Double Clutch Brewing In Evanston Wins Brewery Of The Year Award

EVANSTON, IL — Less than a year after opening its doors, an Evanston brewery has been named the best brewery of its size and received two medals for its German-style lagers at the Great American Beer Festival.

Double Clutch Brewing, which is due to celebrate its one-year anniversary at 2121 Ashland Ave. ahead of Halloween, last month won the brewery and brewer of the year award for places that produce up to 250 barrels of beer. It also came away with silver medals in the Munich-style helles and smoke beer categories.

Scott Frank, of Wilmette, is the head brewer at Double Clutch and a self-professed "Deutschphile."

"It goes back to the cars. I love German cars. I've loved German beer, and my ancestry is German, even though I'm American," Frank said. "I come from many generations of farmers, we go all the way back to German farmers, so this is just the perfect fit for me."

Frank, 57, said he first visited Germany in the early 1990s and has long had a particular fascination with Bavarian beer traditions.

"There's something about drinking it in those enchanted halls in their big, one-liter steins, that just makes it taste better," he said. "There's something about that energy that inspired me, and I've always, as a brewer, tried to recapture that."

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The former artist and illustrator started brewing beer in his garage as a hobby about 15 years ago. He continued to learn the trade in stints with two Chicago breweries — Old Irving Brewing Co. and On Tour Brewing in West Town.

Frank said that during the craft beer explosion of the 1990s, when India pale ales became all the rage, he was looking for something different.

"I've always been a bit of a contrarian," he said. "So if everybody gets in 'Line A' I'm probably going to go get in 'Line B,' and when everybody was going gaga over IPAs, I was bellying up at the German bars and ordering helles lager and experimenting with schwarzbiers and hefeweizen and Berliner weisses and Munich dunkel and things that other people were not paying attention to."

Munich-style Helles, one of the categories in which Double Clutch won a silver medal, has always been among Frank's favorites, he said.

"Because it's just simply refreshing and yet has a malty character that you really can't find in American lagers, so it was something I always gravitated to," he said.

Helles lager, Frank said, is second only to the other silver medal award-winning brew, the helles rauchbier. ("Rauch" is German for "smoke.")

Frank said he entered this year's Great American Beer Festival competition with the intention of getting feedback from certified judges on the seven beer categories in which he entered, which also included doppelbock, schwarzbier, pils and kölsch.

"That's the value to us as a new brewery," Frank said.

"I know that the persons closest you sometimes don't give you the best feedback. The people that are drinking your beer oftentimes are going to tell you they love it," he added. "But to have a blind taste test with objective, qualified judges is what the value of this competition to me was going into it."

The brewer credited Noon Whistle Brewing of Naperville and the Illinois Craft Brewers Guild with providing help with the challenge of shipping alcohol across the country in July.

Double Clutch is owned by Vandalay Brands, which also operates Pescadero Seafood and Napolita Pizzeria in Wilmette, Casa Bonita in Libertyville and several locations in Chicago.

Owners Mike Chookaszian, Luke Cholodecki and Nick Hynes initially planned to open the Evanston brewery on Memorial Day 2020 in the site of a former crossfit gym. But delays associated with the COVID-19 pandemic postponed its opening for about 18 months.

Frank said he preferred to look at the silver lining in the coronavirus-related delay.

"It was difficult but it was also a blessing in disguise because it gave me more time to work out my recipes," he said. "And the opening would have been a whole lot less smooth without that year and a half for me."

In addition to its Evanston location and other Vandalay-owned restaurants, Double Clutch Brewing Co.'s beers are available at Millennium Hall at Millennium Park, Eately in Chicago and soon to be at Binny's in Evanston.

Frank said the team aims to produce 1,200 barrels for its second year and expand in the coming years.

"There's a thousand ways to fail, but there's a few ways in there, maybe a half-dozen ways, to succeed," he said. "We have a lot of money tied up in this, and we just want to make sure we keep this fun and everybody's still having fun with this — but that we're successful."