Back of the Yards Lost a Brewery This Spring. Its Replacement Already Lived Two Blocks Away.
August 13, 2026
August 13, 2026
Ten years ago, Victor Santoyo was brewing beer in his kitchen after watching a YouTube tutorial, mostly because he liked drinking it and wanted to see if he could make his own. He grew up in Back of the Yards and never wanted to leave. When he and his wife Rocio, along with their longtime friend Rene Lemus, finally looked for a real space to open a brewery, they scouted Berwyn and Cicero first, figuring the neighborhood they loved probably couldn't support what they wanted to build.
They were wrong about that, and the story of how they ended up staying says more about this neighborhood right now than any single opening or closing does on its own.
Jesse Iñiguez has a similar origin story. He grew up shopping at the old Goldblatt's department store at 47th and Ashland, the kind of place that had a basement full of stereos and toys and multiple floors of furniture and clothing. He opened Back of the Yards Coffee in 2017, closed the original location at 2059 W. 47th St. in 2023, and spent two years waiting for a bigger opportunity. In March 2025, that opportunity arrived in the form of the very Goldblatt's building he used to walk through as a kid, now reborn as part of the United Yards development. Reopening there gave him about 2,500 square feet, designed as a space where people could sit together or work, plus a partnership with 47th St. Bistro for a menu of breakfast tacos and cochinita pibil empanadas, Block Club Chicago reported.
He wasn't moving into the building alone. By the time the city held an official ribbon cutting in May 2025, the Goldblatt's building had filled with a specific kind of tenant: locally owned, and mostly run by people who already lived in the neighborhood.
Here's what's actually operating inside that building right now:
That's a coffee shop, a clothing store, a barbershop, a bakery, and a health clinic, all inside one renovated department store, all locally owned, and all opened or reopened within a few months of each other in 2025.
A few blocks south at The Plant, a former meatpacking facility turned food business incubator at 1400 W. 46th St., a version of the same pattern just played out with beer instead of coffee.
Whiner Beer Company had operated out of The Plant for about a decade, known for barrel-aged saisons and Belgian-style mixed-fermentation beers. Whiner's owner reached out in late 2024 with the idea of merging operations, and by August 2025, SomosMonos Cerveceria had officially opened alongside Whiner in a shared taproom called The Jungle, Block Club Chicago reported.
Then, on February 20, 2026, Whiner announced it was closing for good. Co-founder Brian Taylor told Block Club the brewery hadn't seen a year of growth since the pandemic, despite pulling in 20 to 30 percent annual increases before it. He also pointed to something more local: ICE raids in late summer and early fall of 2025 hit foot traffic in Back of the Yards hard enough to hurt an already strained business. Whiner's final day of service was March 29, 2026.
Whiner wasn't alone. Alarmist Brewing in Sauganash had already closed on February 1, 2026, and Illuminated Brew Works in Norwood Park announced its own closure that same day, shutting its doors on June 28, 2026. Three Chicago breweries gone within a few months of each other. Nationally, the picture was worse than a rough patch. Brewery closures hit a record 385 in 2023 according to the Brewers Association, and by mid-December 2025, closures for that year alone had reached 434 against only 268 new openings, per the trade publication Brewbound. Craft beer volume was down roughly 4 percent in 2024 and an estimated 5 percent in 2025.
That's the backdrop Whiner was closing into. It's also the backdrop against which SomosMonos decided to expand.
Instead of the taproom going dark when Whiner shut down, the Santoyos and Lemus took over the lease and all the brewing equipment, according to WBEZ's reporting on the closure. As of this writing, roughly four months after Whiner's last pour, SomosMonos is the one running the space full time, not renting a few taps inside someone else's operation.
"We really want to make sure that the community feels like it's theirs, too," Rocio Santoyo told Block Club Chicago after the taproom first opened.
Neither of these stories is unusual on its own. Coffee shops reopen. Breweries close and other breweries take over their leases. What's worth noticing is that in Back of the Yards, both things happened through the same mechanism: someone who grew up here, who could have built somewhere easier, chose to stay and is now the one absorbing the space when something else falters.
Iñiguez could have opened his second location anywhere in the city. He chose the building he shopped in as a kid. Santoyo looked at Berwyn and Cicero before circling back to the neighborhood he never wanted to leave. When national headwinds and local disruption combined to knock out an outside-founded brewery that had been here a decade, the business absorbing that space wasn't a chain moving in to fill a vacancy. It was neighbors who already had roots two blocks away.
That's a different story than the one told about most neighborhoods losing a beloved brewery. Usually the space just sits empty, or a landlord fills it with whatever tenant will pay rent fastest. Here, the replacement was already local, already invested, and already scaling toward exactly this outcome.
None of this is new behavior for Back of the Yards. The Back of the Yards Neighborhood Council, co-founded here in 1939, still organizes the neighborhood's biggest annual event: Fiesta Back of the Yards, a multi-day street festival on Ashland Avenue between 45th and 47th Streets featuring local vendors, food, and the council's long-running Ballet Folklórico program, according to BYNC's own event listing. The organization that's been throwing this party for the better part of a century is the same one that helped shape the Quality-of-Life Plan guiding a lot of the current redevelopment.
Put that next to the coffee shop and the brewery, and the picture that forms is one of continuity, not reinvention. The people organizing the festival, running the coffee shop, and now running the taproom aren't outside investors discovering an undervalued corner of the Southwest Side. They're the same families who never left, taking over more of the neighborhood's daily life as the opportunities open up.
If you live here, that probably matches what you already sense walking down 47th Street. What the last twelve months confirm is that it isn't a coincidence. It's the mechanism keeping this corridor open even when the broader trends, whether that's a national brewing slump or a rough season for local foot traffic, are working against it.
Grab a coffee at the Goldblatt's building, stop into La Selva for something with the neighborhood's history stitched into it, and get down to The Plant to see what SomosMonos is pouring these days. The corner didn't go dark. It just changed hands to someone who already lived here.
If you're curious what any of this means for property values, rental demand, or what a two-flat near this corridor is actually worth, that's a conversation worth having directly. This Is IT works with buyers, sellers, and investors across Back of the Yards and the rest of Chicago's Southwest Side. Contact us when you're ready to talk specifics.
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