Still short of 1st anniversary, Evanston’s Double Clutch Brewing named US’ small brewery of the year
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Many breweries would not be able to pull off what Double Clutch Brewing is attempting on a quiet side street in north Evanston.
Double Clutch is the rare mashup of vintage auto showroom-meets-brewery, displaying a rotating collection of classic cars and as much memorabilia nodding to auto history (Mobilgas and Phillips 66 signs) as beer (Blatz and Hamm’s signs). The unlikely bedfellows could easily come across as not only incongruous, but needlessly gimmicky.
The reason it does work, however, is the reason many people walk through the front door: the beer.
With barely a year under its belt, Double Clutch notched three surprise wins at the Great American Beer Festival last month: silver medals in the Munich-Style Helles category (among 158 entries) and the Smoke Beer category (among 76 entries), plus GABF’s “Brewery of the Year” award for the nation’s very smallest brewers, which made up to 250 barrels of beer in 2021.
It was quite the twist for a brewery that began life as a place for Double Clutch co-founder Mike Chookaszian and his family to store their collection of classic cars. The 70-year-old bow-trussed building also had obvious potential for more, appealing to Chookaszian as a place to act on an idea he had long kicked around with his friend Scott Frank, an avid home brewer: opening a brewery. So Chookaszian decided to do both.
The success on a national stage paid off quicker than he or Frank expected.
“It’s huge — and it’s all thanks to this guy,” Chookaszian said, pointing to his friend of 18 years.
“It feels good,” Frank said. “But it presents a whole new level of challenges for us. It’s a good problem to have.”
The brand added a taproom this summer in a high-profile location at Chicago’s heavily trafficked Millennial Park, and the challenge for Double Clutch has become making enough beer to capitalize on its newfound momentum. Double Clutch is already blazing past its small brewery status, targeting about 1,000 barrels of production in 2022 and eyeing construction of a production brewery within a few years to get cans and kegs across the Chicago area.
The medal-winning Helles, simply called Helles Lager, is indeed memorable, and it’s easy to imagine it standing out in a sea of competitors. It boasts a lovely aroma: grassy, grainy and hints of citrus zest. Its surprisingly weighty and creamy texture makes it shine, drinking deeper and rounder than many Helles lagers. But it remains faultlessly clean and approachable at 5.1% alcohol.
The medal-winning Helles Rauchbier is an acquired taste, smelling and tasting like a campfire — albeit in a bright, tidy and refreshing package. Like Helles Lager, it also boasts an impressively rich texture, which Frank attributed to step mashing, a traditional brewing technique that requires increased time and temperature control to draw greater complexities from grain.
Frank, 57, forged the roots of both recipes as a home brewer in his Wilmette garage, a hobby that became all-consuming after he began dabbling 14 years ago. Double Clutch eyed opening during summer 2020, but the COVID-19 pandemic slowed plans. The opening was pushed to October 2021, which Frank said wound up helping the beer.
“It gave me time to really focus on the recipes I’d be serving,” Frank said.
Both as a drinker and a brewer, he’s more interested in German-style lagers than the India pale ales popular across American brewing. That appreciation was only furthered in his garage.
“Most people don’t tinker with lagers because it takes too long and requires way too much patience,” he said. “I always put those beers on a pedestal because they were harder to achieve, required more patience, understanding and sophistication.”
Double Clutch opened Oct. 29, 2021, without an IPA on the menu, though Frank knew he’d need to add one to appeal to contemporary tastes. Sure enough, bartenders were repeatedly asked for IPA on opening day.
Frank’s response is a fruity hazy IPA nodding to the car theme, Little Juice Coupe. It checks the fruity boxes of a classic hazy IPA, but finishes drier and with a touch more bitterness than many of its ilk. It tastes like a hazy IPA made by someone who prefers making lagers.
Frank and Chookaszian met when their kids were in preschool together and formed a bond over a love of classic cars and motorcycles. They also bonded over beer as Frank’s home-brewing hobby took off.
As part of the Vandalay Brands group that owns 11 restaurants, including Lizzie McNeill’s in downtown Chicago and Pescadero, a seafood restaurant with locations in Lakeview and Wilmette, Mike Chookaszian brought the idea of a brewery with Frank at the helm to his two fellow partners. It was a match.
“They liked my philosophy on beer, and I liked their money,” Frank joked.
There was still the issue of the cars, however. Chookaszian and his family — including his father, Dennis, former chairman and chief executive officer of CNA Insurance — own nearly 100 classic cars. Double Clutch displays about six at a time, rotating the lineup every few months.
For Oktoberfest, it was all German cars. For Halloween, it’s “unusual and spooky cars,” Chookaszian said, including a 1920s-era Bugatti and a Ford Model T with a skeleton driver. Up next is the Christmas display — red Ferraris and whatever green cars Chookaszian can find. When planning Double Clutch — named for a method of shifting gears on a manual transmission — Chookaszian could find no other brewery displaying classic cars, he said.
“We built it like that because it’s what we love,” Chookaszian said. “It’s what we thought would be cool and fun. Not everyone has the cars and the space, so we’re unique in that way. It’s maybe financially not the smartest thing, because that could be space for customers, but we think it’s fun.”
At the end of the day, though, it is beer that drives Double Clutch. Or is the engine of the operation, if you prefer.
Frank said he was “elated and stunned” to win the medals. He wasn’t at the awards announcement in Denver, but at home watching the awards livestream, which was on a lag. Before he could see the news for himself, text messages from friends and fellow brewers in Denver started pouring in, though Frank didn’t quite know why.
“I’ll keep the expletives out of it, but they were saying ‘Hell yes,’ and ‘Dude, that’s awesome,’ but I couldn’t translate what was going on,” he said. “But I knew it was good news.”
