Region & History

When was Chicago's first brewery founded? In 1833, when William Haas and Andrew Sulzer moved from New York State to the shores of Lake Michigan and began brewing English-style ales and porters there. At the time, the city was little more than a trading post on the water. With the arrival of the railroads it became a hub for prairie grain, and brewers found themselves sitting right at the source of their most important raw material.

From the mid-19th century, German immigrants brought bottom-fermented lager beer with them. Conrad Seipp built a brewhouse and cellar on 27th Street, and in winter ice was cut straight from the lake for cooling. Around 1881, the Wacker & Birk brewery installed a refrigeration machine based on Carl von Linde's process, considered the first of its kind in the US.

By around 1900 the city had some 60 breweries. Brewing expertise grew locally too: the Siebel Institute, founded in 1868 by chemist John Ewald Siebel, still exists today and is regarded as the oldest brewing school in the US. Max Henius and Robert Wahl also ran a fermentation research institute that operated until 1921.

On January 16, 1920, Prohibition took effect across the US. Many Chicago breweries shut down, including the McAvoy Brewery, one of the city's largest, that same year. Others switched to producing soft drinks or malt syrup. But thirst didn't go away, giving rise to an illegal market marked by smuggling, corruption, and violence. From April 1933, low-alcohol beer became legal again, and Prohibition ended entirely in December 1933.

The old brewing world never returned. In 1978, the last of the city's historic breweries closed its doors. The fresh start came in 1988 with John Hall and Goose Island, followed later by Half Acre (2006) and Revolution (2010). Goose Island was sold to Anheuser-Busch in 2011 and is now part of AB InBev. There's no protected designation of origin for Chicago beer, and style names like stout or IPA remain free for anyone to use.