Last Wednesday, Old Chicago Pizza & Taproom at The Shoppes of Grand Prairie hosted a tap takeover by local brewery, Peoria Brewing Company and we stopped out to check out the action. You can join in on the fun by scrolling down and following along on the sudsy fun!

Here we are at Old Chicago, I love the towering entrance to the restaurant and taproom!

There’s a nice beer garden over here to the side of the building...

But the PBC taps takeover is inside, so let’s go in and see what’s happening. Check out the silver pizza slice handles on the door, nice!

As soon as we get a few steps inside we’re greeted by a quartet of cuteness at the front station! Gotta love that! From left: Jordan, Kelly Hayley and Sami. Thanks for the nice greeting, ladies!

Okay, let’s make our way inside of Old Chicago!

Here’s the sign announcing the 5PM kickoff of this Old Chicago Explorer Series Featuring PBC! As usual we’re a little early, so let’s go find the bar and have a pre-Explorer beer.

And as luck would have it, there’s the bar right over here! Let’s go snag a stool and get settled in.

Natasha’s the pretty bartender on duty and she wastes no time in serving up a bottle of Dos Equis. I’m holding off on the PBC until it’s officially takeover time.

And it looks like the time is getting near. Here’s Krystal who’s a bartender here and next to her is Derrick from Brewers Distributing and Todd who’s one of the owners of Peoria Brewing Company. Looks like this party is officially underway!

They made a special video for this event and Krystal and some of the other Old Chicago crew got together with Peoria Brewing Company to help out with this batch of beer. Check out the video below for all the details of this brewing collaboration.

This is Adam who’s a staff member here at Old Chicago and he shot and edited the video at Peoria Brewing Company that we just featured above. Great work, Adam!

Here’s the sign announcing this Explorer Series done exclusively for Old Chicago by local artist Devon McGlone. Love his artwork!

A shot of the bar at Old Chicago from the back of the room.

There’s booths and table seating up in the front of the restaurant.

And another colorful chalk sign from artist Devon McGlone hangs over here.

Here’s a gathering of some of the staff members at Old Chicago, from left: Adam, Cam, Natasha, Jay and Krystal. Everybody who works here is super-friendly and it’s a fun place to hang out.

The taps have officially been tapped and here’s Todd, Kevin, Valerie and Pat enjoying some of the brew. Kevin and Pat are with Brewers and Valerie is the bar manager here at Old Chicago.

Check out the extensive tap line here at Old Chicago! I think this is the largest selection of taps in Peoria. Very impressive!

This is three of the four taps just installed for this Explorer Series from Peoria Brewing Company!

And here’s the fourth one, just a few taps away. These will be available until they run dry, so stop out this weekend to sample them at Old Chicago while you can!

Here’s Natasha pouring a pint of Erik the Red, that they brewed with the help of Old Chicago staff members.

It’s ready for sampling!

And here’s Amber and Danielle, two of my favorite people in the world sampling the beer and looking very pretty as they pose for the MBIP camera! Great to see both of them, as always!

And speaking of pretty, here’s Todd with his pretty wife Christy over at one of the booths that are opposite of the bar.

Here’s Pete at the booth, he and Todd and Christy all went to high school together and Pete now lives in Corpus Christi, Texas. Pete is the host of an online radio broadcasting series and you can check it out right here: The Narada Radio Company’s “Pulp-Pourri Theatre.”

Old Chicago has beer tours where you can get your own personalized beer stein and...

Your name on a gold plaque on the wall. Stop by and get the details at the bar.

I love the “Think Globally, Drink Locally,” sentiment on the silver beer stein!

We had some pizza to soak up some of the suds and it was delicious, this is the Thai Pie that’s made with mozzarella, pepper jack and cheddar cheeses and the ingredients include roasted chicken, mushrooms, red peppers and broccoli. It’s Topped with teriyaki sauce, sesame seeds and finished with green onions. It was delicious, but my favorite food of the evening was...

The Sicilian Pepperoni Rolls with dipping sauce.

The rolls have slices of pepperoni, green onions and melted cheese baked in their signature dough and these are so tasty and borderline decadent. A perfect finger food to eat while sampling the beer here at Old Chicago

And now it’s that time for the weekly thanks for people that bought us a beer by using PayPal on our Virtual Beer page.

• Leah Ratcliff sent in a nice donation from herself and her fiancee Don, who’s engagement we announced on our 4th of July post from The Riverfront Museum. This is the message that she sent along: “Marty, thanks for being our official engagement announcer! Here’s one...or two on Don and I!

• Jeff Tolliver sent in some virtual beer cash and left this nice message: “I’d just like to say I appreciate all the time and effort it goes into creating the MBIP blog. I know there’s more to it than just drinking beer and shooting a few digital photos. Not to mention there are some serious hazards involved in creating the stories for your blog. Segway Cop at Northwoods comes to mind! So thanks, and keep it up and hopefully I get to join you sometime soon! Cheers!”

Thanks for the virtual beers, Leah and Jeff! If you’d like to help keep this blog rolling along by buying us a Virtual Beer you can find out how to do that by clicking right here. Thanks to everyone at Old Chicago for a fun event and evening featuring The Peoria Brewing Company! We’ll see you all tomorrow...and hey, let’s be careful out there!

Old Chicago PIzza & Taproom
7610 N. Grand Prairie Dr.
Peoria
309-691-1885
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Peoria Brewing Company
8012 N Hale Avenue
Peoria
309-839-0945
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