Anheuser Busch Companies (BUD)

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Goose Island brewpub reborn as sleek, modern Goose Island Brewhouse

http://www.chicagotribune.com/dining/drink/beer/ct-food-goose-island-brewpub-renovation-clybourn-1018-story.html

By Josh Noel
Contact Reporter
Chicago Tribune
October 18, 2017

It’s only a bar, of course.

But the transformation of worn and cozy Goose Island brewpub into sleek and tidy Goose Island Brewhouse is a lesson in letting go of the past.

The old pub, launched in 1988, was revolutionary when it opened. It taught a generation or two not just to love beer, but to understand beer, and to know that it was often best when fresh, made in the next room, by someone who might be sitting at the bar with you. The quality of the beer stayed remarkably consistent during the next 29 years, but time left everything else behind. The Goose Island brewpub became a dark and cluttered relic from another era.

Which of course, was the problem.

Enter Goose Island Brewhouse, which re-opens in the coming days at 1800 N. Clybourn Ave., after a 10-month renovation. To anyone who spent time at the old Goose Island, the new Goose Island will at first be a mind-bending trip: familiar at the edges, yet wholly different. It’s like leaving on a business trip and coming home to a spouse who had plastic surgery while you were gone. Familiar at the edges, yet wholly different.

The Goose Island Brewhouse is the alternate universe where old Goose Island has been sucked up and absorbed into the sleek modernity of Big Beer.

Which, of course, is exactly what happened.

If you know the backstory — Anheuser-Busch InBev bought Goose Island in 2011 as the opening salvo of an incursion into an American craft beer landscape it couldn’t penetrate by itself — the pieces add up. Ah! That’s why Goose Island looks so good. So tidy. So modern.

Anheuser-Busch InBev has owned Goose Island for six-plus years, but the relationship suddenly seems like it has been just a hazy concept all this time. Sure, the beers have changed here and there and shown up with greater frequency and ever-farther from home. But the renovation gives us the clearest understanding yet of what it means to be in Anheuser-Busch InBev’s impossibly wealthy hands.

And you know what? It looks good.

The main bar room, once a jumble of darkness — dark wood, dark tile floor, dark corners — has been opened and lightened. Gone is the elaborate wood bar anchoring the room, and its thick columns and upper tier finished with ornate moldings. Brewery founder John Hall had that bar installed in 1988 with the intention of creating intimacy at a time that American beer drinking was about Budweiser commercials; in its place is a sleek light gray concrete bar top, finished with bright white subway tile below. (The same tile is also prominent at Goose Island’s Fulton Street taproom, launched in 2015 under Anheuser-Busch InBev ownership.)

The ratty red tile floor has been ripped out, replaced by handsome polished concrete. Brick walls have been hammered through and taken out, allowing natural light to flood in. The old cellar and loft that made room for additional seating are now walled off and stuffed with brewing equipment. In a nod to the contemporary audience — fewer families, more Tinder dates and softball teams — booths have mostly been ripped out. In their place are trim dark wood tables and chairs.

The main bar is almost the exact same size, but feels both smaller (without the grandness of those columns) and larger (there is so much more space). It has 28 taps pouring beer from three sources: an Anheuser-Busch brewery in upstate New York, where Goose Island’s IPA, Four Star Pils and 312 Urban Wheat Ale, among others, are made; Goose Island’s Fulton Street production brewery three miles away; and the gleaming new 15-barrel brewing system in the next room. The pub brewer remains Jon Naghski, who has brewed for Goose Island on Clybourn Avenue since 2012.

Things have changed more radically in the kitchen, which was also treated to entirely new equipment. Now under the direction of Marcus Rasmussen, most recently chef de cuisine at Perennial Virant (which closed last winter), the menu is a mix of new and old dishes described by a manager as “elevated pub fare” — and priced like it too. Holdovers include the pepper-crusted Stilton burger ($16) and fish and chips ($21); new additions include dry-aged hanger steak ($18) and steelhead trout ($24).

The highlight of the revamped space might be what is now called the Vintage Ale Bar. It was previously “The Long Room to the Right When You Enter That Always Felt Like an Auxiliary Appendage.” It was never quite the place you wanted to be if there was room at the main bar.

But in new hands, it’s been given a new purpose: the dimmer, TV-free homage to Goose Island’s reserve beers, such as wood-aged fruited sours and the legendary Bourbon County Stout (which the pub aims to have on tap year-round). The room is built of darker, more intimate materials. That includes a wood bar top, leather stools and oak barrel staves on the walls, another essential piece of what has become “the Goose Island look.” It’s the exact kind of place you’d want to drink Bourbon County Stout on a frigid winter afternoon. All that’s missing is a fireplace.

(Memo to Anheuser-Busch InBev: You’re worth more than $200 billion. Couldn’t you have sprung for a fireplace?)

Speaking of Anheuser-Busch InBev, squint and you can see its presence looming over the revamped pub. As the world’s largest beer company has bought nine more American craft breweries since Goose Island, on-premise locations have become a pronounced piece of the strategy. 10 Barrel, a Bend, Ore., brewery acquired in 2014, has opened spots in Denver and San Diego; Golden Road, a Los Angeles brewery acquired in 2015, has properties in planning in Oakland and Sacramento; and Goose Island, which has opened several international locations, plans a pub in old-school beer mecca Philadelphia.

In that sense, what has happened on Clybourn Avenue during the last 10 months is less about Goose Island renovating, and more about Anheuser-Busch InBev’s grand plan: sleek, modern, comfortable, hip taprooms that serve as powerful marketing vehicles.

They’ve pulled it off. The new Goose Island looks good.

But before you walk in, nurse those memories one last time of what used to be there. Imperfect as it may have been in recent years, it was living history. And then, let that history go. In the form of a gray concrete bar and shiny white tile, the new era is here to stay.

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