• Pipeworks partners Kaighan Pigott, Gerrit Lewis, and Will Johnston

Like a lot of Chicago beer weenies, I got pretty heated up about Pipeworks Brewing in their early days. Heck, I started writing about them almost two years before anybody could buy their beer—first to review their appearance at Goose Island’s Stout Fest in March 2010, then again in December of that year, when they were raising funds on Kickstarter. In June 2011, I included Pipeworks in the Reader‘s Best of Chicago issue, declaring them the Best Craft Brewery That Doesn’t Exist Yet.

The new brewery will make everyone’s job easier. “We’re not bumping into each other,” says Lewis. “We’re not fighting for water.” At Western, it takes four or five people to squeegee a spill to the drain, which isn’t even at the lowest point of the floor; the new facility, by contrast, has long trench drains that make the same mess a one-person problem. At Western, the crew have to grain out by hand, hauling the spent mash in a long parade of buckets and trash cans; the new facility has a forklift. And it’s safe to say nobody will miss washing kegs by hand now that the brewery owns an automated machine to do it.

  • Not only does Pigott understand finance, he can also operate a forklift.

Lewis says it took till 2014 for Pipeworks to land the small bank loan that helped pay for their six-head Meheen bottling machine. (They’ve never had any private investors—though my earliest posts mention unnamed benefactors who’d offered to match Pipeworks’ Kickstarter funds, that didn’t pan out.) The Small Business Administration loan that enabled the brewery to acquire and equip the new facility was much larger—about $1 million, according to a story last summer by Josh Noel at the Trib. Pipeworks signed a 20-year lease in February 2014. In February of this year, they pounced on the space next door (their future offices and barrel warehouse) when it became clear they’d lose it to another interested tenant if they waited to see how the expansion panned out.

  • I forget which piece of expensive brewery equipment is in the crates, but that’s 155,600 empty Ninja vs. Unicorn cans in the background.

For the beer-drinking public, these big changes at Pipeworks mean one thing first and foremost: cans. Four-packs of 16-ounce cans, specifically. Bombers often cost a brewer more than the beer inside them, Lewis says; aluminum cans (much cheaper at roughly ten cents apiece) are less expensive to produce, so retail prices can end up lower. (The profit margin is typically smaller on cans, but high volume helps make up for that.) Until now Pipeworks hasn’t been able to scale up enough to make large-scale canning possible, since the necessary space and equipment require so much capital—the canning line at Pipeworks represents a six-figure investment all by itself.

  • Don’t even think about stealing this. Everybody’s gonna know whose it is.

The Pipeworks crew still self-distribute their beer in Chicago—in Illinois, any craft brewer making 7,500 barrels or fewer can legally do so. But they’re working with distributors elsewhere: at the end of June they’ll launch in New York State, and later this summer they’ll grow into Colorado. Down the road they have plans for the rest of Illinois.