Far from the Field

Downtown Breweries Embrace Urban Farmhouse Beer.

- Julia Thiel

Outside the windows of Whiner Beer—located in a former meatpacking plant in Chicago’s south side—garden plots sprout raspberries, strawberries, carrots, potatoes, cucumbers, and zucchini. The chicken coops nestled beside the garden, though, were empty for some time. “I don’t think the chickens are here this year,” Whiner owner Brian Taylor says. There was a hawk, co-owner Ria Neri adds, that liked the chickens a little too much. Nearby are piles of compost, and behind the Plant, as the building is known, is an anaerobic digester. It’s not yet operational, but once it is, it’ll be central to the operations of this vertical farm that aims to create a closed-loop, zero-net-waste system. Food waste from the businesses housed in the building will go into the digester, which then captures the methane gas produced when microorganisms break down that waste and uses it to produce electricity and heat.

The new brewery is an integral part of that cycle. Not only will its spent grain help power the anaerobic digester (most of the spent grain is currently composted), its boiler is built to run off either natural gas or the methane gas the digester will create. There’s also a CO2 collector through which Whiner can degas its fermenters; the gas moves into an algae tank and is transformed into oxygen for a rooftop greenhouse once it’s built; the kettle stack vents to the roof and will help warm and humidify the greenhouse. At present a mushroom farmer in the building is using Whiner’s spent grain as a growing medium; the same farm pasteurizes the hay used for growing mushrooms with leftover hot water from the brewery. Other businesses in the Plant include a kombucha maker, a bakery, an aquaponics farm, a fruit and vegetable farm, and a coffee roaster—the last of which Neri also owns.