Gone Home to Chicago (Part 2): A Visit to Hopleaf, Chicago's Legendary Beer Bar

Part 1 can be found here.

While home in Chicago earlier this month, I had the chance to drop into Michael and Louise's Hopleaf Bar, the legendary Chicago beer spot located in the Uptown neighborhood of the city. Why legendary? Well:

1. Informal conversations with friends knowledgeable about the Chicago beer scene have repeatedly resulted in the proffering of voluminous praise for Hopleaf's always excellent tap list.
2. Google search after Google search turned up Hopleaf in list after list of the best beer places in the city (and even the country). Chicago Magazine went so far as to call it "The Archetype" for all of Chicago beer-dom.
3. Everyone loves it - Hopleaf has managed to maintain a 4+ star Yelp average with a staggering 1,300 reviews on the books - more than double the number of the next closest beer bar with a similar score.

I walked in excited; I saw my all-time-favorite beer Zombie Dust on tap and nearly fainted:

After my gamely-accompanying friends shook me out of dazed reverie, I ordered a pint of Zombie Dust (my first time having it on tap), a B. Nektar Meadery Zombie Killer (to continue the theme), and a Stillwater Cellar Door (sorry, there just wasn't a third sonambulist-themed beverage). 

Gone Home to Chicago (Part 1): Three Floyds, Pipeworks, Half Acre, and Revolution

As I mentioned in my earlier post, I recently had the good fortune to return home for a long weekend to Chicago. Past the normal (and excellent) aspects about visiting - spending quality with family and friends, walking down old familiar streets, eating myself silly - there came another, more hop-and-malt centric benefit: Chicago beer distribution.

Though I love New York City and its beer scene, there are certain breweries whose product you just can't get here. This is one of the eternal challenges of being a beer nerd: your home base limits the brews that you can readily access. Vermont is blessed with Hill Farmstead, Minnesota with Surly, Wisconsin with New Glarus. Barring clever trading, inside connections, or rare events, it can be difficult to get ahold of a desired beer.

Ergo, traveling to another part of the country always carries with it the added bonus excitement of exposure to a whole new suite of available breweries. In the case of coming home to Chicago, this meant having access to beer from world-class operations such as Three Floyds, Pipeworks, Half Acre, and Revolution. Even that subset merely limits the available bounty to a handful of Chicago area breweries that only have local distribution - other non-Chicago breweries such as Lost Abbey, New Belgium, and Boulevard distribute outside of their home states, including to Illinois, but don't ship to New York.

Put simply, I stepped into Binny's Beverage Depot in Lakeview (3000 N. Clark, Chicago, IL - 773 935 9400) and my jaw hit the floor at the staggering array of new choices on the shelves. I took a languorous half-hour rolling up and down the aisles appraising the incredible variety. The first thing I asked one of the staffers about was Three Floyds, my favorite brewery. As fate would have it, the shipment had come in three hours earlier, and the eager public had already beating me in scooping it up.  Given the fortune that I've had in the past with tasting Three Floyds beer, I had no reason to be upset, but I nevertheless vowed to keep my eyes open and ears perked on the odd chance that somewhere else in town got some in.

The Quest for Zombie Dust (or, To Three Floyds and Back Again)

Three Floyds' Brewing's Logo - credit to brewingsomefun.com

Right around December of last year was when I really started paying attention to online "Best Beer" ranking lists on RateBeer and BeerAdvocate. Previously, I had drank beer that I'd found on the shelves at stores, that friends offered me, or that were on tap at wherever I found myself drinking that evening.

A brewery called Three Floyds topped the 2012 "Best Breweries of the Year" list on RateBeer - and what's more, this mysterious brewery was located less than an hour from my hometown of Chicago! Now, bear with me for a bit, all you super-seasoned craft-beer drinking veterans. I know that none of this is new information for you, but to me it was cause for great excitement - that sort of mania that can only afflict the recent convert. The one brew of theirs that drew my eye the most was Zombie Dust, a Pale Ale. The label was graced with some truly awesome comic-book art from Tim Seeley (of the fantastic Revival out of Image Comics), and as if that Mjolnir-mongering-spider-demon-zombie-king wasn't enough to seal the deal, the description sure as hell did: "This intensely hopped and gushing undead pale ale will be ones only respite after the zombie apocalypse. Created with our marvelous friends in the comic industry." I had to try it.

When I got home for Christmas, I immediately set to the web to track down any possible information on the infamous ZD. I navigated to Three Floyds' facebook page, only to be blindsided by the heartrending declaration that the brewery had run out of ZD not five hours ago. Hope fading, I called every beer store in the area that had ever received a shipment of the stuff. The answer was the same, each time: "Sorry, we're out." The last call on the list was the worst: "Oh, man, wish you'd been here 15 minutes ago - we sold our last sixer." I sat back, defeated - my white whale was evading me.