Destihl Brewery

Destihl Brewery’s new production brewhouse in Normal, Ill., is the largest ever constructed by Wisconsin manufacturer W.M. Sprinkman, says Destihl founder, CEO, and brewmaster Matt Potts.

- Julia Thiel

“That means we’re crazy, stupid, or just ambitious.” The highly specialized system includes a standard 66-barrel brewhouse alongside a 240-barrel sour kettle brewhouse and a 10-barrel pilot system. It dwarfs the 8-barrel brewing system at the original Destihl brewpub in Normal that Potts launched in 2007. “The Great Recession started about a week after we opened, so that was a good time to start a business.”

Nearly 10 years later, though, Destihl has grown from one brewpub to two, plus a Bloomington production brewery and now a $14 million, 47,000-square-foot complex opening May 27. (The Bloomington facility will close after the new space opens.) And the unlikely key to its success has been a beer category that was all but unheard of until a few years ago: sours. “Bloomington-Normal was more of a macro beer town when we opened in 2007,” Potts says. “So craft beer was already a fairly small niche in central Illinois, not to mention sour beers.”

Even Potts wasn’t familiar with sours until a few months before he launched Destihl. A class at the Siebel Institute in spring 2007 opened his mind to them. Potts was hardly new to brewing, though: he’d been homebrewing since 1995 while practicing law. In 1997, Potts and his wife, Lyn, bought a dilapidated building down the street from his office in the town of Elmwood, Ill., to start a brewpub. “Law is very adversarial, especially litigation,” he says. “I’m a guy that likes to collaborate toward a common goal, so the practice of law conflicted with my personality.” Elmwood Brewing Company opened in 2001, and four years later Potts left his law job and transferred his interest in Elmwood Brewing to focus on creating what would become Destihl.