At Dovetail Brewery (1800 W Belle Plaine Ave), beer is about engaging all five senses. I watch as Dovetail brewer Hagen Dost pours a beautiful pale golden hefeweizen. I hear the rich frothiness filling the glass and, when I bring it to my nose, I smell bananas. Sipping through the cloud-like foam, I meet my favorite beer of the summer. The Dovetail Hefeweizen is a perfect balance of cloves and bananas.
The Ravenswood taproom is set to open at the end of the May if all goes well. It’ll be BYOF—guests can order delivery from any restaurant (you’ll pass a great BBQ joint, Ravenswood Q, in the few blocks between the train and the brewery). And, if employees get their wish, a few food trucks will also stop by in the front parking lot in the coming months.
In the meantime, Dovetail Brewery debuts its first brews during Chicago Craft Beer Week. You can sample the hefeweizen at the Long Room on Wednesday and all three brews (lager, hefeweizen and rauchbier) at Kaiser Tiger on Thursday. The Dovetail Lager is malty, rich and complex with the aroma of fresh hops. The rauchbier is produced using 95-percent beechwood-smoked malt and has a smoky flavor that makes you crave a slice of peppered bacon. That works, because Dovetail will soon self-distribute to local bars like Paddy Long’s (rauchbier and bacon flight, anyone?), Hopleaf, The Long Room, Kaiser Tiger, Quenchers Saloon and Brownstone, to name a few.
The Dovetail magic stems come from old-school brewing techniques that brewers and owners Dost and Bill Wesselink learned in Munich. While working on their master brewing classes, the two Chicagoans discovered that they both loved small, family-run German breweries, so they started crafting a business plan.
“People can’t get this type of beer in Chicago, so that’s why we started this,” Dost said.
Large, commercial breweries want to make lots of beer and do it fast, but Dovetail Brewery will use traditional processes, such as using a coolship (a large, flat, open-top container that cools the beer before it ferments) and open fermenters. As for the name, Dovetail has less to do with beer and more to do with bond. Dost and Wesselink say a dovetail is the strongest joint in carpentry, formed by two interlocking pieces—it's a design element you'll see when you sit at any one of the taproom's tables, built by Wesselink and his father. For these humble brewers, the passion project is possible because of their friendship. “There is no way we could do this without each other,” Dost said.