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• The Blind Pig Brewery’s painted windows evoke a past era

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Blind Pig Co., The »
Address: 120 N. Walnut St. Champaign, IL 61820
Phone: (217) 398-1532
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If you walk down Neil Street in downtown Champaign, you’ll pass a window with a blue pig shooting blue sparks from its center that resemble sun rays, centered in space, surrounded by white stars and a milky cosmos, that invites curiosity and blocks prying eyes from the construction within. Large blue and stenciled letters read: “Coming soon, The Blind Pig Brewery.” This sun-pig icon might be familiar to people who frequent The Blind Pig pub, owned by Chris Knight, on 120 N. Walnut St., Champaign.

“The icon,” said Becca Vann, an employee of the Blind Pig, “was done by an artist at the University of Illinois School of Art and Design. Chris Knight put a competition out, and that’s the one that won. It alludes to the Prohibition era, when people would advertise a spectral, a blind lion, and be able to sell alcohol legally.”

First set to open in February and now in May or early June, the Blind Pig is still under construction. There are covered wooden chairs, but the atmosphere of the place is shaping up. An echo of the Blind Pig, with its bright lights, round wooden tables and high bar, the Brewery is representational of a pub from the 1920s, resembling the laid-back attitude of an old western or the sort of pub one would see in England or Ireland.

The same artist who painted the window art for the Blind Pig Brewery also does the window art for The Esquire during the Christmas season.