The brewery itself is small, but mighty:

Created with Admarket’s flickrSLiDR.Click on a photo to view the captions.

When I arrived, Doug and volunteer Dave Bleitner were working on transferring wort from the brewing kettle to the fermentation tank to start fermenting. While they were doing that, I was free to wander around the small industrial building they call home.

After I snapped some pictures, I spoke with Doug and Tracy about their operation. Doug has been interested in brewing since 1989, when he brewed his first batch of beer as a project for an Intro to Botany class in college.

“I was given the opportunity to write a paper or do a project… I wasn’t going to pass up not writing a term paper, so I chose brewing beer,” Doug told me.

In 2002, Doug decided to try to become a professional brewer. He earned a degree from the Siebel Institute in Chicago. During the program’s 6-week training program in Munich, Doug had a revelation:

During my time in Munich, I realized that lager beer that we sometimes get here is much better over there. The reason for that is freshness. Beer just doesn’t hold up in long journeys in hot containers on the sea. (laughs) I thought the best way to find that sort of freshness would be to make it ourselves.

Doug knew he would need a partner to help run the business, and he asked Tracy, a self-described “Jane of All Trades” who at that time ran a portrait studio, to help manage the books and financial.

So, after several years and several names (“Alchemy brewing” was an early front runner), Tracy and Doug put the company together in early 2007. They took several months finding the perfect little patch of concrete on Ravenswood to call their own, then opened their doors this winter.

“We pretty much work as per our skills,” Tracy explained. “He brews, I assistant brew. We do sales together. I do all the bookkeeping, cash flow forecasting… the economics.”

While both Doug and Tracy seem pleased with their progress now, they aren’t ready to rest yet.

“We’d like to grow. I mean, we need to grow. We can’t break even with what we have here,” Tracy said.

Metropolitan Brewing beer can be found in many liquor stores and restaurants throughout Chicagoland. The Metro Brewing Blog has more details.

I’m a bit shocked that they so easily dismissed the brewpubs in the Chicago area. A lot of these breweries, like Flossmoor Restaurant/Brewery, sell to regional distributors as well as their own pubs. These people are just as influential in spreading craft beer culture as their production focused counterparts.

Kudos to WTTW for getting the word out, though.