5 Rabbit Brewing To Open Brewery Later This Year

Sounds awesome! Finally a brewery ten minutes away from my house, and everything I've had from them has been great as long as it's been fresh.

 

Well this seems like a good news for 5 Rabbit:
http://beerpulse.com/2012/08/5-rabbit-cerveceria-hires-goose-islands-john-j-hall-as-new-brewmaster/

Though at first I was thinking, "John Hall? But he's the president of Goose... and doesn't brew beer, per se...". Hah!

 

Wow! Apparent John Hall has achieve divine status: "...John J. Hall has been added to its growing team as Brewmaster/Production Deity."

 

John J's move is big news, that's pretty interesting.

 

Wonder how Randy feels about this...

 

I bet Randy would like to go back to his day job. Unless I'm mistaken, he was always described as being on board to help create recipes and provide the two other dudes with some firsthand brewing know-how.

Also, when Greg Hall left and word broke that he was doing cider, there was a lot of chatter about a possible non-compete. If John J. is able to just change employers, it might shed some light on how AB-InBev treats non-compete clauses for us "armchair experts" (I should really use another pair of quotes around experts here) at home. Or... maybe he's leaving Goose now and will start up with 5 Rabbit once the facility is up and running. Like I said, armchair analysis!

 

We all understand that John J. is not a member of the Hall family that started Goose Island, right?

 

If Randy had wanted to be a commercial brewmaster for this project, pretty sure he would be doing it. I imagine that his presence and involvement influenced who they were able to get to take the job though.

 

Looking forward to having more consistent product from the hometown guys in the future.

Randy Mosher is going to be speaking at our homebrew club meeting in September, will be very interested to hear about his vision for this brewery in the future.

Exciting times to be a craft consumer in Chicagoland (Revolution's production facility, Pipeworks taking off, new Lagunitas facility coming online in the future, lots of smaller operations opening up).

Cheers!