About Pollyanna
Crafted Optimism
OUR STORY
Pollyanna Brewing and Distilling provides our customers with an intimate experience that goes beyond what's in their glass. By sharing our knowledge and advancing the culture of craft beer and craft spirits, our brand focuses on creating a relationship between our customers and the brewery, brewer, distiller, and local community. As an integral part of the communities we do business in, we strive to work in cooperation with local organizations to benefit the community as a whole.
Since opening our Lemont location in September of 2014, we have always focussed on keeping our beer and spirits clean and consistent with a strong focus on balance. We feel our five flagship offerings best represent Pollyanna and take pride in their year-round availability (we package everything in cans!). We're constantly experimenting with local fruits and spices, seasonal lagers, barrel-aging, wild yeast, and bacteria. In our intimate and truly unique taprooms, we offer tasting flights, draft pours, and to-go 16oz cans, 64oz growlers, 32oz howlers, or 32oz crowlers. Our Lemont location offers a scenic look at our production brewery, our Roselle location offers a wide array of wood barrels, Italian Foudres, and a smaller brewhouse for unique one-off offerings, and our St Charles location offers our largest taproom and a beautiful view of our distilling operations as well as the Fox River. Keep an eye out for a constant rotation of special firkins, cocktails, and taproom only offerings at each location.
Crafted Optimism
Our Lemont brewhouse consists of a steam-heated, over-sized, 15-barrel mash/lauter tun and boil kettle/whirlpool. We brew into one of eleven (11) 30-barrel fermenters, which gives us the capacity to produce nearly 6,000 barrels (about 186,000 gallons / 1,500,000 pints) of beer per year. Our dual-stage heat exchanger and massive glycol chiller give us the ability to brew clean, balanced lagers at any time during the year. Our creative, German-trained brewmaster brews some of the most consistent, well-maintained flagship beers around and introduces experimental and one-off offerings to DIE for.
OUR TEAM
This is us. This is us at our most awkward. Enjoy awkward us.
BRIAN PAWOLA
Head Brewer / Distiller / Co-Founder
RYAN WEIDNER
President / CEO / Co-Founder
ED MALNAR
Retired! / Co-Founder
Nick Miller
St Charles & Pollyanna Social General Manager
Kara Cascio
Lemont & Roselle General Manager
Vince Hansen
Lead Brewer
Matt Levy
Operations Manager
Randy Douglas
Lead Keyholder Lemont
Head Coffee Roaster
Abby Ray
Social Media
Marc vloedman
Brewing
IVAN CHAPA
Brewing, Packaging, Logistics
Matt Marrera
Lead Keyholder Roselle
Patricia Maka
Social Media - Pollyanna Social