Is St. Charles a Great Beer City?

One of the things that attracted me to blogging on St. Charles Patch was the opportunity to learn and write about local goings-on, especially how they relate to beer. As interested as I am in beer and brewing, I'm also interested in how to develop livable, sustainable communities, and this blog seems to be the perfect forum to explore how these topics interrelate.

I've often mused that one of the things that any city really needs to have is a great beer culture. Whether it's a hometown favorite made and enjoyed locally or a thirst for some of the finest brews in the world, I think a tradition of enjoying great beer should be considered a prerequisite for being a great city.  

Unfortunately, I have a feeling that if St. Charles was a preschool student, and I was its teacher, and the grading category was "St. Charles has a great beer culture," my gut reaction would be to give the city a "Needs Improvement."

That's certainly not to say there aren't plenty of places to buy great beer. Anyone who's spent time here knows St. Charles has a plethora of bars, taverns and pubs of all types, and some of them even have a pretty decent selection of great beers. Homebrewing, too, has long been a tradition in the city, and so, not surprisingly, St. Charles has its own Home Brew Shop, run by some pretty knowledgeable and friendly people.  In addition, there's several very good liquor stores with impressive selections, including Binny's. So, the city enjoys wide availability of good, and some even great beer, including what we can make ourselves.

But I lament that, for a region that we have already discussed suffering from a dearth of brewing operations, St. Charles doesn't have a commercial brewery at all. The nearest brewpub is in downtown Geneva: the tiny but ingenious Stockholm's Brewpub. There used to be one up in Elgin, Prairie Rock, but that's been closed for a couple years now. Then, of course, there's the on-again, off-again operation at America's Brewpub at the Roundhouse down in Aurora, which was, quite happily, recently purchased by Two Brothers.  

Nevertheless, to my knowledge, in its entire history, St. Charles has had only one brewery of any size: the erstwhile Fox Bay Brewing Company, which was founded in late 1999, then limped from menu to menu, owner to owner, as Rio Zorro and then Monet's Bistro, before shuttering forever in 2002. The entire commercial brewing industry in St. Charles appears to have come and gone all while I was away at college.

It's pretty clear to me that there's a substantial enough market in St. Charles for beer that there'd be demand for "great beer, made here." I have no doubt that a brewpub or a small craft brewery in any one of St. Charles' shuttered downtown storefronts or vacant industrial parks would be successful. From Rockford to Flossmoor, there's plenty of examples all throughout northern Illinois of craft breweries carving out a small niche for themselves and, in the process, helping to reinvigorate the community with good beer, good friends, and good times.  

But the city is not been a particularly friendly place for such pursuits. Officially, St. Charles has historically demonstrated begruding toleration, and often outright contempt, for those who purvey alcohol.  Combined with the recent budget difficulties faced by the State of Illinois, the often byzantine regulatory regime for producers, distributors and sellers of beer, and the uncertain legislative status of small breweries in the state, it's no wonder that St. Charles doesn't have its own craft brewery.

So, on its face, St. Charles' beer culture shows signs of great potential, but for a city of its size, has a lot of room for improvement.

Or, so I have led myself to believe.

The simple fact is, I just don't know enough to conclusively answer the question, but, of course, I feel a certain obligation to find out.  Therefore, I've decided to take this summer to explore the various beer bars and liquor stores of St. Charles, and to reach out and talk to you, dear beer lovers, to determine the answer to the question: Is St. Charles a great beer city?

I welcome your thoughts, opinions and advice, and look forward seeing you out on the town.  Now, go have a beer!