Brian Buckman
Illuminated Brew Works
6186 N. Northwest Hwy in Chicago
IBW-Chicago.com

The last really good beer you drank was… White Oak Brewing’s Casual Jesus saison. Light and refreshing with notes of lemon, banana, clove and some light black peppercorn on the back end. A Belgian-inspired rye saison that’s bold in its experimental stretch to flavor profile… right after my own heart.

What fellow Illinois breweries and specific beers have impressed you lately? 

Pipeworks Brewing’s Floor Quaker — a thiolized sour. I like my sours very tart, and this fits the bill. The thiolized yeast really punched up the fruit flavor on this one.

What are you most proud of at your brewery? 

We continue to push the boundaries on packaging and marketing. I’ve always had a strong aversion to dumb beer names/concepts that plumb misogyny or jokes that would make a 12-year-old blush and a 16-year-old roll their eyes. And there’s a lot of those.

Instead, we try to push people with concepts and Easter eggs that, if they are interested, they’ll need to go out and dig around into some fairly charged information to find. And, the hope is there, that maybe they’ll fall into something that truly blows their mind and changes their world view. Or, maybe, something that makes them laugh.

I’ve always had a strong aversion to dumb beer names/concepts that plumb misogyny or jokes that would make a 12-year-old blush and a 16-year-old roll their eyes.

For example, for the second year in a row, we did our collaboration with the Weird Studies podcast. Weird Studies is a great little podcast produced and hosted by a professor of Musicology out of Indiana University and a documentary filmmaker out of Ottawa. They talk about all the things that I love: weird fiction, film, the occult, consciousness, UFOs, etc. We make a black IPA with them with Comet and Zappa hops that is pretty good.

I did the four illustrations that are on the cans. Each 4-pack comes with one of each of the four different labels. They are made to look like the old Weird Tales magazines from the early/mid 20th Century. There’s a Cthulu one, a UFO one, and there’s one with two guys monkeying with some kind of machine that most certainly will alter the future for all of us, and then one of three good-for-nothing kids poking an alien corpse with a stick.

We also have a beer dropping next week that has a quote from Comparative Religion scholar extraordinaire, Jeffrey Kripal. It’s a mind-bending quote from an even more mind-bending book he co-authored with Whitely Strieber. The beer is called “Your Soul, A UFO”.

We’ve got a collaboration bock beer with the Buckland Museum of Witchcraft & Magick out of Cleveland. … We’re doing the release at our three-year anniversary party September 21. We’ve got a ton of vendors, live music, some tarot readers and some big ass puppets. Oh… and a dunk tank!”

What do you have coming up that people should know about?

We’ve got a collaboration bock beer with the Buckland Museum of Witchcraft & Magick out of Cleveland. The museum is a collection of Raymond Buckland’s (a fairly prominent and important player in mid-20th Century witchy circles) ritual gear and odds and ends, plus a whole ton of other stuff including a wand of Aleister Crowley’s, items from modern-day occultists and a killer Ouija Board collection. 🙂 They currently have an exhibit on a personal interest of mine, Radionics.

We’re doing the release at our three-year anniversary party on Saturday, September 21. We’ve got a ton of vendors (Sideshow Gallery, Bucket O Blood, Alchemy Arts, etc.), live music, some tarot readers and some big ass puppets. Oh… and a dunk tank! Steven Intermill and Toni Rotonda will be giving a 30-minute talk on the museum later in the afternoon, and then at night we’ve got three pretty great metal bands playing: Druuna, COMA and Become Death. It’s going to be epic. We might even do an impromptu procession to celebrate, led, of course, by the big puppets!