Like to many Chicago beer drinkers, a major part of my journey into beer began at the Hopleaf in the Andersonville neighborhood. By the time I moved from the east coast to the Midwest, the reputation for the Hopleaf preceded it as one of the country’s great Belgian beer bars. Walk in to the tiny front cafe area and you see old wooden tables topped with Kwak, Tripel Karmeliet, Saison Dupont. These days you see a lot more American craft, but the Belgian tradition is still alive and well. This is a place where I’ve drank more of the world’s greatest beers than anywhere else. On occasion, I’d heard Michael and Louise Roper talk about the old days, going all the way back to their beginnings in Detroit, and as I start o piece these stories together, I realized that the Hopleaf I’d come to know and love was only one of it’s many identities over the years. Its as time to sit down and set the story straight. Who is this couple that came to run one of the country’s greatest drinking experiences? How did they get a city to drink Belgian beers at such a point in history when something like Heineken was still considered a fancy import? And once they had all those people drinking exotic beers, what did they do with them? It’s an incredible tale of a reluctant barkeep who kept developing his vision even as the world around him seemed so unchanging for so long.