• Alarmist founder Gary Gulley gets into the Beer and Metal spirit. That hydrometer jar should really be the skull of a fallen enemy, but I don’t think he has any enemies.

Two years ago, when I talked to John Laffler of Off Color and Jess Straka of Revolution Brewing (then of Metropolitan) as part of the Reader‘s Chicago Craft Beer Week coverage, the conversation turned to emerging brewers who had business plans robust enough to help them survive increasing competition for shelf space and tap handles.

It was the first time I’d heard Gulley’s name, and what I didn’t know then was that he’d already been working on Alarmist for nearly two years. He has a troubleshooting mind—he graduated from Purdue in 1990 with a civil engineering degree—and to build his brewery he’s put his plans and processes through uncountable rounds of iteration and revision (what laypersons call “trial and error”). Since October 2011 he’s shared candid, detailed reports of his slow but steady progress on the Alarmist blog, where in December 2012 he headlined a post “What’s Faster, Me or a Glacier?” Helpfully, he added a photo of a glacier. “Once I kick this guy’s ass in the 1,000,000 year hurdle,” reads the caption, “I’m going to boil him and make beer.”

Today Gulley calls the firing “the greatest thing that ever happened to me,” something he can say because his wife’s cancer is now in remission—and because he soon found another job in tech with the Tribune. But at first he panicked, in the process giving his incipient brewery its original name. The Alarmist logo, designed by Kim Leshinski of Hail to the Ale, is a fermentation vessel dropping out of the sky like a bomb.

  • Plenty of room for expansion at Alarmist. If it weren’t for those big red support beams, you could play racquetball in here.

While I was visiting Alarmist’s 11,000-square-foot northwest-side facility in early March, Doug Hurst showed up to help transfer the first batch of Pantsless Pale Ale from the fermenter to the bright tank. Because my conversation with Gulley hadn’t exactly followed a straight line, we were still talking when Hurst arrived, and he sat in. The two brewers joked about the obsessions they’d developed that had sucked them into making beer for a living. “Welcome to the vortex,” Gulley said.

Gulley urgently wants a tap room in his brewery for the high-margin revenue it will provide. (Revolution and Half Acre have grown so fast in part because they’ve got those profit centers built into their business models.) He says 39th Ward alderman Margaret Laurino is 100 percent behind an Alarmist tap room, but the problem of funds remains. With any luck he’ll have it open by the end of 2015.

On to the beer itself, then. Is Pantsless Pale Ale good enough to elbow its way into that scrum and hold its ground?