CHICAGO (WBBM NEWSRADIO) - It's canning day at ERIS Brewery and Cider House in Old Irving Park.
Co-owner Michelle Foik says it takes a three-headed canning line, plus three to four people to get it done.
"We do one cider at a time, but today we're doing a dual canning. Basically it's almost 260 cases each time we do this machine,” Foik says.
Foik says right now, everything from canning to keg filling to cider processing is done in-house. You wouldn't be able to guess that before it was ERIS, the building looked a little different.
"We are the third owners of a 1910 Masonic Temple,” says Foik.
ERIS co-owner Katy Pizza says there was a substantial amount of work done to renovate the building while still preserving its character.
"There's 96 individual radiator fins that had been separated and then stripped down and refinished,” Pizza says. “We have more radiators upstairs, hoops from a water tower that was at the roof of the building. Those are six feet in diameter, and old oven burners,” says Pizza.
After three years of work, ERIS opened for business in 2018, becoming the first women-owned brewery in Illinois.
Pizza says from the concept of ERIS to opening day, "chaos" was the word that came up the most.
"We latched on to the concept of chaos and discordianism and just let our imagination play a bit,” says Pizza.
She tells WBBM they resonated with the word so much, it eventually became the inspiration for the business' name.
"Eris is the Greek goddess of chaos,” Pizza says. “We thought it was cute that she is most notorious for throwing an apple into a party [that] she was not invited to, the Golden Apple of discord, that, one thing led to another, and then there's a 10-year Trojan War that followed."
Pizza says she and Foik embraced chaos and decided to use it as fuel for ERIS.
"Chaos is just around, and it's how you respond to it,” says Pizza. Are you going to have a 10-year war, or are you going to build something? Innovating, taking what's around you and making something new, there's a creative thread that goes through pretty much everything around here."
That creativity is especially apparent in the cider, with flavors ranging from pepper jam, to a sweet and tart cherry combo, to mosaic-hopped blueberry.
Foik says ERIS takes a more culinary approach to cider while still making them easy to drink.
"One of the things that we like to do is show people that it's an introductory cider,” says Foik. “We always want to be able to say, hey, ‘You know, it's Granny Smith apples that you eat at home. Well, this actually tastes like a Granny Smith apple.’"
ERIS ciders have now grown in demand and have been in wholesale for about four years.
But, Foik says, when they were starting out the business ten years ago, investors weren't quite convinced cider was the right direction.
"Cider is growing now,” says Foik. “Ten years later, we're in a growing industry right now where cider is becoming more popular. Beer is going down just a little bit in the market, so I'm really happy we made that choice to focus on the cider aspect of what we do."
Now, the cider is part of what has kept people coming back nearly seven years later.
"I think after seven years, we're finally getting ERIS' name out there. The world has changed, everything's different, but I see a really big positive in the wholesale aspect of things…We're opening up other markets within the Chicagoland area.”
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