More than a decade ago, Lakes Community High School teachers Dave Auston and Jim Valsa bonded drinking beers together on a Friday after school. The two teachers found out they both had an interest and some experience in craft brewing.
That blossomed into a friendship, which then turned into a desire to brew together and the eventual creation of 9th Hour Brewing, a brewing company based in Lake Villa.
The company has beers in 24 bars and restaurants throughout Lake County, and it can brew approximately 14 kegs per week.
Some of their beers are education-themed, honoring the two brewers’ day jobs, including the 1st Hour Haze, a hazy IPA, and the School House Rocktoberfest, an Oktoberfest beer that’s brewed with only German ingredients.
9th Hour Brewing produces more than 14 varieties of beer, but it all started with a home-brew in Auston’s kitchen. The first time that the two teachers brewed together was when Auston received a home-brew kit as a gift from his wife.
Valsa, a math teacher at the high school, who has been brewing his own beers for nearly two decades, joined Auston, a science teacher, at his home and the two made approximately five gallons of beer together off of the initial kit.
When they wanted to move on from stovetop brewing, Valsa suggested they use some of the equipment at Richardson Adventure Farm in Spring Grove, where he lives with his family.
“I had this equipment that the farm bought, and it was just sitting there so I asked if he’d want to brew a bigger batch,” Valsa said.
The two teachers began brewing with the farm’s one-barrel brewing system, which resulted in 31 gallons of beer. They continued brewing out on the farm, “for personal consumption, and to have friends over,” according to Valsa.
The duo first took their beers seriously when they started entering home-brew competitions, and ended up winning some of them.
“It wasn’t just us and our friends that thought it was good,” Auston said.
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From there, they continued to enter contests, as well as local craft beer festivals throughout Lake and Cook counties.
Last year, Auston and Valsa partnered up with Harbor Brewing, a brewing company that already had one location in Winthrop Harbor and was looking to open up a second in Lake Villa’s downtown area. The two companies share brewing space in the Lake Villa location, and beers by both companies are served on tap.
The partnership between 9th Hour Brewing and Harbor Brewing was formed due to an idea from the village of Lake Villa.
“It made sense for 9th Hour to partner with Harbor to get their business off the ground,” said Jamie Ross, the treasurer of the Lake Villa, Lindenhurst, Round Lake Area Chamber of Commerce. “I think it’s a steppingstone to getting their own location.”
The opening of the brewery is also helping to revitalize Lake Villa’s downtown district, which centers around the businesses on Cedar Avenue. Prior to the brewery opening, the street was much more empty on a day-to-day basis. Now, it can be tricky to find a parking spot, and the brewery regularly has a large crowd inside.
“[The brewery] has helped trigger the revamping of downtown,” Auston said. “It is a cute downtown, but there is not much to do recreationally there. It’s been great to help other local businesses such as Galati’s, Lake Villa Restaurant and Timothy O’Tooles. We hope that more businesses will be lured to the downtown area to make it more of a destination.”
Harbor Brewing’s Lake Villa location has turned into a community hub, with many of Auston and Valsa’s former students, as well as Lakes Community High School staff and faculty, visiting the taproom to sample some of the teachers’ brews.
“I think it’s great that Harbor came in and took over a large, vacant building that’s been vacant for a long time,” Ross said. “They brought new life to it, and I think it’s great for the village of Lake Villa’s downtown area to have a destination brewery.”
The duo’s name, 9th Hour Brewing, started as an inside joke between the two teachers, and as a sort of code for when they wanted to discuss getting drinks after the school day’s eight hours ended.
“9th Hour became our code word for going out for beers on Friday after school,” Auston said. “We would say, ‘Are you going to ninth hour?’ If a student asked what ninth hour was, we said we had a meeting.”
9th Hour Brewing hopes to continue expanding to more locations in the future, and potentially open up their own space in the community, according to Valsa. While they hope to continue expanding, they said that their main focus will always be on the local community.
“There’s so many bars and restaurants in Lake County that we haven’t touched, so we want to focus on staying local,” Auston said.