Whiner Beer Company to Close Back of the Yards Taproom March 29

Whiner Beer Company announced it will close its Back of the Yards taproom and brewery at The Plant, 1400 W. 46th St., with March 29 set as the last day of service and a goodbye party with live music scheduled for March 28. Block Club Chicago reported the announcement and quoted co-founder Brian Taylor saying the March 28 event will be the eve of the taproom’s final day; the shop has posted on Instagram that “Whiner Beer Co. will be closing on March 29th. The last few years have been so difficult but we gave it our best shot. We could write a”, a post that appears in the source bundle as a truncated excerpt.

Co-founders Ria Neri and Brian Taylor built Whiner into what Block Club called “a Southwest Side fixture for the past decade.” Taylor’s brewing resume includes helping launch Goose Island Beer Company’s wine barrel aging program, and both founders studied at the Siebel Institute of Technology in Chicago, the trade school Block Club noted before its announced 2026 move to Montreal.

Whiner’s beer lineup has been described in two specific ways in the reporting: the Original Report calls the brewery known for “barrel-aged, wild and mixed-fermentation beers,” while Block Club Chicago wrote that Whiner “has focused on light and funky barrel-aged beers akin to those produced in Belgium and France.” Those two source descriptions appear in the record and reflect the taproom’s emphasis on barrel-aging and mixed fermentation techniques.

The taproom’s March event calendar as reported by Block Club includes a Mexican karaoke night on March 6 and a Latin Ska Reggae party on March 7, leading into the March 28 farewell show and the March 29 closure. Block Club framed the announcement as part of a wave of local shutdowns, calling Whiner the third Chicago brewery to announce a closure within the past month.

Block Club placed Whiner’s closing alongside two other recent craft-beer moves: Alarmist Brewing in Sauganash closed its Far Northwest Side brewery and taproom at 4055 W. Peterson Ave. on Feb. 1 after 10 years in business, and Norwood Park’s Illuminated Brew Works posted that it would close on June 28 from its taproom at 6186 N. Northwest Highway, an announcement that came hours after Whiner’s Friday announcement.

Community reaction in the materials collected includes short Reddit posts calling Whiner an “r/chicago icon” and an aggregate lament that “Whiner Beer Company and Illuminated Brewing announce closures. Same day, hours apart. The craft beer scene seems to be slowly disappearing, sadly.” The sources in the bundle do not include a full public statement from the founders explaining reasons for the closure, nor do they specify the fate of barrel stocks, employees, or any plans to continue brewing under the Whiner name elsewhere.

The truncated original-report text in the source bundle reads verbatim: “their public message set a fin” and is preserved here as provided; that fragment underscores a gap in the record for the full public announcement text. Whiner’s last scheduled service at The Plant campus will be March 29, and the March 28 live-music goodbye will precede that final day.