By Dan O’Shea
I spent two recent Saturday mornings shopping for beer at Binny’s on Marcey Street. It’s not that I can only stand to be in that overstuffed section of Lincoln Park at 9 a.m. on a weekend before most of the stores are open – well, okay, that is part of the reason. I went there to collect my first two returns on a recent investment.
Buying beer at 9 a.m. made me feel a bit scandalous until I caught a glimpse of the four or five bums that had gathered at the edge of the Binny’s parking lot, two of them with freshly cracked 20-oz. beers in hand.
I can’t fault them for their choice of packaging. What I had come to collect was a beer about that size – actually a 22 oz. bomber bottle from Pipeworks Brewing Co.
I was one of the “investors” that chipped in $100 via Kickstarter to give a leg up to Pipeworks, one of the newest craft breweries on the Chicago scene.
Like buying stock in the Green Bay Packers, putting $100 into Pipeworks did not give me an ownership stake in anything, but it did allow me to get guaranteed access to new Pipeworks releases (being held at Binny’s until the Pipeworks folks get their own brewery shop up and running).
Posted on April 3, 2012