Lagunitas Brewing Opening Chicago Brewhouse

By Chuck Sudo in Food on Apr 10, 2012 1:30PM

Chicago's craft beer community, already growing by leaps and bounds, received a major boost last night with the announcement that Lagunitas Brewing Company will be building a brewhouse in Chicago.

Lagunitas owner Tony Magee made the announcement on his Twitter feed, 140 characters at a time. Here's what Magee revealed:

- The brewhouse will be located at 18th and Rockwell. That's the old Ryerson steel mill site that's now home to Cinespace Chicago film studios, where Boss is filmed and The Playboy Club was briefly filmed.
- Construction of the brewhouse should completed by July 2013, with the first mash in in the fourth quarter 2013.
- The brewhouse is a 250-barrel system to be built by Roec, which recently completed a similar system for Lagunitas' brewery in Petaluma, Calif.

For Magee, this announcement also serves as something of a homecoming, as he was born and raised in Chicago. Magee said the new brewery would be "a little bit of Northern California in Chicago," and Lagunitas itself is "a little bit of Chicago in Northern California.

Magee had hinted in February that he was working on "something big," tweeting out a photo of his sister Karen Hamilton in the space that will serve as the new brewhouse.