Three Winter Beer Festivals in Chicago Area
Beer festivals in Chicago are numerous. A few days ago, we shared an overview of Chicago’s craft beer history. To further explore you need to taste the beer, of course! This winter brings a few beer festivals in Chicago to wet your whistle. You can always sign on for one our winter tours before one […]
Walking Tours of Chicago Questions Answered
We give walking tours of Chicago almost daily to locals and tourists alike. One of the many perks of my job as a tour guide is meeting so many curious people. Encouraging questions as much as we do means getting stumped every once in a while. Here are answers to some of those questions. Is […]
Gifts for Curious People: Gift Cards Now Available
Our blog is primarily for giving our dear readers new insights into Chicago architecture, history and culture. But every once in a while we will indeed use it to toot our own horn. Consider this some tooting. We now have gift cards for people you love who love Chicago! You can buy these gift cards […]
Through the Side Door: Women and Drinking in Early Chicago
On July 1, 1872, the Chicago Tribune published a story titled “A Man Chains His Wife in a Heavy Weight, and Burns Her Mouth With a Poker to Prevent her Drinking.” Woah, right? Discovering that led to me becoming intrigued by the topic of women and drinking in Chicago’s early history. Eliza Martin’s husband punished her for […]
Beer + Poetry + History = Grand Success
Last Saturday night, Chicago Detours brought together a fabulous combination: writers and drinking at the historic Berghoff Bar. AWP award winners joined local artists and novelists to read a selection of Chicago Drinking poems that we at Chicago Detours dug up from library archives and old anthologies. Readers shouted out the poems amid clinking glasses […]
Lost Chicago Drinking Poems
We lose things for all kinds of reasons – we’re absent minded, we drop them, or we just plain forget about them. One could make many cases for why drinking poems might get lost over time: 1. People were drunk when they wrote them, so they aren’t worth being remembered. 2. People got drunk after […]