Twice as long and twice as much. It’s sort of the mantra for any brewery owner who has been through starting a business in the craft beer industry.
More than 18 years ago, Josh Deth sort of knew what to expect when launching his own brewery. It took a few failed business ventures to get to that stage, but understanding the need to own his space while keeping an eye on the future when it comes to both beer and consumer needs is what has gotten Chicgao’s Revolution to where it is today.
“It’s in our name: Revolution,” said the brewery’s founder. “It’s about change and development, and it’s a little bit opportunistic.
“It’s listening to what people want and then doing it. I definitely want to be in five years brewing and making something that we don’t brew and make today. Innovation is, of course, such a critical thing. You get more mature, and you realize the importance of innovation. To get growth, the new things that we introduce have to sell more than the collective loss of all the old things. That’s generally the arithmetic at the end of the end of the day.”
The brewery just “celebrated” its 15th anniversary as a company, but the balloons and streamers were subdued since the original brewery location — a brewpub located in the Logan Square area of Chicago — closed in late December of 2024.
“When I closed the brewpub in December, that was my decision. I had to make it,” Deth said. “It was a hard thing to do as it’s your baby and you spend your life building it with so many friends. The business kind of talks to you, tells you it’s time. You see it in the numbers. It was a tough thing to do, but I had to make that call myself, let everybody know, and do all the rigmarole.
“And we did the long goodbye. Six weeks to give everybody a chance to come back in for one more pint. Which is great for the customers to revel in it and to be nostalgic. But it’s hard on us and the staff to have to go through that. Maybe next time, I would not have stayed open quite as long.”
But the real estate side is important now and Deth saw that functioning with both a brewpub and production facility about a mile away in the Kenzie neighborhood was not conducive to building Revolution going forward. In fact, a key aspect for Deth was the real estate side.
“We are almost like a real estate company these days,” he said. “I think I have as much money invested in bricks and buildings as we do in stainless steel. It’s similar. But then we have the security.”
The question of what forces a brewery to actually close is two-folded, he believes.
“It’s the landlord, No. 1, and then it’s the bank/running out of money at No. 2,” he said. “It’s nice to control our destiny and we’re in no danger of the landlord closing us down.”
In 2003, Deth founded The Handlebar, a bar and grill. It came after Deth had spent time working at other breweries — including Chicgao’s Goose Island.
“We rented there,” he said. “Definitely in the early days of business development, looking to open a brewery, I was looking to rent. Then I learned over time.
“I bought my own house And you see your equity you build and pay your mortgage off, after five years, okay, I have a little bit equity here. If your home goes up, then you have a little more equity kind of a thing. And you can refinance your loan if interest rates go down, and you do that kind of thing. I learned a lot about property that way.”
Deth also worked at a local chamber of commerce that helped people get into business.
“Some people help people buy buildings or rent or landlords to improve the buildings,” he said. “So I knew a lot about the real estate/property side of our world, and we bought the brewpub building when we launched that business.”
It took three years to get open, but in early 2010 Revolution was born.
“We did a gut rehab with heavy investment,” he said. “It was a great run for a restaurant to be open 15 years. It had a lot of great moments and great memories. And it grew. It launched our whole business.
“So I feel good that we bought the building.”
And the brewpub is still an asset for Revolution as Deth said many restaurant concepts are looking to purchase the building.
“Not a lot of breweries are calling, ‘Can I buy your brewpub?’” he said. “The taproom model is still a little more dominant model.”
In 2012, Deth chose to rent a part of the production brewery spot in Kenzie — a 90,000-square-foot building — but bought the entire building outright three years ago. The growth that can be added in the building includes more storage space for onsight with some future plans yet to be determined. While speaking to Brewer in February, Deth showed new demolition of some former offices that were there, but no immediate plans are formulated.
“We’ve replaced the roof, we’re doing tuckpointing and adding new windows, kind of the boring stuff that you do to secure all the great investment you’ve already made,” he said. “I don’t find that very risky in the grand scheme of things.”
The risk years are over, where the brewery saw upwards of triple-digit growth. Now, flexibility is a key to staying around and growing the way the brewery has.
What started as a brewpub and grew to be known as an innovator in the barrel-aged space, Deth knows that although brands — like the Deep Wood Series, Straight Jacket Barleywine, Deth’s Tar (Imperial Oatmeal Stout), and various iterations of V.S.O.J. — help pique interest in the craft beer world and created hardcore fans, the brewery operates because of its IPA brand Anti-Hero, which generates nearly half of all sales.
“We’re now a 15-year-old brewery and a highly trusted brand,” Deth said. “People know what they’re going to get — quality — they’re going to get that from Revolution.
“You have to earn that first off, and spend a lot of time dedicated to quality to earn that.”
Anti-Hero sales were flat for 2024, which Deth called “awesome for a flagship.”
“We picked up a bunch of sales to Costco,” he said. “If this was like five or six years ago, I wouldn’t be talking about Costco. But they called and they were interested. It felt like now is the time that we should say yes to Costco. And Anti-Hero is just such a respected beer that was one of the last places that you couldn’t find Anti-Hero around Chicagoland. That helped Anti-Hero in 2024 to stay flat.
But resting on those laurels isn’t enough for Deth either. A variety of IPA lines have proven to be valuable, but cannibalization is prevalent enough that the next “Hero” brand won’t help drive new sales. That means adding in a Lager line that can compete with premium macros in Chicago made sense. Enter Cold Time Lager.
READ MORE: Why Revolution’s Deth Appreciates the Blend of Strategy & Influence that CSO Veliky Brings
“That’s the growth beer of the moment,” he said. “Find the styles that are growing, make the beers that people want to drink. It’s an everyday 4.8% premium lager — not a light beer — all malt, and we use Mexican Lager yeast on it. We found that gives a really clean profile.”
The Pareto rule, Deth said, is an important task to follow going forward.
“Give that top 20%, 80% of your focus, because that’s what really drives the business,” he said. “It’s fun to make pilot batches and to talk about all the new beers that are always coming out, but in terms of a business like this, we have to have focus.
Although Deth may have seen Revolution growing with an idea of being a larger Regional Brewery player, seeing that 80% of the company’s sales of 60,000 barrels reside in the state of Illinois — particularly in the greater Chicagoland area — being Chicago’s brewery is award enough while drops into neighboring states is now the ideal situation.
“I think we sell more beer than Goose Island in the city of Chicago,” Deth said. “I think they might sell more of us than the state. But people want to have something that they can identify with that’s theirs too. You have to be willing to let people adopt you or be the thing that they want you to be, in some ways. Just like you get to decide who you want to be a bit, but customers drive the business.
“You have to make the right beer for the right moment and the right occasion, and for the right beer drinkers. That’s a customer-first mentality.”
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