Our Best Beers of 2024
Barrels, tables, desserts and collabs
On Monday, we shared with you our best beer experiences of 2024. None of those experiences included our best beers of the year, which goes to show (again) how much placement and timing can affect how we interact with a beverage.
These beers run the gamut from low-ABV table beer to massive barrel-aged stout, and from a resurgent brewery to a hopefully-returning-soon collaboration from two breweries you may not be familiar with (yet).
It was a good year of drinking. Here’s what we thought were tops:
Steve’s Best Beer: Windmill’s Luelle
As beer styles go, West Coast IPAs are my go-to. I’m kinda over hazies, I’m still a sucker for a pastry stout and will never say no to a Helles lager. All of that is to say that I never expected my favorite beer of 2024 to be a table beer. Heck, I’m not sure I knew exactly what a table beer was when Windmill Brewing dropped Luelle in May, just weeks before they closed their doors.
Head brewer Jake Edwards – now brewing at Open Outcry – named it after his newborn daughter and described the 3.8% beer as “a farmhouse-style table beer brewed with orange peel and grains of paradise.”
I still remember my first sip, pausing before declaring, “That’s a beautiful beer.” An odd response, perhaps, but it was light, lovely and packed so much flavor into something with so little ABV, it quickly became a go-to this summer. Here’s hoping Jake’s new friends on the South Side get a chance to experience “LuLu.”
Eric’s Best Beer: Goose Island BCBS Rare 2024
My favorite beer I had all year didn't come until late October, when I got to try this year’s Rare at the Bourbon County tasting at Salt Shed. It immediately was the standout of the seven beers we sampled that night. The single biggest differentiator among non-adjuncted BCS offerings for years has been the type of barrel used.
Goose got their hands on some rare King of Kentucky bourbon barrels and brewed up a stout to withstand the slumber in wood. I got to try it again at Fulton on Black Friday while there muling for someone and I was lucky enough to grab two more bottles: one to drink and one to trade. There's so much barrel.
The buzz and limited availability so far1 have most beer nerds outside Chicago wondering what all the fuss is about. I suspect this special beer will be unlike 2015 Rare, which you could find at Target a year later. Consider this one truly rare.
Ryan’s Best Beer: Ellison Brewery’s Tiramisu Stout
To appreciate my favorite beer of the year it’s important to understand the place behind it. Ellison Brewery first opened in 2015, a year after we uprooted from Chicago and moved to mid-Michigan. This was the closest brewery to our house, had free popcorn which immediately made it kid friendly, and had a fantastic lineup of stouts and IPAs.
It became our go-to brewery to take friends when they were visiting, a spot to grab a beer while running weekend errands or for the occasional girls or guys nights out. For Christmas in 2019 I was even gifted a mug club membership. And then COVID happened.
A lot of businesses struggled through those first several months, and I tried to do my part making trips every two weeks to snag beer or spirits – or sometimes both. In the ensuing couple of years things were different there. The steady rotation of beers we came to love weren’t always on draft, the brewery closed for a spell during renovations and a second location in Lansing shuttered in 2023.
I don’t know the why behind it, but for a time, Ellison had become a shell of its former self. Which is why I was thrilled to find the brewery I first latched onto as my local brewery (much like I did with Half Acre and Begyle back in Chicago) had a resurgence this year.
Ellison’s lineup of stouts is unparalleled, and their Tiramisu Stout may be the best of the bunch. It’s equal parts sweet and roasty without being an over-the-top pastry stout. A few sips reminded me of why I fell in love with the brewery nearly a decade ago.
Karl’s Best Beer: Gnosis & Knack’s Gnack Lager
I don’t track the beers that I drink on Untappd or BeerAdvocate or anything like that. Instead, when I like a particular beer, I take a photo of it on my phone. As I was scrolling through my photos app to remind myself of what I drank this year, I stopped short on one photo that sums up what I really like in a beer at this point in my life: Gnack.
In July, Steve kindly sent me a few cans from breweries in the NWI region, including two tallboys of Gnack. He knew I’d love this English brown lager, saying also that “my mind was blown by how good it is.” And he was right!
Made by Merrilville’s Gnosis Brewing and Kankakee’s Knack Brewing & Fermentations, it takes a seamless combination of everything I love about a good English-style mild ale - light, bittersweet, subtle and rich at the same time - and musically transposes it into a lager key, making it even easier drinking and approachable.
And even though we’re in a renaissance of delicious dark lagers, this one walked an impressively delicate tightrope of flavor — not as sharply roasty as a Czech dark nor as sweet as a Dunkel — while working in the framework of a dry, grassy, lightly earthy English style. I loved it.
I had a lot of really good beers this year. I have a lot of good beers chilling in my fridge right now for NYE purposes. I’m pretty lucky, and I drink pretty well. And I really wish I had some of this back in my fridge again right now. Here’s hoping it returns next May.
(Runner up for me this year is the Liquid Spirit porter on cask that I had at Brass Ring Brewing, so clearly, I have transitioned into just full-on malt adoration guy this year.)
What were your favorite beers of the year? Let us know in the comments (open to all!) or hit us up on our socials. See y’all on Monday when we get back to regular business.
…which was just Rare Day, the Black Friday pre-ordered packages, a handful bottles that sold out in about an hour at Fulton [and possibly Salt Shed] the same day and then a few more bottles on the 23rd.