After a distinctly trying year, the owners behind Skeleton Key Brewery are gearing up to reopen their brewery and taproom in Woodridge. The microbrewery, owned and operated by Emily Slayton, her husband Paul Slayton, and her brother John Szopa, has been closed since June 20th, Father’s Day, when a tornado blew through the southwest suburbs and wreaked havoc on the brewery.
“I think we were in literal, clinical shock for probably a couple of months,” Emily Slayton shared during a phone interview with What Now Chicago, “Those first few days, I look back on them and think about how prescient our fellow industry members were when we couldn’t be.” Another local brewery, Microphone, sprang into action and organized a GoFundMe to help Skeleton Key right itself.
Slayton praises her fellow industry members for being so forward-thinking. “On one end of it, I’m dealing with incredibly emotional devastation over this thing I’ve spent so much time making being destroyed,” she recalled. “And then on the other end, here are these amazing people who are not only organizing this for us but also donating to it, and it was really hard to reconcile those two emotions.”
10 people lost their jobs the day of the tornado, and because of the GoFundMe, Slayton was able to keep paying them.
Skeleton Key, which celebrated its fifth anniversary in September, has always been a community-oriented brewery. The owners, who got their start as homebrewers, initially planned to open a commercial, shared-use kitchen to help other people launch their businesses. But after weekends spent brewing beer together, it occurred to them that they might be able to maintain that model with a focus on beer.
“The whole idea of the skeleton key is one key that opens many different doors,” Slayton explained. “One of those doors is camaraderie and enjoying the sensory experience of beer, another door is through the classes we teach here and at the local community college about beer and tasting beer, and the third door is the incubator program.” Through their incubator program, which consists of a 12-week immersive course and early market exposure, Skeleton Key has helped three homebrewers open their own breweries.
Fortunately, Slayton and her partners are resilient, and repairs to Skeleton Key are already underway.
“It took a long time to get started on the project because of supply and labor delays,” she said, “but since they’ve started, things are rockin’ and rollin’.” Just last week, the indoor bathrooms were finished, and a few other exciting changes can be expected.
Because of the way the walls collapsed, one of the offices located at the entrance to the tasting room has been removed. “It’s going to feel bigger,” Slayton said of the tasting room, and there will be new windows into the brewing area. “You’ll be able to see the equipment right when you walk in, so that’s pretty cool too.”
While Skeleton Key hasn’t been able to produce beer in its own space due to the construction, the equipment has been saved. And of course the owners wanted to keep making beer.
“We had a number of those same amazing industry supporters who reached out and said ‘come make a beer at our place,’ so we ended up making 13 collabs over the last the 6 months,” said Slayton. She’s enjoyed the process of collaborating on recipes, brewing together, and celebrating joint releases.
Slayton says Skeleton Key is looking at a pandemic-contingent soft opening in March, with a grand reopening slated for April.
In the meantime, Skeleton Key has been operating a modest taproom in the back of their brewery while they rebuild. “Little Key” is 21+ and the hours change weekly.
Learn more by visiting Skeleton Key Brewery online.
