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We’re your favourite drinks magazine and podcast, all about beer, cider, wine, pubs and more. Reader supported, proudly free to read.
We’re your favourite drinks magazine and podcast, all about beer, cider, wine, pubs and more. Reader supported, proudly free to read.
Hopleaf Bar—referred to most commonly as just “Hopleaf” or, sometimes locally, “the Hopleaf”—is a loosely Belgian-inspired pub that has played an outsized role in the development of the city’s, and the country’s, beer scenes over the last 30-plus years. Even still, it has never lost its identity as a community meeting place. It’s both a local for many Chicagoans and a destination for pilgrims seeking this holy land of beer.
Established by Paddy Glenny as The Glenny Brewery Company in Witney, Oxfordshire in 1983, it was renamed the Wychwood Brewery in 1990. Somehow, this small brewery in rural Oxfordshire went from selling to a few freehouses to producing a beer so iconic that it shifted 100,000 barrels a year, changed pub culture, and eventually became a global brand in the Carlsberg portfolio.
