To hear Mike Pallen describe it, Mikerphone Brewing, a nano-brewery based in the Chicago suburbs, combines his love for music and beer. Before he opened his own place, he worked as a marketer in the music industry, and the hustle he learned and honed over years of dealing with recording artists, hanging out in clubs and making connections to get an intimate yet wide-appeal product into the hands of new customers, has served him well in the few years he’s been open.
Beer is also part of the family business. His father spent a career working for Miller Brewing, although the recipes Pallen and his team are turning out are a far cry from the beers made a generation ago by the Milwaukee brewer.
In the early days, after making some noise as a homebrewer in the Chicago scene, Pallen started working for a few up-start breweries in the area and across the border in Indiana, where the owners would allow him to make beers under his own label. That evolved into a contracting operation, then eventually to opening the doors to his own spot in 2017.