Lagunitas Taproom Delayed Until June

By Chuck Sudo in Food on Feb 26, 2013 10:20PM

The opening of the Lagunitas brewery in Douglas Park later this year is easily going to be the biggest local beer event of 2013. But plans for opening the brewery and accompanying tap room will have to wait a few months while Lagunitas goes through the process of bringing the facility at 18th and Rockwell to code.

Owner Tony Magee provided updates on the brewery’s buildout on Twitter and said installing fire sprinklers was the biggest obstacle. “The building is 300,000 square feet with 50-foot ceilings. That's 15,000,000 cubic feet!” he said. “I want to make the building safe, for sure. But it'll cost nearly as much as the brewhouse itself, so we had to get it right. And we did!”

As for ETAs for the openings of the brewery and taproom, Magee said look for the taproom to open sometime in June, with the brewery producing beer by October. “It'll be finalized by this Friday,” he said.

Lagunitas’ Chicago brewhouse will be in the old ld Ryerson steel mill site that's now home to Cinespace Chicago film studios. It’ll house a 250-barrel system to be built by Roec, which built a similar system for Lagunitas' brewery in Petaluma, Calif., last year. When production begins, Lagunitas will be far and away the largest brewery in Chicago.