Today we’d like to introduce you to John Neurauter.
Thanks for sharing your story with us John. So, let’s start at the beginning and we can move on from there.
My friend Pete Crowley was brewing beer for Rock Bottom Brewery at State & Grand when we met. I had a passion for making sausages and slow cooked BBQ and quickly became engulfed by the beer making process as our friendship developed. We foolishly joked one day in my kitchen while making sausages for my block party, and drinking growlers of Rock Bottom beer that Pete had made, that we should try this out on our own. I mean, who doesn’t like sausage and beer?
To take a step back, I actually met Pete because my dad bought me a “Brewer for a Day” gift at Rock Bottom, which was a charity auction item. He had known Pete through a mutual friend of ours for years and always thought that we’d get along. Pete and I of course both liked to drink beer, but he actually made it, and that sort of elevates one to sainthood. I was very excited to get to go and see how the process worked on a real system. I had home brewed once and loved the process, but my execution didn’t exactly yield spectacular results. I was hooked by 11am that day and by 2pm, Pete and I were in the basement of Rock Bottom drinking off the tanks and forging what would become a lifelong friendship.
It was within 5 years of that conversation in my kitchen when we were making sausage that we opened the doors of Haymarket Pub & Brewery in what would become Chicago’s hottest restaurant row. We found our space at Randolph & Halsted in 2009. The economy had just taken a horrible stumble and places were shuttering all over the city. It seemed like just a crazy enough time to mortgage the house and borrow as much money from family and friends as we could to follow our dream. It was a crazy gamble. We were inexperienced in the construction of our own restaurant, but we went for it, and with the help of some pretty great people building the place, we completely transformed our 9,000 sq. feet from a complete structural and mechanical mess into a pretty awesome place. You have to understand that the West Loop was not then what it is today. We ended up there because the rent was cheap at the time and the building needed some serious build out, which made it financially doable for us.
We opened our doors on Christmas Eve 2014, 150% over budget and completely drained by the process of building and opening not only a brewery, but a 300 seat bar and restaurant with an opening staff of over 100 people. It was just nuts. Thinking back on it I’m happy we had no idea how much work it would be when we had that conversation in my kitchen 5 years earlier or we would have never done it.
Our brewing focus at Haymarket is on classic Belgian and contemporary American beer styles, including a cross of the two. We try to always have something on for every taste palette. Crisp clear lagers, strong Belgian-style ales, hoppy IPAs, stouts and fruited wheat beers are some of the mainstays in the rotation. We make some seriously awesome Belgian-style IPAs as well. We have won World Beer Cup and Great American Beer Festival Gold awards for our American-style Stout, named The Defender and also for our Belgian IPAs.
In addition to our own beers we have a great wine and spirits selection since we operate under a Brewpub license at the location in Chicago. So we’re able to please a larger audience than just the beer drinkers.
Chef Chris McCoy leads the charge in the kitchen, churning out delicious from-scratch food for our restaurant, and also for our taproom at our brewery in Michigan. We pride ourselves on quality food offerings like our house made sausages, pizzas, burgers, salads, sandwiches and hand cut fries to name a few. Classic pub fare that’s taken to the next level with quality, responsibly sourced ingredients and made from scratch is what we do. We have several rotating items on the menu as well. I would say the menu resembles the beer lineup from a philosophical standpoint in that it covers a lot of bases. Our slow cooked pork, pulled and served with a choice of house made BBQ sauces is there to satisfy the heartiest of carnivores while our from scratch vegan burger can handle the other end of the table. Lady Gaga once tweeted praise about or vegan burger, just saying.
In January of 2017 we opened our production brewery in Bridgman, Michigan, which is in the Southwest corner of the State, just over the border on I-94. We’re canning and kegging beer over there and distributing it back into 9 northern counties in Illinois and 10 in Southwest Michigan. We have 3 of our brands available in 12 oz. cans currently on the shelves at retailers where fine craft beer is sold, including all Binny’s locations, most small bottle shops and a mixture of Whole Foods, Mariano’s and Trader Joe’s. The 3 varieties currently available in cans are our Speakerswagon Pilsner, a crisp German-style pilsner with 5%ABV; Oscar’s Pardon Dry-hopped Belgian-style Pale ale, which is a sessionable 4.5% pale ale made with Belgian yeast and dry-hopped with Amarillo hops; and Aleister IPA, an American-style IPA brewed and dry-hopped with Amarillo hops and weighing in at 6.5% ABV. We will be releasing 2-3 more canned beers in 2018, so look for those on your local shelves. You can also find these beers and bunch of rotating seasonal draft offerings at restaurants and bars throughout Chicagoland.
Haymarket is named after the events of the labor movement that took place in 1886 in Chicago. The Haymarket Affair was probably one of the most important catalysts in the developments of workers’ rights and was the start of the 8 hour work day. It’s a very important piece of Chicago’s history and we’re proud to celebrate it. We honor the workers, activists and the police who lost their lives in this movement and the countless others who continued the movement for their lifetimes. It was also one of the biggest cover-ups in American history, leading to the wrongful execution of several men and eventually the pardoning of several others by Governor Altgeld. It’s normally explained in a chapter of a 6th grade history book, but there’s a lot more to it and it was the birthplace of a worldwide movement that helped shape where we are today.
You’ll find ties to the history of the Haymarket Affair in our beer names, but more importantly in the culture of our Haymarket family.
Has it been a smooth road?
No road is smooth when you’re traveling it. Rising costs and headaches of doing business always put a few wrinkles in the plan. We now employ about 75 people at our Chicago location, they’re our family and we’re forever grateful for them, but it’s a challenge to manage a group that size. We’re also in a very hot neighborhood with a ton of development. A lot of that development will bring more people to the area, but it seems like bars and restaurants have sprouted up an astounding pace, before all of the bodies perhaps, so we’re seeing a little dilution of customer base. When we opened in 2010, there were a lot less options in our neighborhood, so we enjoyed a more captive audience. But I will say that the West Loop is a very special place, we’re all there fulfilling a niche with our craft, and I think we’re all delivering a pretty spectacular experience. We look forward to having more people in the neighborhood to enjoy what we have to offer. We have a few hotels under construction, and when those complete, we’ll be ready for more tourism business and can’t wait to show them Chicago’s best.
Chicago, and Illinois and Cook County for that matter, is an expensive place to do business. That’s probably just the opening statement for a much larger conversation, but I would list that as a large challenge in operating a profitable business. We spend a lot of time and money each month keeping up with the various taxes that these bodies all throw at you. It’s especially annoying when they don’t always seem to do a very good job running their business. So I guess that’s an annoying challenge.
We’d love to hear more about your business.
A lot of this is in the story that I told. The quality of our product and the experience that we provide at our restaurant and genuine and high. We wouldn’t be doing this if that wasn’t the case, so that goes without saying for me. The family of people though are the soul of our company. It’s the team that makes it happen, that builds the brand that makes Haymarket something more than the building, equipment, licenses, etc. It’s our family. Every company has their own family, and others might be great, but this one is ours and I wouldn’t trade it for any other.
Is our city a good place to do what you do?
As I mentioned before, the City is expensive. Not all of that is taxation of course, it’s just expensive to do business in a City like Chicago. But it delivers a huge audience, so the price can be justified if your business can capitalize on the audience. If I were opening a new brewery today, I don’t know that Chicago would be my first choice. If I went back to 2010 to open Haymarket again, I wouldn’t change a thing.
Chicago is making great improvements to its tourism business and we’re lucky to see a good bit of this happening in the West Loop. This is a great area of improvement that we’re seeing in action.
On the other hand, Chicago has a lot of expensive bureaucracy. Property tax payers and businesses pay for that. If we constantly raised the prices of burgers and pints and started charging guests for things they thought they were already paying for to cover our costs like Chicago seems to do with the endless tax and fee schedules, our customers would revolt. Ha, maybe we should as well.
Contact Info:
- Address: 737 W Randolph St.
Chicago, IL 60661
(Southeast corner of Randolph & Halsted) - Website: www.haymarketbrewing.com
- Phone: 312-638-0700
- Email: info@haymarketbrewing.com
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/explore/locations/1011420/haymarket-pub-brewery/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/HaymarketBrewing
- Twitter: https://twitter.com/HaymarketPub
- Yelp: https://www.yelp.com/biz/haymarket-pub-and-brewery-chicago
- Other: https://untappd.com/haymarket
Image Credit:
Gosia Photography
Rusty Reilly
World Beer Cup
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