The Dempster Street Purple Line station in Evanston, on the street where Temperance Beer Co. operated Photo: Thestraycat57 / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0
A brewery called Temperance only makes sense in Evanston. For more than a century the city was the base of the American temperance movement, and for a good part of that time it was legally dry. When Temperance Beer Company opened a tap room at 2000 W. Dempster St. in December 2013, the name was a wink at all of that.
WBEZ reported at the time that the tap room opened to the public on Dec. 19, 2013, and described Temperance as Evanston’s first craft brewery. Production had started only months earlier.
A dry town, then a brewery
The history behind the name is well documented. According to The Daily Northwestern, Northwestern’s Methodist founders asked in 1855 for a charter change banning alcohol sales within four miles of campus, which started Evanston’s long run as a dry town. Frances Willard, a longtime Evanston resident, was a founding member of the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union and served as its president from 1879 until her death in 1898.
National Prohibition began in 1920. When it ended in 1933, Evanston residents voted to stay dry for decades more. The City Council finally approved a liquor ordinance in 1972 by an 11-6 vote, allowing businesses to apply for licenses starting Jan. 23 of that year. Mayor Edgar Vannemann Jr. declined to sign it. Pressure from neighboring suburbs with busier downtowns was a major factor, the newspaper reported, and Evanston’s liquor rules remain tighter than those in many other cities.
Owner Josh Gilbert, an Evanston native and Evanston Township High School graduate, told WBEZ that the brewery saw itself as a kind of modern reformer, loosening a stance the city had held for so long. He started thinking about a brewery in 2008, when the economic downturn gave him room to explore other projects. He had trained as an architect, and the tap room showed it: pale wood fixtures against exposed brick, in a small space.
The people and the beer
Claudia Jendron was the head brewer. She had previously worked at Goose Island, where she began as a receptionist, and she met Gilbert at a bowling party hosted by the Illinois Craft Brewers Guild. The opening lineup was six beers, among them a wheat beer, an ESB and a porter, with recipes that grew out of Gilbert’s home brewing. Small tastes made with local foods were served alongside.
Gilbert also told WBEZ that Evanston officials were far more helpful with permits than Chicago’s had been. Another local producer had cleared part of the path. Paul Hletko of Few Spirits, which opened in 2011, had persuaded the city to change its laws to allow a distillery.
The Daily Northwestern later noted that the taproom offered a place to socialize without the cost expectations of a restaurant, and that it hosted a Mayor’s Town Hall and a political discussion series called The New Saloon.
A beer for the reparations fund
In January 2021 the brewery released Where I’m From, a hazy IPA brewed with vanilla, tangerine and orange peel, available at the brewery starting Jan. 29 and at local retailers in early February. According to the brewery’s announcement, as reported by Guys Drinking Beer, the plan was first to send 13 percent of proceeds to the City of Evanston Reparations Fund, then the brewery raised that to 100 percent. The fund, described in that report as the first of its kind in the country, is financed by a 3 percent tax on local marijuana sales plus donations. Evanston artist Maia Faith designed the label, and the name nods to a Digable Planets song.
The end of the run
Temperance did not last forever. Hoodline reported in October 2024 that the brewery would stop operating on Sunday, Oct. 27, 2024. Gilbert said the craft beer market had changed so much in a decade that it was barely recognizable, with drinkers shifting toward spirits, non-alcoholic drinks and spiked seltzers. In its final year the brewery released Near Tears, its first non-alcoholic beer, at 0.3 percent alcohol by volume.
The brewery left a clear mark on Evanston’s business story: a company that borrowed the language of a movement that once kept the trade out of town, and then spent a decade showing the city could host it.
Sources: WBEZ (2013), The Daily Northwestern (2020), Guys Drinking Beer (2021), Hoodline (2024).
Daniel Okafor covers business, startups and the Innovators section for The Evanston Edge.
