CHAMPAIGN – It's alive.

Starting today at 3 p.m., you can belly up to a bar in downtown Champaign and order a freshly brewed beer made on-site, marking the first time in over a decade that beer has been brewed commercially in Champaign-Urbana.

And because it's unpasteurized, unfiltered beer, it's alive with yeast and B-12 vitamins, said the brewer.

"It's the freshest beer you're going to get in this town," said Bill Morgan, brewmaster at the Blind Pig Brewery, 120 N. Neil St., C.

The bar opened earlier this spring, but Tuesday is the first time the Blind Pig is featuring its own beer. The brewery started serving the beer Monday night with a pre-release party.

The first Blind Pig brews to be featured include Kolsch beer, which is a German beer typically made in Cologne (also called a golden ale); hefeweizen, a wheat beer; India Pale Ale; and a hard cider made from Champaign's own Curtis Orchard cider.

"I'm thrilled. This has been a long time coming," said brewpub owner Chris Knight, who also operates the Blind Pig Co. at 120 N. Walnut St., a pub also in downtown Champaign.

"What I'm doing is putting a brewery into a bar. Usually it's done the other way around," Knight said.

The brewery is located in what was previously the Barfly.

"It's really exciting. I've worked in small breweries and large breweries. In a large brewery, the brewmaster is somewhat isolated from the end consumer. ... In a little pub like this, I can wander among customers and get immediate feedback. That's incredibly rewarding," Morgan said.

While a student at the University of Illinois in the 1980s, Morgan brewed beer at Joe's Brewery in Champaign. After he left in the late 1980s, he would go on to graduate from the Siebel Institute of Technology and World Brewing Academy in Chicago, create and brew beers at the Diamondback Brewery in Cleveland (earning him medals at the Great American Beer Festival) and work at the Ginga Kogen brewery in Japan.

Knight, who started planning the brewery in 2003, said he believes it is the first time since Prohibition that full- or all-grain beer has been made commercially in the area.

Full-grain beer (think of it as beer from scratch) is brewed beginning with whole grains, rather than a malt extract syrup, Morgan said. He said Joe's Brewery, which made its beer with malt extract, stopped brewing its own beer in the mid-1990s.

Blind Pig beers are brewed in small batches.

A batch is about 65 gallons or four kegs of beer, Knight said.

"This is one of the highest purity products. We use four ingredients: barley, yeast, water and hops," he said. No preservatives, no additives, he added.

"Most of the beer is water, and we have a good water supply in Champaign County. It's very pure and has no taste to it," Knight said.

The Blind Pig buys its grains from all over, such as imported English malted barley and English hops for English beers and domestic malts for American brews, Morgan said.

The Blind Pig also features cask-conditioned beer. Generally, cask-conditioned beer carries on the fermentation in the cask, lending a bigger body and more flavor to the beer, Knight said.

Beers to be featured in the future include an English bitter, oatmeal stout, chocolate stout and Weizenbock.

In addition to the four Blind Pig brews, the bar features 10 commercial beers on tap.

The Blind Pig Brewery is open from 3 p.m. to 2 a.m. daily.