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

Filbert’s Old Time Root Beer hits its centennial this May, and the McKinley Park operation is still running on equipment that most of the soda industry in the United States walked away from before World War II ended.

Ron Filbert, 63, fills bottles at 3430 S. Ashland Ave. on a manual 20-valve machine built in the 1920s. Gears screech. Caps fly. Glass sometimes shatters. The machine doesn’t stop, and neither does Ron.

“We’re durable,” he said.

The company’s roots go back to a German immigrant named George, Filbert’s great-grandfather, who hauled bottled milk through Chicago streets by horse and buggy. George handed it to Charlie. Charlie handed it to Ron. Ron handed it to his son, who carries the same name. The label never changed. A business license Ron Filbert keeps at the warehouse shows the company began brewing draught root beer around 1926 to answer the demand that Prohibition created, when Chicagoans wanted something to drink that didn’t require a password to obtain.

A Pepsi warehouse sits one block away on South Ashland. Filbert’s isn’t losing sleep.

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

That’s not bravado talking. It’s 300 accounts talking, taverns and pizza joints scattered across Chicago that never left Filbert’s even as corporate consolidation chewed through the regional soda market and spit out logos nobody remembered. When plastic bottles dropped the cost of mass production to almost nothing and the big brands started absorbing small ones, Filbert’s held its ground on South Ashland and kept doing it the slow way. They bottle only when customers actually call in an order.

The company makes close to 40 flavors now. But Filbert’s hierarchy on the subject is firm. “There’s only one root beer,” Filbert said, using a pronunciation that comes out closer to “rutt beer,” the kind of inflection you don’t acquire anywhere north of the Eisenhower.

The recipe stays locked. It’s the one thing Filbert won’t discuss, the anchor of 100 years the family earned the hard way.

“One hundred years is a big deal,” he told reporters covering the centennial. “We have our own unique little taste that makes us different.”

Inside the warehouse at 3430 S. Ashland, a century of Chicago has accumulated in layers. A yellowed American flag hangs above stacked soda boxes. Two posters of the 1985 Bears watch from the wall, which feels right for a place built on the same stubborn, don’t-fix-what-isn’t-broken thinking that defined that team. Shelves hold Filbert’s collection of vintage bottles from brewers and soda makers who didn’t make it through the decades. Filbert’s did.

Walk-in customers can come Monday through Friday, 7 a.m. to 3 p.m., or on Saturdays from 9 a.m. to 1 p.m. They can sort through boxes on the warehouse floor and buy any combination of 24 bottles for $15.

Dennis Antkowiak, 73, is central to why the line keeps running at all. He drinks his coffee and reads the paper at the warehouse before starting up the soda machine each day, a man who has watched 13 presidents come and go and is still showing up for work. He’s still there in 2026, he told reporters covering the centennial, because he can’t imagine doing anything else.

Competitors have tried to cut in. Chain distributors have circled. None of it made much of a dent. Filbert’s has 3 full-time employees and a customer base that keeps calling back, year after year, because the product doesn’t change and the address doesn’t change and the man behind the counter is named Ron Filbert, same as it’s been since before most of those competitors existed.

“There’s only one root beer,” Filbert said.

He’s been saying it for years. At 100, the evidence is starting to stack up in his favor.