Illinois
Cheers to Illinois: Beer tourism booms as travelers sip their way through the Land of Lincoln
![Cheers to Illinois: Beer tourism booms as travelers sip their way through the Land of Lincoln](https://images.foxtv.com/static.fox32chicago.com/www.fox32chicago.com/content/uploads/2023/10/1280/720/snapshot-2023-10-19T215838.225.jpg?ve=1&tl=1)
Cheers to Illinois: Beer tourism booms as travelers sip their way through the Land of Lincoln
If you brew it, they will come. In tonight’s special report, Dane Placko taps into a new travel trend that has tourists “pouring” into the Land of Lincoln.
CHICAGO – If you brew it, they will come.
In tonight’s special report, Dane Placko taps into a new travel trend that has tourists “pouring” into the Land of Lincoln.
“People like beer, and they’ll drive far places to get beer,” said Brandon Wright, owner of Werk Force Brewing. “We’re lucky enough to be one of those places.”
Wright knows that for a fact. He’s the owner of Werk Force Brewing, a craft beer brewery in Plainfield.
Not only does he see customers come from near and far during their annual Oktoberfest but also during a special release of one of his craft brews.
“They drove all the way up from Paducah, Kentucky,” said Wright. “There was a limit. It’s one bottle per person. So they drove all the way to get a single bottle of Sleepy Bear. It was worth it to them.”
Ed Dimler is another beer tourist who likes to hit the road for a good brew.
He is from Iowa, but we caught up with him on a bike trail in St. Charles.
“I like Illinois beer,” said Dimler. “Boy, these local breweries do it. They make some delicious beer here in Illinois, for sure.”
When you are in a city like St. Charles, it’s not hard to find some delicious beer.
“We’ve seen a huge growth in beer tourism in St. Charles here locally. We are so lucky to have six local breweries here in St. Charles,” said Jenna Sawicki, Executive Director of the St. Charles Business Alliance. “Our breweries are always trying new experimental stuff. There’s always something new to try, so we feel like it’s brought in a ton of tourism.”
Alter Brewing and Kitchen is one of them.
“In St. Charles, we see about 15 percent of our reservations come from folks from out of town,” said Ken Henricks, co-owner of Alter Brewing. “In Oak Brook, it’s closer to 30 percent. Oak Brook has more of a business traveling community.”
Known for its “Hopular Kid” pale ale, Alter Brewing has a third location in Downers Grove.
“When we talk to our out-of-town guests, craft beer and visiting breweries in other locations is one of their favorite things to do,” said Henricks.
The Illinois Craft Brewers Guild says more people are traveling to Illinois and exploring the state because of the breweries. When they do, beer tourists like to combine one favorite pastime with another.
“We are gonna hit some breweries and stuff like that too,” said Dimler. “We like to do that when we are out biking, they go really good together.”
Chris Curren, a well-known Chicago chef, and his wife, Megan, run the Graceful Ordinary Restaurant in St. Charles.
“I think the demographic we get here is from all over the Chicago area and I think the breweries are part of the reason why people would come to this area,” said Chris Curren. “You can hop from brewery to brewery and then go out and have a decent meal.”
Will County is also seeing some of that tourist traffic pour in.
“We have two major crossroads not too far from us,” said Jamie Albert, owner of Will County Brewing Company. “A mile away, we have I-55 and we have I-80, so we do get people that are traveling through the area.”
Whether they are on their way to Starved Rock in Ottawa, a Frisbee golf tournament in Channahon or the DuPage River for some tubing, award-winning Illinois beer is also a big draw.
“I think the water source probably has a lot to do with it,” said Albert. “Lake Michigan has some of the best brewing water for beer.
If you head back toward DuPage and Cook counties, craft brewers there are seeing similar tourist traffic.
Ryan Weidner is the CEO of Pollyanna Brewing and Distilling.
With brewers who have trained in Germany or Belgium, he says beer drinkers are drawn to all three of their locations and nearby adventure experiences only add to the trip.
“Lemont has been kind of growing since we set foot down there in the last 10 years. Now that the Forge, the Lemont Quarry is there, we’re seeing a lot of outdoors folks come in,” said Weidner.
When we asked the state’s office of tourism about “beer tourism” here, we found out the appeal of Illinois beer growing across the globe.
“The one thing we are doing to put a spotlight on that is we have an Illinois-made makers program, so we have over 236 makers, and we call these artisans, craftsmen, distillers, beer makers,” said Daniel Thomas, Deputy Director of the Illinois Office of Tourism.
Thomas says this program is big with beer drinkers in Germany and other countries.
“We’re seeing a really important global uptick with our airlift and visitors from those countries leaning into beer tourism,” said Thomas.
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Illinois
Watching This Video Of A Soccer Field In Illinois Get Swallowed By A Sinkhole Is The Thing Nightmares Are Made Of
![Watching This Video Of A Soccer Field In Illinois Get Swallowed By A Sinkhole Is The Thing Nightmares Are Made Of](https://chumley.barstoolsports.com/union/2024/06/28/Screenshot-2024-06-28-at-6.20.07-PM.93cce0ea.png?crop=0.81%2C0.99%2Cx0.13%2Cy0.00%2Csafe)
AP News – ALTON, Ill. (AP) — A giant sinkhole has swallowed the center of a soccer complex that was built over an operating limestone mine in southern Illinois, taking down a large light pole and leaving a gaping chasm where squads of kids often play. But no injuries were reported after the sinkhole opened Wednesday morning.
“No one was on the field at the time and no one was hurt, and that’s the most important thing,” Alton Mayor David Goins told The (Alton) Telegraph.
Security video that captured the hole’s sudden formation shows a soccer field light pole disappearing into the ground, along with benches and artificial turf at the city’s Gordon Moore Park.
The hole is estimated to be at least 100 feet (30.5 meters) wide and up to 50 feet (15.2 meters) deep, said Michael Haynes, the city’s parks and recreation director.
So I guess that’s what happens when you build soccer fields on top of old abandoned mines? Yikes man.
Looks like when Bane just left the stadium and Big Ben, Heinz Ward and the boys were about to kickoff. And things just went kaboom.
Thank God nobody was on the fields playing when this happened and tragedy was avoided. But I guess all that limestone we use for everything has to come from somewhere right? One of the cool parts about flying back to Chicago from down south or the west coast is flying over all the quarries outside the city and seeing how freaking far down they dug to get all that stone out. Some of them are insanely deep. Almost as deep as your mother. OHHHHH
Illinois
Illinois Senate President Don Harmon kept his cool when Springfield got hot
![Illinois Senate President Don Harmon kept his cool when Springfield got hot](https://cst.brightspotcdn.com/dims4/default/7bc5c69/2147483647/strip/true/crop/4418x2522+0+293/resize/1461x834!/quality/90/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fchorus-production-cst-web.s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com%2Fbrightspot%2F19%2F7b%2F7c4c5e50b9426e213c0705a809f8%2Fmerlin-89141795.jpg)
During the last couple weeks of the spring state legislative session, Senate President Don Harmon got whacked twice by allies, including Gov. J.B. Pritzker, but still managed to keep his cool.
On May 14, the pro-choice powerhouse group Personal PAC issued a blistering press release blasting the Senate supermajority for an “unacceptable decision” to strip abortion services from the governor’s birth equity bill, which banned co-pays and other added insurance costs for most prenatal and postnatal care. Pritzker quickly chimed in, saying if the House-approved bill was indeed stripped of abortion coverage, he wouldn’t sign it.
Eleven days later — the day before the Senate took up the state budget package — an internal administration talking points memo was mistakenly sent as a blast text message by a member of Pritzker’s staff to House Democrats. The incendiary blast text was sent shortly after the Senate Democrats, in consultation with the Republicans, amended a House bill reforming the Illinois Prisoner Review Board.
The Senate’s bipartisan amendment included requirements like live-streaming Prisoner Review Board hearings, which the Pritzker administration claimed at the time would cost a fortune and, according to the mistakenly texted memo, was actually part of a plan to undermine the state’s Mandatory Supervised Release program because hearing officers would be intimidated into not releasing deserving prisoners while being video streamed.
“This is a right-wing wolf in disingenuous transparency clothing,” the administration’s text told House Dems. “It eliminates [Mandatory Supervised Release] by design. And it’s appalling that senate democrats [sic] are so eager to please their Republican friends that they would undermine justice and push to keep people incarcerated who, by measure of actual law, should be out on MSR.”
There was real fear in the building the accidental broadside could derail the budget.
Budget package stayed on track
Through it all, though, Harmon didn’t overreact. The entire budget package cleared his chamber with far more Democratic support than it received days later in the House. Things could’ve been so much different.
“It did not trouble me in a way it may have in the past,” Harmon told me last week after I asked if he had matured over the years.
The Senate, he pointed out, eventually “passed the birth equity bill, and in the form it was passed.” He later added, “I think there were some misunderstandings that could’ve been resolved by a telephone call.”
And Harmon said of the Prisoner Review Board amendment imbroglio: “We weren’t intending to pick fights. It was a bit of a surprise to me the level of engagement and the way it happened. I’d much rather work with the governor to make this work than to spin our wheels for nothing.” He said he’d be “happy” to have a conversation with the governor to “make sure all voices are heard” going forward.
“In the end, we’re judged by what we produce, not the rough drafts in between,” Harmon said. “The partnership with the governor, responsible budgeting has been a real anchor here for all of us, I think. And again, my priorities going into any session are to do the best I can to make sure the members of our caucus have the opportunity to advance legislation that’s important to them and to make sure we adopt a responsible, balanced budget. So, I try to focus on those things and not worry about the political flame-throwing that just seems to be part of our process.”
Harmon and the governor didn’t start off on the best terms. The two were old allies, but their top staffs just did not mesh well, to say the least.
But Harmon told me things started to change toward the end of the 2023 spring session. “I think the challenges we faced in passing the budget last year have solidified the relationship between the Senate staff and the governor’s staff and demonstrated our ability to work well together,” he told me.
Harmon wouldn’t specify what those “challenges” were, but it’s pretty obvious what he meant.
Last year, House Speaker Chris Welch agreed to a budget deal with the other two leaders. An announcement was made, but then Welch got heat from his caucus and needed to find more money for his members. Rather than walk away, Harmon and Pritzker and their staffs worked with Welch to find a solution.
Former House Speaker Michael Madigan wouldn’t have been nearly as accommodating, to say the least. Making accommodations and overlooking attacks just weren’t his thing. Times have indeed changed.
Rich Miller also publishes Capitol Fax, a daily political newsletter, and CapitolFax.com.
Send letters to letters@suntimes.com
Illinois
This Is How Old You Have To Be To Legally Drive A Boat In Illinois
![This Is How Old You Have To Be To Legally Drive A Boat In Illinois](https://townsquare.media/site/711/files/2024/06/attachment-Untitled-design-2024-06-28T102530.591.jpg?w=1200&q=75&format=natural)
It’s boating season for sure.
The 4th of July weekend is the time to get out on the water. I saw several trucks with boats at a coffee shop this morning, likely heading out for the week. If I could, I’d spend the whole week flopped out on a boat. We put up with a nasty January for this. Whether you’re swimming, drinking, or the one driving the boat, there are sure to be shenanigans.
I’ll be the first to admit that I get the zoomies when I drive a boat. It’s almost jetski intense. I haul all over the lake, I won’t lie. Some of us start driving boats sitting in our family’s lap holding the steering wheel. And that’s not too far from the legal boating age in Illinois.
The Minimum Age To Drive A Boat In Illinois
Illinois seems to have similar boating rules to Iowa. According to the Illinois DNR, minors (12-17) can drive a boat under one of two circumstances: they have their Boating Safety Certificate from the Illinois DNR or they have someone 18 or older with them.
It also depends on the boat the kid is in. That rule applies to boats that are over 10 horsepower.
No kid under 10 years old can operate a motorboat at all.
Also, as a good reminder for the 4th of July weekend festivities, don’t let the most blitzed person on your boat drive it. We all know they don’t need to do anything besides try not to black out.
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