News About Flatlanders: Does Anyone Care?

News out of Lincolnshire: Flatlanders is closing down its operations here and moving the brewery into Mundelein, while moving the restaurant to another location in Vernon Hills. The plans are for a separate site so they can expand the beer making. See article here.

Personally I thought that it seemed like an OK place to go-it was near my work, so on the way home, a few times, I stopped in for one. I had tried the taster flight too, but overall I had mixed feelings about their beer. The Locomotive Stout was a good dry stout, and Braydon's Red had a classic taste and was refreshing, but a lot of their other regular offerings were pretty run-of-the-mill. As far as expanding their operations to make their beer more available: I am for it, but I think they need to improve on a few of the recipes.

I can believe that customers weren't appearing. Being right on Milwaukee Avenue was good, except the layout of the strip mall was pretty poor, and very confusing. It also wasn't easy to turn into the mall, you had to go around the corner onto an always backed up street (22). Plus, they say, too much competition was popping up.

In my opinion, though, I think they gave up on serving their customers long ago. The beer list was the same for a long time, with very few changes; the response I heard about the restaurant from some of my friends who live nearby had said they food was nothing special and definitely not worth the price; and for me, the three times I was there in the afternoons the bartender was not interested in answering my questions nor did he seems at all knowledgeable about beer and what they are making. In fact, I had a better discussion about the beer with one of the servers. It was always hard to tell what their motivation was over there: food, their beer, or just mixing drinks.

I always expected them to try to appeal to beer geeks and expand in that direction. There are a few places that can survive by making their own beer yet preparing fancy food-Ram is one of them-but with the beer club and specials and more than one location Ram has an advantage. I never got the impression that Flatlanders wanted to be known as a beer maker or the place to go for good micro-brewed beer. Just a look at their weekly drink specials and you could see my confusion. They had half priced growlers on Sundays and one other day they featured their micro-brews. All the others were for Bacardi bombs, etc.

Hopefully they can work out those details at the new place and make it more inviting for the beer geeks.