Friday night, Nancy and I made our way over to Lo Rez Brewing, our neighborhood brewery, kind of a mini date night, for the first time since they re-opened under Illinois' phased plans.  Seating is outside on their lovely, covered porch.  It has a great, historical, turn-of-the-century vibe - it is a repurposed loading dock for an old brick warehouse.  The only drawback is that it doesn't seat that many folks.  The Lo Rez crew (Dave, Kevin and Ginny) have set it up so all the precautions are followed - spraying and wiping down the tables between customers, wait to be seated and wear a mask as you walk to your table, order and pay on your phone, one of the crew (wearing a mask and gloves) brings your beers to your table.  

We ordered the two beers they made from a partigyle process - one grain bill and mash where the early runnings are used to make a big (high alcohol) beer and the later runnings are used to make a smaller beer.  In this case, the big beer is an imperial stout they named Public Declaration and the small beer is an English-style mild they call Party Guy Ale.  

The Public Declaration was as good as I remembered and the Party Guy Ale was really nice - coming in at 2.7% abv, it wasn't thin, which can be a problem with beers this small, and had a pleasant roasty malt character, just balanced with some English hops to make it an easy to drink, really delightful beer.  

The partigyle process began in Scotland, I believe, three to four hundred years ago, where they would make three strengths of the same beer.  You should stop by Lo Rez and try out their version of this historic process. 

For homebrewers, here's a link to a thread on HomeBrewTalk that has some good links in it for more info about how to do partigyle brewing.    

While we were there, a major storm blew through Chicago - but we stayed protected on their patio.  It was wild and woolly, though, torrential downpour, fast moving weather fronts and clouds coming in, obscuring the downtown skyline, then moving off, finally revealing this rainbow!