USA, IL: Demo Brewing Company holds soft opening in Chicago

The newest addition to Ravenswood’s Malt Row is a nano brewery that’ll serve up an ever-rotating selection of brews — including some beers that are still a work in progress, the Block Club Chicago reported on March 6.

Demo Brewing Company, 1763 W. Berteau Ave., had its soft opening over the weekend ahead of planned grand opening March 29. The debut weekend featured an inaugural lineup of 10 beers brewed by owners Jeffrey Borders and Lucas Irvine.

In the spirit of experimentation, two of the beers are variations on the same recipe. “Sue Me” is a light, crystal clear Kolsch with a slight bite while “Sue Me (Peeled)” puts a twist of citrus on the former recipe by cold filtering the brew with lemon peel and citra hops.

Demo is a nano brewery, which means it produces less beer per year than other beer makers. The owners said they’re leaning into that smaller production scale to frequently change out which beers are on tap to foster experimentation with new recipes. Its website promises the “demo’ing” of a new beer every week.

“When we say the business name, a lot of people think like demolition, like construction. But it’s more like a demo tape that somebody gives you of their music or something,” Irvine said.

Other beers on tap during the soft opening include “Porch Drinkin’,” an easy India pale ale brewed with a blend of magnum, amarillo and cascade hops to gives the beer orange-citrus, floral and grapefruit undertones. There’s also “Cow Statue,” an American India pale ale brewed with crystal malts and Centennial hops that balances caramel and toffee notes with floral and citrus aromas.

Some beers on the menu are subject to have their ingredients changed, however.

“Everything on tap might not be where it’s [a] finished product, but Jeff and I like to taste along in the process, so there will even be some unfinished ideas on tap once and a while,” Irvine said.

Demo Brewing has been over six years in the making and builds upon its founders’ love of the local beer community and passion for home brewing.

One of Borders’s friends got him into craft beer years ago. When that friend moved to the West Coast, Borders decided to buy a home-brew kit so they could brew some beer together when his friend visited Chicago, he said.

“I loved every aspect of it,” Borders said of home brewing. “The attention to detail and the art behind it as well.”

Borders and Irvine used to work together, and Borders brewed the beer served at Irvine’s wedding, which was a big hit, Irvine said.

While enjoying beers at Revolution Brewing’s Logan Square taproom in 2017, the pair formed an idea of opening a brewery of their own.

After that initial conversation, they would go on self-guided “brewery tours” to take notes of how the businesses were set up and the kinds of beers they had on tap, they said.

“[We were] kind of more bullsh****** than anything,” Borders said. “Like, ‘Oh, wouldn’t it be cool to start a brewery, right?’ But then one day, we got serious about it.”

By 2018, the duo had put pen to paper on a serious business plan to get the ball rolling on Demo Brewing Company, they said.

After doing some research, they settled on a micro-brewery plan to help them stay nimble and lean into their experimental side.

“Revolution’s Kedzie taproom is so big and grand. It’s beautiful and we love it. But when we started talking about opening ours, we looked at the opposite of that,” Irvine said. “Like, what’s the smallest size you can go? What are the advantages or disadvantages of that? That kind of brought it into kind of a more reality.”

Plan in hand, the pair purchased brewing equipment and put it in storage in February 2020 while they sought a location for the business. The COVID-19 pandemic put an initial pause on their plans. By 2022, the pair had begun construction on the Berteau Avenue space to convert it into a production brewery with taproom, they said.

“We found the spot next to, you know, all these breweries that we admire,” Irvine said.

The brewery’s tentative hours are 4 p.m. to 10 p.m. Wednesday through Friday and noon to 10 p.m. Saturdays, but those hours are subject to change after Demo’s grand opening, the owners said.

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