You don’t need be a beer aficionado to enjoy Peach Front Property, described as a big sweet, fruity, hoppy beer now being served at Homewood Brewing Co. and Flossmoor Station Restaurant & Brewery.
The Double West Coast IPA beer was produced jointly by Cam Horn, brewmaster at Homewood Brewing, and Jake LaDuke, brewmaster at Flossmoor Station.
Homewood Brewing, at 18225 Dixie Highway, is the newest craft brewery in the community, and Horn said he is educating clientele about beers.
“It’s been a little bit of a pivot since we opened up, thinking we’d be talking to a mostly (craft) beer crowd,” Horn said. What he’s found is that “we’re introducing the beer and teaching about the beers. It’s a lot of fun bringing people into the space that we’re all so comfortable with and enjoy so much.”
LaDuke describes Peach Front Property as “a fun beer you don’t see very often. It’s not a dessert beer but a beer you can enjoy a glass of and appreciate. At some point it’s a nice fill-in on my menu. It’s a beer style I enjoy, so that’s my take on it.”
The fruity beers are really popular, and the high alcohol content beers are popular, said Kyle Thomas, assistant brewmaster and head of sales at Homewood Brewing. Peach Front Property is at 9.8% ABV, which is high for a beer.
Thomas, who named the beer, said “from a sales perspective there’s a contingency that’s shopping for the most bang for their buck in terms of the ABV (alcohol by volume). So, you’ve got a lot of folks who are looking to spend the least amount of money for the most alcohol content in their beer.”
LaDuke has been at Flossmoor Station for about 18 months, and Horn signed on as the brewmaster at Homewood about two years ago, but the business has been open and serving beer for about seven months.
Regardless, both brewmasters say they enjoyed working on their first collaboration.
“When we first started talking about making beer together, and Jake sent me his first idea for the recipe, I thought I could plug this right into our system. We’re working on very similar scale at our two breweries,” Horn said. “It’s been a fun project.”
Flossmoor Station in downtown Flossmoor has a compact brewing area compared to Homewood Brewing, but Horn said their systems can produce about the same amount of beer. Homewood Brewing has space for more batches.
While the beer has peach in the name, the brewmasters say the peach flavor isn’t overbearing. Horn said they took Peach Front Property to a beer festival in Chicago recently and “it got a fantastic reception.”
The two brewmasters hope it also raised the stature of breweries in the South Suburbs.
“Even though this is a less talked about craft beer area, we are right off the line of the train that comes right from the Mecca of craft beer which is Chicago,” LaDuke said. Having their breweries and others in the area is an opportunity for people to come out to learn about the great beers being produced here, he said.
Horn and LaDuke collaborated with the blessing of their bosses, Carmella Wallace at Homewood Brewing and Carolyn Armstrong at Flossmoor Station, who both believe in giving back to the community.
“I was trying to get these guys together because the H-F community is huge. And I think you two understood what I was trying to do,” Armstrong said at a meet-up at the Station. The two communities are joined through James Hart School, Parker Junior High and Homewood-Flossmoor High School. Working together “is a very community thing to do.”
