal beers throughout each year, in addition to their “core” beers. Revolution makes just about every kind of beer imaginable, including barleywines, sour beers, lagers, porters, ales, and stouts - especially imperial oatmeal stouts. While Revolution offers an impressive range of different beers, they are best known for hop-heavy beers like “Anti-Hero,” the India pale ale (IPA) that has served as their flagship brew since the original brewery opened in February of 2010. Not only does Revolution Brewing give virtually all staff the opportunity to pitch ideas for new recipes, but their head brewers are unafraid to get experimental. In fact, their bold attitude towards brewing is inherently experimental, as well as a bit humorous at times. For example, Revolution brews an American imperial brown ale called “Working Woman.” They also make a similar beer called “Working Mom.” Carruthers said that every batch of “Working Mom” begins as a batch of “Working Woman.” “Then it goes into these barrels for nine months,” he said, “and it becomes ‘Working Mom!’” He said that the barrel-aging process adds vanilla, oat, and butterscotch notes to the character of “Working Woman”’s imperial brown ale character.
Adam Basalay said during my visit that Revolution Brewing is a very “hop-forward” company. Most of the beer that Revolution Brewing makes - in terms of both volume and variety of different recipes - tend to be very hoppy. Of the six “core” beers that Revolution regularly brews year-round, half of them are IPAs. According to Carruthers, approximately forty percent of the total volume of beer that Revolution brews annually is “Anti-Hero.” The others are “Every Day Hero,” a session IPA, and “Fist City,” a “Chicago Pale Ale.” Even their staple golden ale “Cross of Gold” has a distinctly hoppy finish to it. Over the past two or three years, Revolution has been making greater and greater varieties of hop-heavy beers. Their “Hero” series in particular exclusively features IPAs brewed with a variety of different hops designed to compliment each other, or specialty hops chosen to create a very specific taste. The trio pointed out with enthusiasm how each of these are not simply pallet-swaps of Anti-Hero or another hoppy Revolution beer. “It’s not just one hop,” Glenn Allen said, “there are other hops to compliment each different hop. Before, we couldn’t make enough Anti-Hero to keep up, so it was just Anti-Hero, Anti-Hero, Anti-Hero...but then, once we got that big brew house, we could expand.”
Revolution’s founder is Josh Deth (pronounced “DEETH”). For years before starting Revolution Brewing, Deth was a longtime beer expert and aspiring brewmaster. He began his beer career in 1995 when he got a job at Golden Prairie brewing, later moving on to become a pub brewer at Goose Island. While working here, Deth honed his craft and befriended many fellow beer experts who would go on to become integral members of Revolution Brewing - including Matty Kemp, Revolution’s first employee, and Jim Cibak, a brewmaster who had worked at notable breweries 3 Floyds and Firestone Walker.
Nobody could ever credibly accuse Deth of being a lackadaisical person. Between beginning his journey in beer making as a novice in 1995 to opening Revolution in February of 2010, Deth persisted in working to bring his dream to life until he was successful. In 2003, after a couple of unsuccessful attempts at opening his own brewery, Deth opened Handlebar, a biker-themed restaurant in the Wicker Park area of Chicago that is still in business today, though Deth is no longer its owner. He also served in the Chamber of Commerce for the Logan Square neighborhood of Chicago, becoming its executive director in 2005. According to Jessica Wobbekind, the Chamber’s current executive director at time of writing, Deth spent most of his time while serving in the position focusing on community engagement. While serving in this position, Deth noticed a building on North Milwaukee avenue that intrigued him. He saw the spacious interior and the decorative tin ceilings, and knew right away that this would be the place for his brewery. Deth roused Kemp, Cibak, and other friends, and after securing startup capital through investment funds, Deth finally made his longtime dream come true.
Though Logan Square is now a well-known hub of breweries and bars selling independent craft brews, at the time there were not quite as many. Revolution opened its first location in February 2010. The same day, they also launched what would become their most popular beer: “Anti-Hero.” Soon, Revolution was selling beer from the front about as quickly as they could make it in the back. In 2012, the company purchased a much larger facility North of the brewery, in the Avondale area of Chicago. This allowed them to brew more beer and to distribute it to a greater range of customers. When I visited Revolution’s Avondale location Carruthers, Allen, and Basalay showed off the brewery’s multiple 800-barrel fermenters. “That’s 1,600 kegs of beer,” Carruthers explained. He said that over the course of 2018, Revolution produced over 85,000 barrels of beer. He also said that he believed the facility may be capable of producing up to 120,000 in a year. In 2015, the Avondale brewery saw another expansion, adding a 120-barrel brewhouse to the space.
Revolution’s success lies in synergy. Everything they do is meant to either kill two birds with one stone, or do something ordinary in a uniquely efficient way. Revolution’s founders were all highly-experienced brewers before they founded the company, and they used that experience to design the most productive, worker-friendly brewery that they could envision. As Carruthers, Allen and Basalay showed me around, they explained that everything was designed to be as efficient as possible, both ergonomically and in terms of productivity. Revolution’s plant floor is full of specialized equipment, from a locally-manufactured industrial can rinser dubbed “The Gatling Gun” to a “wet” mill, which feeds wet grain into the mill so the shells can be crushed to extract the grain’s sugars more efficiently than a traditional “dry” mill. The wet mill in particular is a huge efficiency booster. It holds about 9,000 pounds of grain, wetting and soaking it about 500 pounds at a time before the shells of the grain are cracked, leaving it with an almost oatmeal-like consistency. This allows far more of the grain’s natural sugars to be extracted with less work, which means they can make more beer with less grain. Allen said that wet mills are sometimes found in larger breweries because they offer greater efficiency than dry mills. Carruthers said that when the wet mill was installed, Revolution saw a tremendous boost in productivity. Most of this equipment relies on different pumps and motors from a variety of manufacturers. “We do have our preferred vendors, but we really just go with whatever the OEM is speccing,” Adam Basalay said. “We don’t typically try to go away from their spec just because at this point, we have just about everything.” Revolution uses pumps made by Alfa Laval, Eurodrive, Hilge, Fristam, Mapco, Barrett, and just about “every pump under the Moon.”
This culture of efficiency factors into packaging as well. Though bottles are the classic vessel for beer, Revolution eschews them completely - you won’t get Revolution beer out of anything but a can or a tap. “Cans are the superior package,” Basalay said. “You can ask anybody.” Carruthers, Allen, and Basalay told me that the beer brewing industry is beginning to focus more on canning than bottling beer, and they were not short on reasons for why this may be a good thing. Canning beer actually makes for a better-quality product with a longer shelf life, they said, as beer cans trap less oxygen - which contributes to packaged beer losing quality over time - than bottles. Because cans are not transparent, sunlight isn’t an issue either, unlike bottles (this is why beer bottles are usually dark-colored: it dilutes direct sunlight, too much of which can ruin beer). Cans also cool faster and are safer than bottles, which can be dangerous if shattered, posing a potential hazard to both consumer and brewer. The three also said that cans are easier to recycle, and less heavy, which makes them cheaper to transport than bottles. Canning is also a faster process than bottling, so focusing on cans allows the brewery to produce more beer for distribution.
The canning line is an intricate maze of machines and conveyor belts. Because the company cans so many different types of beers, the line is designed to be flexible, so that the cans can be cleaned out, filled, sealed, and packaged efficiently, even though several different brews may be canned on the same line in a short amount of time, and in different quantities, whether they are packaging 4-packs, 6-packs, 12-packs...this includes cans with varying quantities (12 ounce cans vs. 19.2 ounce cans, for example). All can be modified to fit the needs of Revolution at any given time.
Revolution Brewing has achieved a lot in a short time because it is, and has always been, a brewery run by people passionate about what they do. By sale volume, Revolution Brewing is the number one independent brewer in the state of Illinois. Revolution Brewing has won recognition from various organizations for every year that it has been in operation. Chicago Magazine awarded Revolution’s “Eugene Porter” its “Best Beer of 2010”, and in 2013 Time Out Chicago named Revolution Brewing the “Best Chicago Microbrewery.” More recently, in 2016 they took the bronze at the World Beer Cup for their imperial brown ale, “Winter Woman,” and in 2018 they won the bronze at the Great American Beer Festival in Denver, Colorado for “Straight Jacket,” an English barleywine. Currently, Revolution can be found in seven states in the U.S. besides Illinois: Indiana, Wisconsin, Michigan, Ohio, New Jersey, Massachusetts, and New York City. Revolution is also the 40th largest independent brewery in the United States, the 50th largest overall in the U.S….but of course, it’s still number one in Illinois.