BRIDGEPORT — Along the walls of the brick warehouse home of Filbert's Root Beer, you'll find one of the South Side's neatest secrets: Ron Filbert's childhood collection of more than 2,000 beer cans and old-school glass beer bottles.
Filbert started his collection when he was a kid and stopped in 1985.
"It was the thing to do," Filbert said. "You collected baseball cards and beer cans."
At Filbert's you'll find cans and brands from every era. The regulars are all here: Miller, Coors, Hamm's, and Pabst Blue Ribbon.
Ron Filbert hasn't changed his family's recipes or process for making root beer.
Filbert has even more cans tucked away in a storage area he calls the "Filbert's archives."
And there are some you've likely never seen, like the "Old Vienna Style" beer Filbert's brewed in Chicago before Prohibition wiped out the booze trade and forced the family to shift its business to root beer.
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