beer

Hopworks Beer Bike

Hopworks Beer Bike

The Hopworks Beer Bike is a perfect storm. It’s the colmination of a love of craft and a deep respect for producing a quality product. Designed and built by Phillip Ross and Jamie Nichols of Metrofiets Cargo Bikes for Christian Ettinger of Hopworks Urban Brewery, the dual keg toting pub-on-wheels sports an aluminum pan with fifty feet of draft coil, two custom taps, inlaid old-growth woodwork bar with a split top for easy access to the kegs, an MP3 sound system modeled after a motorcycle’s hard pannier bag, and a back rack capable of holding three large pizzas for the unavoidable crowd that forms every time the bike stops.

Continue Reading Adam Flaherty5
Reblown bottle glasses

Reblown bottle glasses

Glassblower Nick Paul of Chicago drinks beer. (Hopefully, he has some friends who help him out with it, from time to time.) Then he takes the empty bottles and blows out their necks to make flat-sided tumblers. Then, in a stroke of packaging/marketing/recycling genius, he puts them back in their original six-packaging and sells them through his online storefront, Windy City Glass. The tumblers have smooth, rounded rims and are annealed to relieve internal stresses. No part of the original bottle is wasted. I love the green-on-green simplicity of his Heineken glasses, above, but the gestalt awesomeness of his Arrogant Bastard Ale tumblers, pictured below, may prove irresistible to me. If I know me, you folks have about an hour after this post goes up before I cave in and buy them for myself.

Continue Reading Sean Michael Ragan2