A sequel almost five years in the making, this episode reunites us with the beers of Sante Adairius Rustic Ales thanks to listener Mike Rousseau. Recognized by RateBeer as the 10th best brewery in the world, SARA may have built its legacy on oak-aged saisons, but here we get to sample some of their recent forays into IPA. Craig seeks out some dog walking advice, Ryan shares the smartest snack, we practice a little tantric sipping, and we explore themes of the next films in the Expendables franch...
Mar 27, 2019•1 hr•Season 6Ep. 269
An ancient prophecy foretold of a legacy brewery that would make a baffling number of IPAs to be available all at the same time, and that those IPAs would remind two lowly podcasters about why they fell in love with beer in the first place. Yeah, the Sierra Nevada love is strong on this one, especially from Ryan, whose CostCo shopping made this show possible. But we do find a lot of interesting variation in the seven IPAs in this lineup. Craig tries not to lean too hard into the “tastes like a b...
Mar 20, 2019•1 hr 8 min•Season 6Ep. 268
To help push us through the last bits of this awful Chicago winter, we drink beers from paradise to tackle our 19th state show. This episode features five beers from five Hawaiian breweries, and they taste pretty great even without the tropical background. We also introduce our extremely on-brand Sweet 16 bracket challenge, give you Something Else to Complain About Ⓡ, and explain how Craig’s mom is awesome (and better than Ryan). You’d expect us to say “aloha” here, but we didn’t. Ha. Beers Revi...
Mar 13, 2019•1 hr 3 min•Season 6Ep. 267
Like a lucky slot machine pull, we have a winning lineup of cherries on this show as we try five different styles of beer from five breweries, all featuring cherry. We learn quite a bit about these versatile drupes while we rank this group that has a few transcendent flavor experiences. This one is also ripe with diversions that include Zen gardens, Dairy Queen flagships, screaming lemons, the worst Sunday alibi, Al Borland Cosplay, hateful Hobby Lobby aromas, Dan Cortese’s filmography, and a Bu...
Mar 06, 2019•1 hr 3 min•Season 6Ep. 266
With a secondary price tag higher than our mortgage payments, this show is an embarrassment of riches in flavor and in rarity. But will we be embarrassed by our blind rankings of eight barrel-aged vanilla stouts released in 2018? You bet your sweet tooth we will. We are joined by Ryan Tracy at his Park Ridge establishment, Beer on the Wall, as we fumble through our guesses and evaluate these high gravity beers based only on what’s in the glass. It’s a fun way to hear our beer careers come to an ...
Feb 27, 2019•1 hr 22 min•Season 6Ep. 265
Whether you see it as beer’s #version of Record Store Day or as a viral marketing ploy to drive sales for struggling brands, we here at ABV Chicago embrace these classics with open arms. And our arms are very open on this episode as we sample 12 of the most important beers in American craft beer, all of which either launched or propelled legacy brands. No one in the world really needs our take on these beers, but here you go! Before pronunciation becomes a problem, we share the plagiarised stori...
Feb 20, 2019•1 hr 40 min•Season 6Ep. 264
Deep in the heart of Wisconsin, there exists a not-so-secret society of like-minded artisans - specializing in beer, liquor, and wine - that have formed a collective to bring more tourists to the area. And for some reason, they thought that giving us a bunch of booze would be a good idea to promote their brand. Well luckily the liquids are all tasty-to-impressive, and we have a hell of a time lining them up on this show. In addition, Craig shares his week of Final Destination-style close calls, ...
Feb 13, 2019•1 hr 24 min•Season 6Ep. 263
Since our first encounter with James and Sarah Howat’s Black Project back at GABF in 2015, we’ve wanted to dedicate a show to their spontaneously-fermented wild ales. So we’re understandably jazzed about this whole deal, and the lineup of five beers on this show go beyond our expectations. In addition, Craig does the following things: quizzes Ryan on government conspiracies; solves the mysteries of The Shining ; invents the worst Slip-n-Slide; and starts his Soundcloud rap career as Must Buoy. W...
Feb 06, 2019•59 min•Season 6Ep. 262
Now that bottles of Afterthought beers are starting to leave Lombard to reach more drinkers in the Chicagoland area, we celebrate by popping five elegant saisons from Mike Thorpe’s small-yet-acclaimed brewery. Using mostly Midwestern ingredients, Afterthought’s saisons are about as diverse as they come, while being mistakable for some of the bigger-name farmhouse-made beers from around the country or world. Amidst our appreciation of these top-tier beers, we somehow find time to debate about hor...
Jan 30, 2019•1 hr•Season 6Ep. 261
After the first five Deep Wood releases, Revolution Brewing could’ve taken the rest of the season off and enjoyed a victory lap. Instead, they drop five more barrel-aged beers that might be collectively better than the first half. We taste through this colorful - and strong - array of styles with an early appearance from joyful inebriation. We work through the tingles by proving our age through technology, coming up with secret beer orders, weighing the seriousness of a high fudge tolerance agai...
Jan 23, 2019•1 hr 11 min•Season 5Ep. 260
In almost three years, Cruz Blanca has quietly become one of the city’s best breweries, churning out everything from lagers that pair perfectly with a smokey tlayuda to wild ales that will captivate even the nerdiest bottle share. Now with 6-pack cans of three crowd-pleasing beers out in the market, Cruz is poised to build a bigger fanbase than ever. We sat down with brewers Jacob Sembrano and Todd White to sample a broad array of their beers while exploring why they’re ok with being the sleepin...
Jan 16, 2019•2 hr 2 min•Season 5Ep. 259
Opinion on Brut IPAs seems to be passionately divided between love and hate. But many brewers are banking on it gaining traction with the hopes that their version of this wildly inconsistent style will come to define the Brut as we know it. On this episode, we attempt to find out exactly what makes a Brut IPA and carve out our own subjective idea of what makes the good ones stand out. Through a blind tasting, we sample six Brut IPAs - three local, and three from afar - with the added challenge o...
Jan 09, 2019•1 hr•Season 5Ep. 258
We’re truly in Beer Country now as our States Series takes us to the home of the most breweries in the nation: California! We have six beers on from six breweries, split evenly between the halves of the state, and we are shook by the unfaltering quality. Craig makes an impossible sacrifice for 2019, Ryan educates you on the brewing facts you won’t find in textbooks, and we both enter rankings less clear and less sober than we’ve been in a long time. Come to basketball land, you get dunked on. Be...
Jan 02, 2019•1 hr 11 min•Season 5Ep. 257
When you are gifted a mix of beers from Hill Farmstead and The Alchemist, you stop everything and drink them. Thanks to listener/Patreon supporter/forever friend Josh Sissman we have five canned beers from both nü-classic Vermont breweries, and we review them with a tactical precision unseen for nigh on 50 episodes. But we still find time to announce our most exciting brush with fame, the last place you want to find pine needles, our wildly different perception of the Mosaic hop, check the cream...
Dec 26, 2018•50 min•Season 5Ep. 256
When Neil Fisher crushes your porch with a big box of WeldWerks beer for sampling, you don’t hesitate to revel in the flavorful delights contained within. Recorded in October, this 2nd edition (in ten episodes) of us marvelling at the expertly-crafted hype-machine beers from the Colorado brewery includes likely the best beer either of us have had all year. But there’s also some important contributions to the ABV Chicago canon, like “flerbals” and “flavor aliens,” so you can hear what that’s all ...
Dec 19, 2018•1 hr 12 min•Season 5Ep. 255
Adults have proven time and again that all childhood nostalgia is better with booze, so beer advent calendars became a thing. Bitter Pops makes one of the best surprise 24-packs of beers, and they’ve outdone themselves this year. So we’re outdoing ourselves by reviewing and ranking the first 12 beers of the calendar. Yes, there is some light caroling (Craiging?) and some overall Xmas music appreciation chatter. But we also share a tasty holiday punch recipe, shamelessly mine for retweets from Xm...
Dec 12, 2018•1 hr 34 min•Season 5Ep. 254
Have a fellow beer lover in your life that you want to spoil during the holidays? Or are you heading to some ugly sweater, ornament-decorating, cookie-binging holiday party and need a beer to bring that’ll help you make it through? We enlist the help of Ryan Tracy from Beer on the Wall to suggest some beers that make good gifts for all different types of drinkers. In addition, because we’re on site, we talk about our sponsor Beer on the Wall from their start to their very exciting future, which ...
Dec 05, 2018•1 hr 48 min•Season 5Ep. 253
Revolution has taken some serious steps towards becoming THE barrel-aged beer producer in the city of Chicago by churning out varied, high-quality product in an accessible format over a fairly casual release schedule. Simply put, they are killing it. So we couldn’t be more eager to line up the first five releases of 2018’s Deep Wood series to review and rank, giddy with knowing that there will still be five more to come. We also chip away at two different wood-based trivia games, dust off the Pl...
Nov 28, 2018•1 hr 17 min•Season 5Ep. 252
Every Black Friday, Goose Island strives to deliver on a year-plus promise of bringing together consistent quality and technical innovation for a Bourbon County lineup that succeeds in besting the previous year’s. We sat down with Mike Siegel, head of Brewery Research & Development, to walk us through a tasting of some of this year’s offerings while highlighting the processes that brought these beers into existence. There’s also questions about the major changes instituted since the infectio...
Nov 20, 2018•1 hr 55 min•Season 5Ep. 251
For our big 250, we bring together a show that’s been over four years in the making about beers that take at least three years to produce. It’s all American-style gueuzes - er, Méthode Traditionnelle, in some cases - from six sour beer makers. We’re joined by Doug Veliky of Revolution Brewing, just because we wanted a friend to share these with. But Doug shares with us a bunch of Revolution updates, and spoils our dreams on why we’ll likely never see a canned Gueuze. If that weren’t enough, this...
Nov 14, 2018•1 hr 40 min•Season 5Ep. 250
The 16th annual Festival of Wood and Barrel-Aged Beers is almost upon us, and we continue our yearly tradition of geeking out about our favorite Chicago festival. We have five beers from brewers who will be pouring at this year’s fest while we also share some festival tips and breweries to seek out. Ryan also has done his homework as he subjects Craig to a few rounds of FoBAB history trivia. But we also review the bathrooms at the Google HQ, recklessly redefine the word “subtle”, enter the Apriv...
Nov 07, 2018•1 hr 20 min•Season 5Ep. 249
What horrors abound in this blind gross-out tasting challenge, wherein we try to inflict suffering on each other through liquid terrors? After the inaugural Beer Purge we did last year, Craig’s hungry for sweet and sickening revenge. We pour six of the worst beers we could find while challenging one another to guess what’s in the glass while trying to lessen the volume of our pours from the Cuveé of Doom finalé. Listen in as Craig cackles while committing an unspeakable evil, and Ryan warns that...
Oct 31, 2018•1 hr 16 min•Season 5Ep. 248
Our 50 States Quest continues as we take on our fireworks-selling neighbors to the East: Indiana! Recorded over the summer after Craig returned from a jaunt around the Indianapolis area, this episode features five diverse Hoosier beers that show Indiana beer is much more than that one metal brewery on the border. And because this was recorded in August, we get Craig’s recap of the Wizard World Comic Con including the cultural penetration of Golden Girls, Funko Pop everything, and what surprising...
Oct 24, 2018•1 hr 10 min•Season 5Ep. 247
The proliferation of pumpkin-flavored everything has slowed significantly compared to five years ago, and that seems to be the case in beer as well. Even in a year’s time, pumpkin beer entries at GABF dropped from 66 in 2017 to 38 in 2018. Are pumpkin beers on their way to the porch to be picked apart by squirrels or obliterated by little rapscallion neighbors? Or is the trend deserving of a Great Pumpkin-like return? We try five unique pumpkin-featuring styles on this show (and one terrifying p...
Oct 17, 2018•1 hr 1 min•Season 5Ep. 246
When we first met Neil Fisher from WeldWerks back in 2016 , we couldn’t help but root for him: an affable guy making outstanding beers that were poised to reach a larger audience. Fast forward to the present, and WeldWerks is making some of the most exciting beer in all of Colorado, and the growing demand for the beers reinforces it. For this show, we have five WeldWerks beers to review along with five segments of an interview we did with Neil this year on the GABF floor. You’ll learn about Weld...
Oct 10, 2018•1 hr 20 min•Season 5Ep. 245
Taking three New England-made hoppy beers and pitting them against three Chicago ones in a blind taste test would seem like a novel idea, if we hadn’t already done it like 11 months ago. But here it’s a fresh crop of hops from some big names in IPA, and our blind assumptions prove to be challenging yet again. Ryan is trapped in meme purgatory, Craig unveils his worst version (down with Fall Craig!), we say Mosher’s name 3 times to see what happens, and the throat hops return. Come feel safe in t...
Oct 03, 2018•1 hr 2 min•Season 5Ep. 244
For our fifth straight year at the Great American Beer Festival, we drank all of the beers in Denver so you didn’t have to. This episode is our full recap of this year’s fest, including discussions on the medal winners, our favorite beers at the fest, the hazy IPA takeover, and our inability to navigate the new layout. We also have a bunch of interviews from the festival floor featuring brewers we admire and beer people we respect. And if that isn’t enough, we drink and review three Denver-area ...
Sep 26, 2018•1 hr 55 min•Season 5Ep. 243
As IPA further becomes a parody of itself, we stare down the ultimate challenge to our perception of what hoppy beers could - or should - be. Milkshake IPAs are a newer variation on the fruit-forward and bitterness-free take on the IPA that features lactose and/or vanilla to raise sweetness while incorporating wheat or oats into the grist to increase its heft. Listen as these six beers slowly chip away at our reservations around this hot new trend, and we learn to love again. Sort of. Also, Ryan...
Sep 20, 2018•1 hr 21 min•Season 5Ep. 242
We’re counting down the days to the 37th annual Great American Beer Festival, and going into our fifth year attending, we finally feel like we’re qualified to give advice for those attending, or provide escapism for those that would like to be. Also, we drink five beers from five Illinois breweries we’ve never had on the show - and who also happen to be pouring at this year’s GABF! In regards to the fest, we share general advice, Illinois brewery pour lists, our picks for must-try breweries, and...
Sep 12, 2018•1 hr 26 min•Season 5Ep. 241
Years ago, before every other American brewery had a koelschip or a “sour program,” the options to foster a love for sours was mostly limited to shelf-available Belgian beers. As Ryan’s long-gestating audio lovechild, this episode represents a time when exploration of sour styles meant green-bottled imports and hard-to-pronounce names. But our reverence for these classics is apparent as we try five different Belgian sour beers done in five different styles. We learn about the beers themselves in...
Sep 05, 2018•1 hr 6 min•Season 5Ep. 240
