USA, WI: Milwaukee enjoying brewery boom

Last week, MobCraft Brewery opened at 505 S. 5th St., making Milwaukee its permanent home after brewing in Madison for the last four years, TAP Milwaukee reported on July 15.

Last month, lines of people crowded an east side sidewalk to be the first to visit Good City Brewing, 2108 N. Farwell Ave.

Ten more breweries are opening throughout the metro area by the end of the year.

So why the sudden beer boom?

"It's just Milwaukee's time," said John Holl, editor of All About Beer magazine and a frequent visitor to Wisconsin. "There's a demand for better beer these days, and local beer."

What made Milwaukee famous a century ago is back — but with a modern twist. Where Schlitz, Pabst, Blatz and Miller once jockeyed for national domination, smart breweries today take advantage of their local nature.

The Brewers Association estimated that retail sales of craft beer reached $22.3 billion last year, with the number of craft breweries jumping from 3,676 in 2014 to 4,225 in 2015.

"People are going to farmers markets more," Holl said. "They're going back to butchers. They want to know where their food comes from. People want to know where their beer came from."

Making beer is a transparent process at MobCraft, where oversize windows offer a view to the brew. Vintage mismatched chairs form a conversation pit in one corner. The long bar — made from floorboards on which audiences once danced at Turner Hall Ballroom — re-imagines the brewery version of an Edward Hopper painting.

At least four more breweries will open in town before summer calls it quits.

Black Husky Brewing should be open in early August, said owner/brewer Tim Eichinger. Like Minds from Sanford owner and chef Justin Aprahamian plans to open the same month. So do City Lights and Third Space Brewing.

And there's another round coming after that.

Pabst plans to open a small brewery on the site that bears its name this fall. Broken Bat has a license for a spot in the Historic Third Ward. R'Noggin is ready to brew beer in Kenosha.

Westallion Brewing in West Allis is shooting for November.

Explorium has a date to open in Greenfield by the end of November.

Bass Bay Brewhouse in Muskego hopes to brew its own beer by Christmas.

The new breweries join 18 breweries already in the Milwaukee area, from macrobrewer MillerCoors to craft brewpubs like Company Brewing. That's a lot of beer, even for a place known as Brew City.

And others are expanding. Enlightened Brewing is already showing off its new taproom after moving downstairs to larger space in Bay View.

Biloba Brewing in Brookfield is in the long process of moving across the street, swapping its 500-foot taproom for one three times that size and a 10-barrel brewing system.

Most of the new breweries are planning taprooms with games, patios and shared tables that hopefully spark conversation; some have decided against televisions for the same reason.

MobCraft has plans for cribbage and a shuffleboard table, once a staple of old-time corner bars.

"Part of it is a little nostalgia," said Brook Meier, senior designer at Milwaukee architectural firm Vetter Denk. Taprooms, he said, are designed with a nod to the public houses of yesteryear.

"A lot of these breweries make their money off the taproom," Meier said. "So the tricky thing is to maximize how many people you can get in there without being too big."

Taproom profits help pay brewing costs and perpetuate growth. Build a loyal audience and, soon, the bar down the street is pouring your beer because customers want it.

The Brewers Association says at least two craft breweries open each day in the United States.

While that's great for consumers, there's only so much retail shelf space and tap space at local bars. The taproom might be the customer's first introduction to the beer.

All along, the plan for Good City was "community," said Dave Dupee, who owns the east side brewery with Dan Katt and Andy Jones. Customers are expected to "hang out over great food, great beer" to encourage conversation and friendships.

Third Space Brewing based its name on a concept popularized by social commentator Ray Oldenberg, who charted three spaces for everyday life — home and the workplace were numbers one and two.

"Third spaces are the anchors to the community life that serve as gathering places, fostering broader and more creative interaction," co-owner Kevin Wright said.

In the Menomonee Valley, City Lights is renovating the former Milwaukee Gas Light Co. building, designed at the beginning of the 20th century by architect Alexander Eschweiler.

Jimmy Gohsman, brewmaster and a partner in City Lights, said plans call for a top-floor bar area in the tower and barrel aging.

In the meantime, the brewery will concentrate on a two-level taproom and an outdoor beer garden.

In Minneapolis, focusing on the neighborhood fueled growth for Indeed Brewery and helped draw new breweries as neighbors.

Tom Whisenand, Indeed's owner and president of the Minnesota Craft Brewers Guild, admitted he had been nervous about competition after nine breweries followed suit in the same northeast neighborhood.

The good news: "Craft beer drinkers love variety," he said. "Every time a taproom opened up, we only seemed to get busier."

Whisenand said online ads for rental units would describe vacancies by their location to breweries. Food trucks and tour groups grew around it in the neighborhood.

Fourteen Milwaukee craft brewery owners took a page from Minneapolis' live-and-let-pour playbook to form the Milwaukee Craft Brewery League last spring.

From a tourism perspective, the boom in breweries helps sell Milwaukee's brewing heritage and has the potential to be "a moneymaker for the region," said Kristin Settle, director of communications for Visit Milwaukee.

"We can send them to different neighborhoods and they can still have that brewery experience," Settle said.

It's happening already. Fun Beer Tours offers a walking tour of Milwaukee's S. 5th St. breweries — MobCraft, Brenner Brewing and Urban Harvest.

The new breweries coming to Milwaukee this year include:

-Black Husky, 909 E. Locust St., is next in line to open, followed by Like Minds Brewing, 823 E. Hamilton St.; City Lights Brewing, 2300 W. Mount Vernon St., and Third Space, 1505 W. St. Paul Ave.

-Enlightened Brewing moves this month from a second-floor location at 2018 S. 1st St. to the first floor with room for a taproom.

-Biloba Brewing also moves from 18725 W. Pleasant St., Brookfield, to a bigger spot across the street at 2970 N. Brookfield Road.

-R'Noggin Brewing, 6521 120th Ave., Kenosha, will open this month, according to its Facebook page.

-Pabst Brewing plans to open a small brewery at 901 W. Juneau Ave., on the site of the historic former brewery. The original opening was planned for summer but was pushed to fall.

-Milwaukee Brewing will open a new brewing facility at 1131 N. 8th St. late this year.

-Erik and Kim Dorfner are working to open Westallion Brewing Co. at 1825 S. 72nd St. in West Allis by November.

-The owners of Broken Bat Brewery recently signed a lease to start brewing at 231 E. Buffalo St. and hope to open in fall.

-Engineering consultant Mike Doble hopes to open The Explorium at Southridge Mall in late 2016.

21 July, 2016