Maplewood Brewery & Distillery
You could tell a lot of stories about Chicago’s Maplewood Brewery & Distillery. There’s the ever-more-common tale of homebrewers going pro and finding success. There’s the adventure of being the only brewery/distillery in Illinois. There’s the legal thriller of losing the rights to their original name of Mercenary Brewing and then the poetic ode of their name Maplewood, honoring a former village that survived the Chicago Fire. But the best story of Maplewood is about the sagas Maplewood is telling with beverages.
MAPLEWOOD’S STATUS AS A brewery and distillery lets them write liquid narratives in which grains move from beer to spirit and back again. One such narrative is Pug Stout Whiskey, which was inspired by their Fat Pug Oatmeal Milk Stout, a recent Great American Beer Festival medal winner. And with their Juice Pants series, Maplewood is spinning a web of related beers that could compete with the Marvel Cinematic Universe. For Maplewood, each ingredient and style offers a new venue for creativity, and it’s all connected.
Founders Adam Cieslak and Ari Megalis (who started as homebrewers), along with partners Paul Megalis and Kevin Holl, founded Mercenary Brewery & Distillery in 2007 but rebranded as Maplewood in 2015 due to a legal dispute over their name. Also in 2015, another homebrewer, Adam Smith, joined them, and the business took off not long after. After brewing 1,000 barrels a year in 2016, they were set to at least triple that number in 2017, and their beer can be found all over Chicago and Illinois and in parts of Indiana and Michigan. By embracing (and relentlessly varying) the New England/hazy IPA while innovating new crossovers between beer and spirits, Maplewood is making a massive impact in a crowded beer scene.
Maplewood is best known for its hazy IPAS, such as Son of Juice and Crushinator. Cieslak says they came to their signature style gradually, and it started with Charlatan American Pale Ale, which went through “many iterations” and was in part a response to Half Acre’s Daisy Cutter, one of the most popular and well-regarded beers in Chicago: “We love Half Acre. We were inspired by their hoppy beers and wanted to make a rival pale ale that’s equally as good as their pales. It’s not as easy as you would think to make a really balanced but hoppy pale ale.”
The path to Juice Pants continued with some homebrewing experimentation, as described by Smith: “We used to do an IPA called the Azacca Morris, which was focused on Azacca hops. That was something we were really proud of, but we knew we wanted something different. So I put five or seven gallons of that in a homebrew small pilot fermentor and fermented it with different yeasts.” Smith says they started with The Alchemist’s Heady Topper yeast strain, though that ingredient shifted later.
As Smith enthusiastically recalls, “I dry hopped the shit out of it because it’s a homebrew batch, so I put five ounces in it, crazy dry hops. And then we took a sample, and because it was so juicy, I said, ‘Holy shit, dude, this is a beer you gotta put your juice pants on for.’ Just a stupid statement—i wanted to make Adam [Cieslak] laugh, and he thought it was funny, so it stuck somehow.”
Each “chapter” of the sporadically released Juice Pants features a different hops blend and a name that would work as the title of a movie, such as Return of the Juice (which included Motueka, Citra, and Mandarina Bavaria hops) and The Passion of the Juice (a mix of El Dorado, Ekuanot, NZ Pacifica, and NZ Waimea hops). Cieslak says, “Juice Pants is our creative outlet to try some of the new hops coming out, some of the old hops we haven’t used before, or just combos we haven’t used before. It’s a way for us to showcase awesome hops.” The common denominator is the grain mix, which is only slightly tweaked.
Juice Pants 6 was planned for the opening of the taproom in December 2017, and future chapters may revisit previous recipes. Smith speculates that we could see Juice Pants 7: The Return of Juice Pants 2. Such taglines are reminders that anyone who likes his/her beer to have notes of
pretention will have to look elsewhere. Cieslak says, “In the end we’re making beer, which we take very seriously, but we like to have fun with it.”
The chapters of Juice Pants play out like a movie franchise, but there are also spinoffs. One of Maplewood’s year-round beers is the Son of Juice IPA, whose name some drinkers think is a play on “son of a bitch” but is actually another movie allusion—to the 1939 horror film, Son of Frankenstein.
Smith says, “We took the alcohol down a percentage or so, and we found hops we liked [Mosaic, Simcoe, Nugget]. That’s the everyday version of Juice Pants. Then we wanted to do a double version, so we did Husky Pants.” As with Juice Pants, the hops change with each version of Husky Pants. There’s also Cashmere Pants (a pale ale featuring oats and Cashmere hops) and someday, perhaps, Half Pants. In a big understatement, Cieslak says, “We like to tie things together.”
Though Maplewood is known for its IPAS, they’re not limited to or defined by them. While discussing Brownie Points, their English brown ale with vanilla beans, Cieslak points out how, just as IPAS can highlight hops, “brown ales are the perfect beer to showcase a nice mix of malts. There’s vanilla in this, but it’s definitely there to complement the malts.” In another example of cross-beer continuity, they’ve done an 8 percent ABV version of Brownie Points in bombers called Bonus avenue—not Points. Smith says, “It’s a different malt
as toffee-driven, but more of a brown, roasty malt.”
“We have a malt we use to make Fat Pug [oatmeal stout], and we’ll scale up the grain, kind of remove the hops from it, and step it up so we have a more appropriate whiskey mash, but the same exact grains go into Fat Pug that are going into our stout whiskey.”
Besides the twisty series of Juice Pants sequels and other beers, Maplewood is innovative in a realm that makes them stand out even more in the Chicago beer scene—the interaction between beer and spirits. The cofounders were torn between opening a distillery and a brewery—they arrived at the perfect but challenging compromise to do both. This pays dividends in the form of beer-inspired spirits. Cieslak describes the process, “We have a malt we use to make Fat Pug [winner of a bronze medal for oatmeal stouts at the Great American Beer Festival], and we’ll scale up the grain, kind of remove the hops from it, and step it up so we have a more appropriate whiskey mash, but the same exact grains go into Fat Pug that are going into our stout whiskey.”
Cieslak obviously enjoys these creative possibilities. “Being a distillery and a brewery, you can take one kind of grain and you can see what happens when you make a milk stout beer, or you can distill it and get this amazing whiskey that is chocolaty with roasty notes that carry into the whiskey. You’re getting this cyclical, full-circle path for beverage enthusiasts to try.”
Similar paths are offered by other drinks, such as whiskeys made from Pilsners and Oktoberfest beers. Cieslak describes a gin made with hops from their Charlatan pale ale. “We throw some hops into the gin basket, and you get this nice citrus-forward gin. Plus you get this piney bitterness from the juniper.”
The Maplewood brewers are excited to keep writing new chapters with beers and spirits just as their own journey reaches a climax with the opening of their Logan Square taproom in December 2017. Amid the hubbub, Cieslak hasn’t forgotten Maplewood’s humble roots.
“We were homebrewers to start, and we slowly started to progress and start taking it more seriously, and it grew into this.”
What “this” is—beyond all the hops, malts, and yeasts—is a commitment to giving Chicago (and beyond) beers that are not only new and not just juicy, but are consistently great.
Cieslak sums up the Maplewood philosophy: “We’re best known for hoppy beers, but we want to be known as a beer brewery that, no matter what you have from us, it’s going to be damn well-made.”