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Tour Stop 27 - Imperial Oak Brewing - 6/22/2017
Imperial Oak Brewing, 501 Willow Blvd, Willow Springs, IL 60480 Hours: Mon-Tues-Wed- 12:00 pm- 11:00 pm | Thur-Fri-Sat- 12:00 pm- 1:00 am | Sunday- 11:00 am- 11:00 pm
Experience before you go............
Well since a lot of friends are still working (not to mention my beer drinking buddy Brad) and I'm retired, and my beautiful wife Kat feels like the odd man out when she joins me on a brewery tour because I'm at the bar talking to all by new friends.......well you guessed it, it's time to do a tour stop on my own!! Now for some folks this might be a little intimidating but for me, it's right up my alley.
Now the crazy thing is the day didn't start out with "I'm doing a brewery tour on my own". It was a fabulous sunny midwestern summer day and believe it or not I've been trying to hit a golf ball most of my life with not much success. And I'm sure you've heard this from a lot of non-retirees, "I don't have time to golf but maybe when I retire". Well, like I said I'm retired and I have the time so let me see if I can get any better at this crazy game! So I opened up one of my favorite apps, Golfnow......and secured a 1:30 tee time at Gleneagles Country Club in Lemont for one with a cart for $15 bucks......yeah buddy, life is good!! So I get there and I join the twosome, Jim and Art who have already teed off and look at me like, "Who's this guy?". Come to find out that both Jim and Art are in their 70's and are retired military. A couple "Nice drive, good putt and a thank you for your service," Jim and Art warm up a little bit and we have a nice 9 holes of golf edict and camaraderie. At the turn they both leave and I'm on the 10 hole teeing off by myself. I've been trying to golf for 35 years and I've never been on a tee box by myself. For a second I really didn't know what to do.....so I looked around, teed up my ball and hit a straight as an arrow, 225 yard drive right down the middle!!! Long story short I had two par holes, birdied a 165 yard par 3 and shot a 40 on the back 9 and ended up with an 88 for the round.....OMG!!!! And of course it happens when there's no witnesses!! I use an app called Golflogix to keep score and bing bang boom....an 88!!! I have to tell someone, well the first victim is the 17 year old golf course employee gathering the carts by the ProShop, beaming....."I just had my best round of my life, an 88", "Good for you"! I got to tell more people! Hit my Around Me app (who ever thought I'd be so hi tech), up pops Imperial Oak Brewing. Did someone say beer, I guess I did......and away I went!
A little 7 minute drive to Willow Springs. I turn left on Willow Blvd and Siri says, "You've arrived". All I see is apartment buildings so I go a little further which curves to the right and there's a guy walking and I ask, "Is there a brewery around here"? He points straight ahead with a big smile on his face and literally 50 feet and to my right is Imperial Oak.
I do the front signage selfie shuffle and hit the door. It's Thursday, 4:45 pm and it's packed to the gills! The taproom is 15-20 feet wide and 40-50 feet long with a fabulous bar running the entire length and there it is.....one bar stool left with my name on it, right in the middle. I sit down, get 3-4 HoppinBreweryTour.com cards out and settle in. I say hi to the guy to my left and also to the pair of guys to my right who obviously have been here for awhile and talking a hybrid English/Eastern European dialect with a lot of laughs and toasts and a few, "That's what she said". Big bruiser bartender greets me with a welcome and what ya drinking. Of course I hand him a card and do the Hopin' Brewery Tour dance and I tell him I'm an IPA kinda guy. Now with all these brewery tour stops that I've done, I think this is the first bartender that I failed to get his name. But if he was a buddy of mine, I'd call him Bear. So Bear lined up a good looking flight starting with Crank It Hop - El Dorado IPA (6%), next was Crank It Hype - New England IPA (7.2%) followed by the Farmers Daughter - Saison (6%) and bringing up the rear was the Kaiser - Kolsch (5.4%).
To my left we have Mike from the great state of Oklahoma. Come to find out that Mike is a underground tank Inspector and I know that Oklahoma has a bunch of underground tanks so I'm immediately intrigued in why Mike is up here. Well the country has thousands of buried tanks that are getting older and are very costly to maintain and even more costly to replace. Mike travels all over the country climbing down in tanks and either fixing or recommending replacement. Now Mike is a Milk Stout guy and according to Mike, the darker the better. He has two 4oz glasses of Utterly Black - Milk Stout (5.5%) in front of him and I'm wondering why. Well Mike is conducting an experiment.....yes, right here at Imperial Oak Brewery. One of the Utterly Blacks is CO2 and the other is the Nitro version and he wanted to see which one he likes better. The Nitro was creamier, longer foam head and just better tasting.....gotta luv it!! Mike orders a pint of the Nitro and I join him with a pint of the Crank It Hops. Mike and I solved all the world's problems and cover a bunch of topics. Travel, bucket list items, motorcycles, beards, women, guns, crawfish, painting doors and exit strategies. Really enjoyed meeting ya Mike and I wish you nothing but happy trails in the future!!
Bear fills up a couple 32oz "to go" cans for me.....one being the Crank It Hop IPA and the other in honor of my new buddy Mike, the Utterly Black - Milk Stout (Nitro)!
Side note.....after I got home I had to revisit my online score card to relive my fabulous round of golf. What's this.....no score on hole # 11!! How can this be.....some way, some how no strokes were entered for hole #11! I remember the hole as if it were yesterday, oh yeah it was.....and I got a bogey on that hole which was a 6. Oh well, I guess I shot a 94 and believe it not, this is still my best round ever......ain't life grand!!!!
Until next time and remember.........
Go get'cha one!!
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