Kevin Hickey, a Michelin-starred chef, first teamed with Rouben at Goose Island to make a Flanders-style Belgian ale using white beets from Nichols Farm in Marengo for Allium at the Four Seasons. Since then he has teamed with local breweries Begyle, Pollyanna and Une Annee to make beers including a lemon verbena hefeweizen for his Bridgeport restaurant, the Duck Inn. Before that, he produced beers with Begyle for Bottlefork in River North, where he is chef/partner, incorporating carrots, sugar beets and parsnips, tying the whole farm-to-table-to-keg process together.

The day Hickey and the brewers pulled out the spent grains and chopped up vegetables, a local pig farmer stopped by. Hickey gave the farmer the used ingredients to feed the pigs. Those suckling pigs later found their way back into Bottlefork's kitchen, where Hickey served the meat in barley risotto, atop a flatbread with smoked cipollini onions and other preparations, and paired them with the beer that started the process.

The idea behind culinary brewing is to think of more interesting ways to pair beer with food and to control the entire process. “A chef has the opportunity to have beer that's custom tailored to your food, and that's a huge tool to have in your arsenal,” says Jacob Sembrano, the head brewer at Rick Bayless' Fulton Market brewpub, Cruz Blanca, which aims to open this spring on Randolph Street.

Sembrano says they'll emphasize beer while thinking about how it'll pair with food at the attached restaurant, dubbed Lena Brava. They'll produce a Pilsner, a German lager, a doppelbock and an imperial stout, all incorporating Mexican ingredients with locally sourced items. They'll launch with three kinds of biere de garde (French-style farmhouse ales) that will have a longer maturation period and a malt character.

Two things you won't find at Cruz Blanca: IPAs and pale ales, because they're harder to match with food. “There's only a certain amount that goes well with (big IPAs),” says Michael Carroll, head brewer and partner at Ravenswood's Band of Bohemia, which opened in late 2015.

Carroll spent 20 years working in kitchens, including Thomas Keller's Bouchon in Yountville, Calif., and Grant Achatz's Alinea, where he was the restaurant's first baker. At this culinary brew house, ingredient-driven beers such as “orange chicory rye” and “maitake basmati nutty” will be created to match with food by chefs Matt DuBois and Kevin McMullen.

“There's a thought process about what flavors and textures go together and why,” Carroll says. “I'm not just making beer to make a beer. There's more to that. I'm not just chopping apples and throwing them in. You grill them, have some char on them, it's the wood you use. It's about understanding flavor.”

At West Town's Forbidden Root, which opens Feb. 18, the team includes not just a head brewer, an executive chef and a director of operations, but also a “rootmaster”—Robert Finkel, who also founded Chicago private investment firm Prism Capital—and a senior alchemist, beer industry veteran Randy Mosher, who has written a few books on beer and is an instructor at the Siebel Institute, the country's oldest brewing school. The men describe the 150-seat brewpub as an innovation center.

“The world's senses have been awakened by the availability of specialty foods and different flavors,” Finkel says. Hops are “an important botanical, but there are thousands of others. Having a wider artist's palette allows us to use more tools in a more refined way. It gives us more pixels.”

Forbidden Root's namesake 5.5 percent ABV oak-aged root beer comprises 20 natural extracts such as nutmeg, ginger, molasses, tarragon and licorice root; its Sublime Ginger wheat ale features Chinese ginger, fresh key lime and honeybush; and Wildflower pale ale is a crisp, dry beer made with marigold and elderflower.

“The food adds a dimension and lets people get more experimental than they would in their normal lives,” Mosher says. “They get out of their (beer) habits.”

This growing beer trend crosses many culinary genres and inspires collaborations between brewers and chefs.

Bo Fowler, who owns English gastropub Owen & Engine and barbecue spot Fat Willy's Rib Shack, will open Bixi in Logan Square in late summer. The Asian-inspired brewpub will feature craft beers made with lapsang souchong (a smoked black tea), Sichuan peppercorns, lemongrass, chilies and orange peel to pair with Fowler's assertive dishes, obtaining many of the ingredients, especially teas, from Rare Tea Cellar's Rodrick Markus.

At Like Minds Brewing, which opened on the Near West Side in November, James Beard-winning Milwaukee chef Justin Aprahamian recently produced an imperial stout using Intelligentsia coffee and a hearth-charred grapefruit saison, which he collaborated on with the kitchen team from the Promontory in Hyde Park.

“I've always said brewing is an extension of cooking, but we have bigger pots, different uniforms and different hours,” Moody Tongue's Rouben says. “You're still manipulating an ingredient with time and temperatures to satisfy the palate, but you get to intoxicate people—and what chef doesn't want to intoxicate their guests?”