Big Grove Brewery has a contract to purchase Durty Nellie's in downtown Palatine, and on August 25 the Iowa brewery spent about two hours walking the Palatine Planning and Zoning Commission through what it wants to do with the space.
The short version: they are not just changing the sign.
The plan for 180 N. Smith Street includes a 9,000-square-foot patio, a gutted and rebuilt first floor, private event space upstairs, six to eight beers brewed exclusively in Palatine, and a working brewhouse sitting where the Durty Nellie's stage currently is. The commission unanimously recommended approval, and it heads to the Palatine Village Council on September 8.
That stage decision is the part that got me in my feels.
Before Aleluminati, I spent a chunk of the mid-2010s playing drums in a pop-punk band called InsideOut, bouncing around the Chicago and suburban scene, including shows at Durty Nellie's. So somewhere around the spot where I used to set up a kit, Big Grove now wants to make beer.
Life takes a very reasonable path.
Anyway. There's a lot buried in that meeting, so let's dig through all of it.
Who Is Big Grove?!
Photo: Big Grove Brewery
Fair question if you've never been west on I-80.
Big Grove started in 2013 in Solon, Iowa, a town of about 3,000 people sitting between Iowa City and Cedar Rapids. It has since grown to six locations across Iowa, Nebraska and Kansas, and it's probably best known nationally for Easy Eddy, its flagship hazy IPA, which just started showing up on Chicagoland shelves this month.
Palatine would be number seven, and the first in Illinois.
CEO Matthew Swift and COO Mike Wehr presented the plan themselves. The renderings released with the village agenda come from Chicago architecture firm Pappageorge Haymes Partners, and they show a building that has been worked over pretty thoroughly.
Down to the Studs
Anyone familiar with the inside of Nellie's isn't going to recognize much of it when this is finished.
Photo: Century 21 Properties
Right now the first floor is chopped into separate rooms by the bathrooms, the bar and the stairs. Big Grove wants all of it opened up. They've already completed a 3D scan of the building and looked at its structural integrity, and the working plan calls for relocating the staircase, centering the bar, and adding overhead garage doors that connect the restaurant directly to the patio.
The mezzanine stays.
Photo: Century 21 Properties
The stage does not. Wehr explained that part of the floor plan as clear as day:
"The current stage becomes the brewery."
Upstairs becomes private event space, aimed mostly at corporate gatherings and weddings, with the existing second-floor bathrooms staying and getting renovated along with the rest of it.
Photo: Century 21 Properties
Photo: Century 21 Properties
The kitchen has to grow, too. Big Grove builds its locations around what it calls a "golden triangle" of scratch food, beer and the physical space itself, and the current Nellie's kitchen simply isn't sized for the number of people they expect to feed. Early concepts put the room somewhere around 250 indoor seats with another 192 outside, though the brewery was clear those layouts are preliminary and they'd like to push the patio closer to 250 if the final design allows it.
And then there are the bathrooms, which are one of the biggest problems Big Grove has encountered.
The building doesn't leave many good options on the first floor, so one version of the plan shoves additional bathrooms down into the basement. Big Grove would rather not do that and have asked its architects to continue working toward a main-floor solution.
This is the glamorous side of brewery expansion nobody puts on social media.
Come to brew a hazy IPA. Stay for a month of trying to figure out where the toilets go.
9,000 Square Feet of Patio
Big Grove likes patios, that’s no secret.
Wehr told the commission that being able to build a ground-level patio was such a critical piece of this project that, without it, they probably wouldn't have been interested in the property at all.
The current plan has it at roughly 9,000 square feet, with covered and uncovered seating, landscaping, yard games, and a small enclosed area modeled on the kid-friendly outdoor space at their recently opened Prairie Village location outside Kansas City. Big Grove typically covers about 80% of its outdoor space, and the Palatine canopy would be an actual roof rather than one of those pergolas that looks beautiful right up until it rains through every hole in it.
Heaters, fans, and fire pits are all in the conversation as well. The goal is to squeeze as many months out of the patio as Illinois will allow.
Asked to describe the Big Grove crowd, Wehr refused to narrow it down to one specific sect of individuals. Retired women playing Mahjong. Travel baseball teams. First dates. Families. People bringing newborns into the brewery.
They've achieved the rare brewery demographic of whoever is around, and Commissioner Stephen Fedota gave that idea a name during the meeting, calling the proposal a strong example of a "third space". Which is the gathering spot that isn't your home and isn't your work, but a space where you can go to get away and relax.
Big Grove is planning to close at 10 p.m. on weekdays and 11 p.m. on weekends, which is the exact opposite of how Durty Nellies hours functioned.
Palatine Flagships
Photo: Big Grove Brewery
The plan calls for roughly 20 draft lines. Wehr broke it down as about 12 Big Grove flagships brewed in Iowa, plus another one or two rotating seasonals arriving through distribution. The remaining six to eight taps would be Palatine originals brewed on site.
The proposed brewhouse lands somewhere in the five to 10 barrel range, with an estimated 200 to 300 barrels of annual production, and the vast majority of that beer would never leave the taproom.
This concept is no stranger to Big Grove. Wehr pointed to Des Moines, where they brewed a beer called Sherman Hill Champagne for the surrounding neighborhood, which is their riff on Miller High Life, and the neighborhood adopted it so thoroughly that people get irritated when it isn’t on the taplist. That's exactly what they're hoping to find in Palatine as well.
Swift said they haven't landed on names for the Palatine beers yet, but he wants those names to actually mean something locally. The brewing operation would likely come online about 30 days after the restaurant opens, and they plan to line up a local farmer to take the spent grain, same as they do in their other markets.
So… Why not Chicago?
One commissioner asked the obvious question. Why Palatine?
Big Grove is the official craft beer of the Iowa Hawkeyes, and Wehr pointed out that roughly 42% of the University of Iowa's student body comes from the Chicago area, with heavy representation in the Northwest suburbs. The brewery also launched Chicagoland distribution just over a week before this meeting, and a taproom is a far better way to make people interested in your brand rather than hoping somebody notices a pack of Easy Eddy on a shelf at Garfield's.
Photo: Big Grove Brewery
Then there's the Metra station sitting directly next to the property, which they think can pull people in from Arlington Heights, Crystal Lake and every other stop along the UP-NW.
Swift then decided to open up about why they didn’t actually lock in the Chicago Location.
He'd been hunting around Chicago for about two years and at one point got close on a West Loop spot, but it never came to fruition.
"I didn't feel attached to it. I didn't feel any connection. I wanted to do something that mattered. I didn't think that we would matter much down there. I thought we'd just be another one."
Eventually he had lunch in Iowa City with friend and Palatine resident Jeremy Brade, admitted he couldn't crack Chicago, and started scrolling listings on his phone. Nellie's came up. Brade told him it was "the coolest place in town."
And that was pretty much the beginning of Big Grove - Palatine.
Last Call for Live Music
Nellie's as a music venue is done, and Big Grove isn't sugar coating that. When commission chair Jan Wood asked directly about live music, Wehr said other locations have done it on a small scale and gave a few examples: a singer-songwriter, a piano player, a small acoustic setup on the patio for a couple of hours.
Swift was a bit more blunt about music at Big Grove, stating that "We weren't very good at music."
That came up during public comment, too. A local audio production owner asked whether Big Grove would keep working with the musicians, DJs and engineers who have been tied to Nellie's for years. Roy Von Brack of the Jazz Consortium Big Band talked about playing monthly shows there for more than 15 years and bringing high school bands in to open for them.
The answer was essentially maybe, but not in the way Nellie’s was doing it. Swift talked about local artists, vinyl markets, jazz, high school organizations and smaller concerts, and said the events director at each location would be the one building those partnerships around whatever Palatine actually responds to.
Ma Nugent Stays
When longtime customer Deb Gabriel asked whether anything from Nellie’s would be preserved, the brewery pointed to what they've done at other locations.
Their Des Moines location sits inside the former Crescent Chevrolet building, where they cut the old dealership sign in half, restored it, and hung it inside a private event space called the Crescent Room. Prairie Village occupies part of a former Macy's, and they recreated the old Macy's wallpaper near the bathrooms and hung historic photos of the shopping center throughout the building. They plan to do something similar at the Palatine location.
"It would be dumb of us just to forget that Durty Nellie's ever existed," Wehr said.
The most literal piece of Nellie’s history isn't going anywhere either.
Photo: Eric Kinkle
Sitting outside the front door is a four-ton boulder honoring Marion "Ma" Nugent, Ted Nugent's mother, a Palatine resident for 28 years who wrote a column for the Illinois Entertainer answering reader questions about rock and roll and everything adjacent to it. Palatine musician Eric Kinkel spent more than a year putting the tribute together, and Nugent himself came out in August 2007 to dedicate it in front of a few hundred people.
Wehr said the boulder stays. Which has to be the easiest call on the entire preservation list. You do not move a 7,800-pound rock. ever.
The Timeline
Nothing is final yet.
The commission's unanimous recommendation came with conditions covering the final parking configuration, sound, lighting and agreements tied to the property. Next stop is the Palatine Village Council on September 8.
If everything keeps moving, the sale could close as early as October, though Big Grove said November is also on the table. Construction is currently estimated at about 34 weeks, which puts the target at summer 2027, with "target" doing some heavy lifting there.
"We'd have to get cooking to hit summer," Swift said.
There's a lot of design, engineering, permitting and construction between here and there, to say nothing of the bathroom situation.
But the bones are interesting. A brew house where the stage used to be. Six to eight beers made only in Palatine. A giant covered patio hanging off the Metra line. A four-ton rock out front that isn't going anywhere. Palatine has quite a bit to look forward to.
And sometime in 2027, if all goes according to plan, I’ll get to walk back through the same doors I used to struggle getting my drums through, this time carrying a beer back to my seat and taking in the beautiful space Big Grove Brewing has made of it.
That's weird, and I like weird.
