• The palatial headquarters of Illuminated Brew Works. I could tell you what those video games are doing there, but then I’d have to kill you.

If you were going to start a brewery—and don’t tell me you haven’t thought about it, you beer-column-reading person—how would you get the money? (For rhetorical purposes, I’m assuming you’re not independently wealthy.) Would you hit up family and friends? Run a Kickstarter? Beat the bushes for private investors? Grovel for a bank loan? (Good luck with that!) Lots of great breweries—if not most of them—have chosen one or more of those routes.

Illuminated began distributing to local bars in February 2014, beginning with just eight accounts, but because it wouldn’t secure its license till October, it brewed at Une Annee—the single five-barrel fermenter that IBW now uses in its own space lived there instead. I had my first taste of Illuminated’s handiwork at an August 2014 event at Goose Island’s Wrigleyville pub—the American citrus saison Orange Sunshine was the best new-to-me beer I tried that day.

Maybe most important, last month IBW hired two part-time sales reps, Arman Mabry and Sam Eaton, and when I talked to Buckman the two of them had just sold ten kegs in three days. (That’s a lot for Illuminated, at least at this point. I wasn’t being mean when I said “tiny.”) Arman is an old friend of mine from my garage-rock years—in 2001 we drank lots of nasty beer together as bandmates in the White Outs—so it was a pleasant surprise to hear his name.

  • I forgot to turn my glass of 2-Headed Dog so that the IBW logo would face the camera.

The “Extra Special Belgian” 2-Headed Dog (5.8 percent alcohol), named in tribute to the Roky Erickson song, stitches together a British ESB and a Belgian pale. Brewed with New Zealand hops, Rochefort yeast, and a combination of English and Belgian malts (Maris Otter, Special B, and dark crystal), it smells a lot like a dubbel, with black cherry, raisin, and tobacco in the nose, but once you take a sip, that dark fruit gets cut clean through by a faintly smoky toastiness and a dry, nutty finish. This is a beautifully rich beer, especially considering its modest alcohol content, and might’ve been my favorite of the day.

  • No fire pit is complete without a crucified skeleton. Illuminated plans to start throwing parties and having concerts out in the yard come June.

IBW has a busy spring planned, but I’ll stop with an event on Friday, March 6, at Fountainhead, when the bar will pair local beers with local whiskeys. I’d expect to see 2-Headed Dog there too.