Chicago Beer: A History of Brewing, Public Drinking and the Corner Bar
Drinking in the Windy City has deep roots. Long before corner bars stitched the social fabric of Chicago's neighborhoods together, raucous pioneers like Mark Beaubien were fermenting over the untapped potential of the unbroken prairie. Take a determined saunter from the clamor of Chicago's first breweries, through the hidden passages of thousands of speakeasies and then back into the current of the contemporary craft beer revival. Follow a path plastered with portraits of infamous saloonkeepers and profiles of historic bars. Author June Sawyers serves as an expert guide, stopping very so often to collect a vintage beer label, explain an original recipe or salute the heady history that sits atop the City of Big Shouders. --Back cover.
Chicago by the Pint
Perfect for “beer nerds and history buffs . . . This quirky volume . . . uses Chicago-area breweries as an entry point into the city s broader history” (Time Out New York). Chicago is full of colorful history, local legends, and great beer—and they all converge in this pint-sized history of brewing and drinking in the Windy City. Author Denese Neu uses the local craft brewing industry as a gateway to Chicago’s storied past, with tales designed to be read in the time it takes to enjoy a pint or two. So belly up to the bar and learn how Chicago’s best brews were born, and how some of its historic breweries and brewpubs are connected to notable figures from sports legends to bank robbers and more.
Beer
The Saloon
This colorful and perceptive study presents persuasive evidence that the saloon, far from being a magnet for vice and crime, played an important role in working-class community life. Focusing on public drinking in "wide open" Chicago and tightly controlled Boston, Duis offers a provocative discussion of the saloon as a social institution and a locus of the struggle between middle-class notions of privacy and working-class uses of public space.