The Best Craft Beer Bars in Chicago

Michael Roper’s legendary Andersonville bar has looked to Belgium for inspiration since 1992, and continues to find it with lambics, trappist ales and abbey-style ales. Nonstop crowds pack the claustrophobic front lounge, the soaring bi-level dining room and the adjoining exposed-brick-lined pub space. Many of the taps, no matter how obscure, are a reasonable $6, and the bar has no televisions, no games and no distractions to keep patrons from focusing on the beers (and the city’s best moules frites).

One hundred-plus bottles and 30 taps—many locally produced specifically for this rowdy bar—liven up an otherwise quiet neighborhood stretch. The skull-centric heavy metal details and bearded craft beer geeks make for quite a scene, especially in milquetoast Lincoln Park. If your idea of heaven involves eating a hulking po’ boy while listening to Bloodbath and washing it down with an obscure Danish stout, welcome home.

Some bars offer 36 beers, and we call them serious. The beers at the Map Room—a modest cash-only corner tavern full of old National Geographic issues—represent 36 different styles, ranging from a cask-conditioned local ale to a gluten-free Spanish lager. There are obscure microbrews like Flossmoor Helles Maibock and obscurer imports like Corsendonk Brown. The unparalleled taps would be enough, but add cozy environs, patient bartenders and early-morning Intelligentsia coffee and pastries, and you’ve got the perfect neighborhood bar.

This heroic slashie (half liquor store, half bar) sells a decent number of bottled brews in the smart liquor store up front, and offers more than 475 artisanal beers in the dark, art deco-y lounge in back. The chill vibe, which often includes old films projected on a back wall and the occasional free Korean barbecue, extends from customers to the bartenders. Don’t be fooled: The genial barkeeps know their stuff (and make surprisingly good cocktails for a beer bar).

Down the road from Wrigley Field, Sheffield’s may boast more points of entry than any bar in town: skilled and attentive bartenders, barbecue smoked in house daily, a cottonwood-shaded beer garden with heating lamps, multiple bars and, of course, insanely good beer. Fifty impeccably curated taps—heavy on hoppy American craft beers—and lord-knows-how-many bottles, may make ordering daunting. But seriously, you can’t go wrong.

This sausage (the bangers) and beer (the lace—a term for the doily of suds left after drinking down a beer) place comes with its own cicerone, who curates the rotating tap list. There's a lot of taxidermy and dark leather in case you don't feel the hair growing on your chest the moment you order a corn dog and an IPA.

A self-described craft-beer café, this Lakeview spot is popular for all sorts of beer-infused scenarios: locals shop for carry-outs (the cooler’s stocked with more than 350 at a time), diners take advantage of the “BYOFood” policy (delivery orders are welcome), work-from-homers bring their laptops for buzzed surfing and, in a nod toward European tradition, parents bring their kids. There are craft-beer networking events; there are knitting clubs. The only thing Beermiscuous doesn’t seem to cater to is pretense.

Perhaps the most unique user experience in Chicago’s bar scene, Tapster is a pour-your-own beer bar with a timely mission: “Freedom of choice is the American way, and we at Tapster have embraced this basic human right.” Thirty-eight taps are kegged with regularly rotating beers (another two dozen are set aside for cocktails, wine and kombucha), all of which can be sampled or sipped by the ounce and logged on vending cards. There is no physical bar. Instead, staff mill about the crowd, ready to gush about an of-the-moment sour or seasonal saison.