Filbert's Root Beer Turns 100: Chicago's Old-Time Soda Maker

Filbert’s Old Time Root Beer turns 100 years old in May, and the McKinley Park soda maker is still running on a machine most of the industry discarded a century ago.

Ron Filbert, 63, bottles root beer on a manual 20-valve filler from the 1920s at 3430 S. Ashland Ave. Gears screech. Caps fly. Glass sometimes shatters. The machine keeps going, and so does Filbert.

“We’re durable,” he said.

The business traces back to Filbert’s great-grandfather George, a German immigrant who delivered bottled milk by horse and buggy. George passed it to Charlie, Charlie to Ron, and Ron to his son, also named Ron. The name on the label never changed. According to a business license Ron Filbert keeps, the company started brewing draught root beer around 1926 to meet demand during Prohibition, when thirsty Chicagoans needed something to drink.

A Pepsi warehouse sits one block away. Filbert doesn’t lose sleep over it.

“They don’t bother me,” Filbert said. “They want our business but can’t quite seem to get all of it.”

That confidence isn’t bluster. It’s backed by 300 longtime accounts, from taverns to pizza joints across the city, that have stuck with Filbert’s through decades of consolidation in the soda industry. When plastic bottles made mass production cheap and corporate soda makers swallowed up small regional brands, Filbert’s stayed put on South Ashland and kept the orders small. The company bottles only when customers actually call.

Filbert’s now makes nearly 40 flavors. But the man behind the operation is clear about the hierarchy. “There’s only one root beer,” Filbert said, pronouncing it “rutt beer” in a voice that sounds like it was bottled on the South Side.

The recipe for that root beer is the one thing Filbert won’t share. It’s the anchor of a centennial the family has spent generations earning.

“One hundred years is a big deal,” he said. “We have our own unique little taste that makes us different.”

The warehouse at 3430 S. Ashland reflects a hundred years of accumulated Chicago. Above the stacked soda boxes hangs a yellowed American flag. Two posters of the 1985 Bears look down from the wall, which feels appropriate for a place built on the same stubborn, physical, don’t-fix-what-isn’t-broken logic. Shelves hold Filbert’s collection of vintage bottles from brewers and soda makers who didn’t survive the century.

Filbert’s did.

Customers can walk into the warehouse Monday through Friday from 7 a.m. to 3 p.m. and on Saturdays from 9 a.m. to 1 p.m., dig through boxes on the floor, and buy any mix of 24 bottles for $15.

Dennis Antkowiak, 73, is part of why the operation runs. He drinks coffee and reads a newspaper at the warehouse before he starts up the soda line each day. He’s still on the job because, as he told reporters covering the centennial, “there’s nothing else to do and ain’t no other company to go to.”

That’s the kind of workforce a place like Filbert’s attracts. It doesn’t run on growth projections. It runs on people who show up.

The soda industry in the United States shifted hard toward mass production and national distribution after plastic bottles became standard. Regional brands either scaled up or disappeared. Filbert’s chose a third option: stay small, stay local, don’t change the recipe. Three hundred accounts don’t sound like much against the output of a global beverage company, but they’ve kept a South Side family in business for a century.

Ron Filbert doesn’t drink root beer the way he used to. But every production run, he’s there on the floor watching the old machine work, hands unmarked after decades near flying caps and breaking glass.

The family has kept one consistent principle since George Filbert was delivering milk by horse through Chicago neighborhoods. Do it well and right, and don’t let anyone else tell you the machine is obsolete.

It isn’t.