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• One-on-One with Rebecca Vann, manager of The Blind Pig Co.

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Blind Pig Brewery of downtown Champaign brews its own original beer right inside the bar. Photo by James Kyung

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Blind Pig Co., The »
Address: 120 N. Walnut St. Champaign, IL 61820
Phone: (217) 398-1532
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The Blind Pig Co. is a bar serving a different side of CU. Since it opened the mircrobrewry addition in November, it gives beer drinkers the option to go local. buzz sat down with manager Rebecca Vann about beers, brewing them and the real history behind the sightless swine.

buzz: How many different Blind Pig Beers are there?

Rebecca Vann: The maximum we serve on tap is four, but there aren’t always four. It’s kind of a supply and demand system. Our brewing system is pretty small — we have three on tap right now. Our brewmaster has years of experience. He’s probably made more than 20 different styles of beer so far. We usually have one lighter beer, one darker beer, and the other two are seasonal. Since it’s winter we have dark beer on tap, and once it gets warmer we’ll have the lighter varieties.

buzz: The brewer is an Illinois graduate. Are a lot of your employees former Illini?

RV: He’s actually a graduate student at U of I and getting his masters right now. We actually don’t have U of I graduates working here; some people have lived here forever, some have just been working here for a long time. A lot of us have gone to U of I at one point, taking two or three classes. It all changes depending on the time of year.

buzz: Being off-campus, do you get a lot of business from students, or is it mostly just the local crowd?

RV: We actually do get a lot of students in here. We get more grad students and professors and TAs than undergraduates during the week. We do get a good amount of undergrads on the weekends. We get a really good crowd in here on the weekends; business is definitely up.

buzz: Do you expect anything big for Unofficial?

RV: We expect the usual student crowd that we get on weekends. We probably won’t be as chaotic as campus bars on Unofficial, but we’ll definitely get some good business that weekend.

buzz: What is the history of the bar? Is the rumor true that it was brought over piece by piece from England?

RV: The brewery opened in May of 2008, and it wasn’t running for a while. We just released our first beer last year in November. The pieces in the bar definitely have a lot of history, but I don’t think any of them were actually brought over from England. The owner has authentic antiques brought in from all over the United States, giving the bar a really eclectic feel.

buzz: Your Web site blindpigco.com says that there are fourteen taps dedicated to small local breweries. Why the focus on the smaller breweries instead of big sellers, like Miller and Budweiser?

RV: We like to showcase beers from microbreweries as opposed to macrobreweries. That just means that instead of the big companies like Budweiser, we like to serve beers from smaller companies. For the beer nerds out there, this is what they want and look for; these beers are better than the ones made by the bigger companies because these microbrewers really care more about the beer that they’re making. The only well-known beer we have on tap is Old Style. For those people that don’t really care about the beer, they’re just there to be with friends.

buzz: Can both beer connoisseurs and people new to beer enjoy what Blind Pig has to offer?

RV: It may look and sound intimidating, but we have really great bartenders who know their beer and are educated enough to know which one tastes closest to your favorite big-name beer. They are definitely able to recommend a good gateway beer for the average Joe who comes in and doesn’t recognize any of the names and is intimidated by the beers that he’s never heard of.