Birth of a brewery

Before the doors open and the beer starts to flow

by

Before it opened, during the planning stages, I sometimes thought of the brewery as a child. I wrote notes about the process all the way through, as any expectant parent might write in a baby book. Dear Brewery, Sorry I haven’t written lately, but know, I think of you often. Brittany says you are like our second child.

When I shared that sentiment with somebody in the business, he said the brewery would be more like a second spouse.

Whenever a brewery opens — and let’s face it, there are lots of them opening — the public gets only a snapshot of all it took to get there. Customers see only the final draft, the polished version. That brewery is the bikini-waxed, airbrushed cover model.

Behind the scenes is the bearded 30-something, pecking away at business plans over a keyboard at lunch while at job #1 or again before heading off to job #2 and then again, after his toddler has gone to bed.

This story about opening our brewery, Working Draft, focuses on some of the parts that usually get skipped when the official version gets told. The dashed hopes and downsized expectations. The endless business plans and licensing hoops to jump through. But ultimately, this is a story about keeping perspective on what’s really important.

Origin story

Ben Feifarek, owner of the Wine and Hop Shop, J Bowen, my homebrewing buddy with an M.B.A. and I all started by homebrewing. And — as one does — fantasizing about opening a brewery.

Then we started planning more seriously over beers and really, really spicy Thai food, walking through a business plan with our spouses.

We wanted to find a way to replicate the intimacy of the homebrewing process on a commercial scale.

We started dreaming about door-to-door delivery. (Illegal.)

We considered launching a CSA for beer: a basket of assorted bottles delivered once a month, and tough if you don’t like porter, just like, tough if you don’t like radishes.

We investigated a brew-on-premise model, essentially a place where homebrewers can brew away from home, with better equipment. It’s popular in states like Ohio and Minnesota. (It turned out to be not explicitly legal in Wisconsin. Which means illegal.)

We thought about making high-priced, large-format champagne-style bottles and guerilla-style “flash” beer releases.

We asked friends if they’d buy opaque, label-less bottles of beer, so they would approach the beer free from bias. This would encourage openness to new styles, colors, flavors, aromas, and emphasize a more mindful consumption of the beer. (They wouldn’t.)

We discovered that owning and running a brewery is not a moonlighting endeavor.

At one point, it was going to live in my garage. It would have been cool, like we were in Portland! The plan was to file as a limited liability company (LLC), get permitted, establish a brand, leverage actual beer sales into financing from a bank, and then parlay that into a larger brewery.

We were measuring, calculating, projecting numbers. We were working the avenues in the city zoning office, asking what we thought were the right questions, until we actually asked the right question, and that was the end of that.

A brewery can’t open up just anywhere (like in a garage). There are ceiling heights, floor weight loads and door widths to be considered when dropping in huge stainless tanks. There are water pipe sizes and power supply requirements. There are pallets of grain to be delivered on trucks, full kegs that’ll head out and empty ones that’ll get stacked. There should be room for growth. There are neighbors, other businesses and city officials to consider, all of whom have a voice.

In the end, what we did was more conventional than our original pie-in-the-sky ideas. We planned to open a small, seven-barrel brewery and tasting room, with a one-barrel pilot brewhouse. That turned out to be complicated enough.

Trial runs

Two years ago, my mom asked me what needed to happen with all the brewery planning before it would feel “real” to me. A name? A location? Fermentors dropped in place? The doors opening?

My mom asked me this during a visit in Colorado, where I was born and raised. I arranged meetings with breweries in Fort Collins and Denver. I wanted to hear stories, learn lessons and glean any advice I could.

Each meeting gave me patches from which I was able to stitch together a clearer vision of our brewery. I brought a New Glarus beer to each meeting, some of the really good stuff from the “cellar” choice bottles like 2012 Enigma or 2015 Oud Bruin. Somehow I thought that this would make me seem more “legit” and less of a homebrewer dreaming of starting a brewery.

Each meeting forced me to rehearse my vision for the brewery. I didn’t intend it to be, but each conversation was a practice pitch for how and why we would ever want to turn our passion into a profession.

For the first time, I was saying not I will or I plan to open a brewery but I am opening a brewery in Madison, Wisconsin. It was an immediate and profound change to the story I had been telling myself and others. This all-in attitude lent us the momentum we needed during the two years it took to get the brewery open.

Where are you at?

While I was in school for my master of fine arts degree in poetry at the University of Alabama, you couldn’t get a beer over 5.8 percent ABV at the store, which meant virtually no craft breweries distributed to the state. Because we couldn’t buy good beer, I decided to make my own. My father bought me a homebrew kit and a couple of buddies and I brewed up a clone recipe of Fat Tire from New Belgium. Once it was bottled, we threw a party, and all our friends, and even some faculty, showed up. We drank the entire batch in one night.

What struck me most about that first batch was not how good the beer was — honestly, it wasn’t all that good — but how the beer was an opportunity for friends and teachers and poets and novelists to gather.

Homebrewing, and beer more generally, is a catalyst for community. We built our whole brewery model on this idea. We wanted to open a brick and mortar place that would be a hub where connections could be made.

Key to that was making sure we would build where people would want to come. Location, location, location. Can people walk there? Bike? Bus? Drive? Park? Are there other nearby bars or breweries? Other destinations that draw people to the area? How much space is there for the taproom? What about a patio?

In the end, the site of the former RP’s Pasta on East Wilson hit all the right notes. It was on the bike path. It was walkable from the Williamson-Marquette neighborhood, and Tenney-Lapham, and all of the new high-rises on East Washington Avenue. It was adjacent to McPike Park. There was even parking. When this spot became an option, other elements started falling into place: the open brewhouse, the community tables, the mural called “How We Gather,” and dozens of other details that finally combined to become Working Draft.

Legalities

The Federal Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau (TTB) application is a doozy, and it’s the one most likely to shake — even if just for a split-second — the steely facade of the most seasoned brewer. “Have you started your TTB app?” or “Have you received TTB approval?” is almost whispered.

There are hours tallied tracking bank statements and history of funds, creating PDFs, getting SSNs, collecting signatures — and this is all before you even start the application itself.

The application asks for details on your operation, like, are you a brewery or brewpub?

That seemingly simple query felt more like an ontological question in sheep’s clothing. Do we keg beer or serve it from large vessels? Do we have food? Where do taxed goods go? How do you tax the goods before they go to where they go? Each bubble clicked on the online form opens or closes sections of the application, which gives the sense of navigating a maze of funhouse mirrors, defamiliarizing what seemed so known — Oh god, do we keg beer? How can we ever, truly, secure taxable goods?

Then there’s the state permit through the Department of Revenue (DOR). Again: Brewery? Brewpub? What’s your annual barrelage distribution ceiling? Do you also want to serve alcohol, cider or wine? How many locations do you plan?

And even before the TTB and DOR, there’s Public Health Madison and Dane County. City zoning. And even before the municipality, there’s the neighborhood. Are they okay with us being there?

And before the neighborhood, there’s the bank, investors, pitch deck, business plan, financial model, operating agreement, LLC filing, and the first human striking stone against stone to create fire, as Prometheus looks on, pleased.

Among all surprises within the various bureaucracies, I was delighted to find torchbearers waiting to guide us, and our young brewery, out of the cave. Ah, Mary at the TTB, we formed a bond over the multiple calls about average application response times and adequate separation between brewery space and public space. Agents at the DOR, city zoning staff, neighborhood board members — there were so many helpful, guiding hands bringing us and the brewery safely back from the cusp of oblivion.

Call it by its name

I wish I could say we all got together, had some beers, and ran through names, booing some, cheering others. And at the end of this upbeat montage, we would have a name. I wish.

The brewery’s name, Working Draft, came from a creative process, for sure. But it was also just a lot of work. The number of breweries opening in the U.S. now averages more than two per day. Each of these breweries needs a name. Each beer that each brewery makes needs a name. Increasingly, breweries are trademarking those names and actively defending those trademarks.

We were advised to do the same, at least with the name of the brewery itself. Plus, our attorney said, cideries, wineries and distilleries are also getting more litigious. Cross-check all potential names against names of those, too. And we might want to be aware that any other brewery’s existing beer names might cause an issue down the road. Check slogans, too.

For those who want to play along at home, here’s the rules we used.

Pick the kind of words that when you hear them, you say to yourself, “Heh. That’d make a great name for a brewery.” Then search for them as an already-existing brewery or beer name. This one’s obvious. Search for it as a winery. Search for it as a cidery. A distillery. Do a quick U.S. Trademark search. Facebook search. Twitter search. Untapped search. Beer Advocate search. RateBeer search. Check the domain name availability. Check the alternative domains like .net, .biz, .beer; hope they’re not porn sites.

Look up the etymology of the word. Consider the roots and how the denotative meanings enhance or contradict your vision for the brewery. (In addition to being a brewer, I’m also a poet.)

Does the name offer a designer lots of opportunity to create a dynamite logo?

Float the name past parents, brothers and sisters, friends, friends of friends, and other brewers. Finally, subject the name to an attorney’s risk assessment.

After this process, there are precious few words left in the English language that qualify. For us, the words that came through weren’t necessarily our top choices. But tough. We picked one and celebrated it.

Finally, the beer

Ironically, paradoxically, making beer is one of the last things that happens when you open a brewery.

Sure, we knocked out some small test batches along the way, working out kinks as best we could on the 15-gallon scale, bottling up some for tasting parties, and reminding ourselves of the backbone of our business: the beer.

As a bunch of homebrewers, we were quite capable at this point. But as we raised cash for a commercial system — for a factory, really — acquiring the necessary brewing experience also became a priority for us.

Fantastic 5-gallon batches made in the garage don’t automatically translate into success at the commercial level. With so many homebrewers making the jump to professional brewers, this lesson is a well-worn one in the industry now.

So, for some homebrewers, the route is to sharpen one’s chops at Seibel in Chicago or another brewer training course. For others, it’s to bring on a pro brewer as a consultant and learn the ropes from there. We went out and hired a young guy who knew what he was doing, gave him equity in the company and turned the brewhouse keys over to him. Luckily that guy, Clint Lohman, our head brewer, was a former homebrewer and friend, too. I actually relish saying, “No, we hired a professional,” when asked if I am one of the brewers here.

The choice of what to brew is yet another exercise in research, whimsy and gut calls. Industry stats said we’d be slinging an IPA — or IPAs — once every four beers. Combing social media showed the clear popularity of hazy and milkshake IPAs in all their opaque, juicy glory. Scotch ales and ambers held their own in the area, but not so much craft lagers (New Glarus notwithstanding).

We used these data points to push against when thinking about what we wanted to brew — and what we wanted to drink. The plan: hit the ground running with lots of hoppies, but make a German pilsner one of our core beers. None of us really like drinking amber ales, so we brewed an amber lager.

And the ubiquitous Scotch ale? Clint tossed some medium toast American white oak spirals into the fermentor to give the beer additional depth.

Sometimes a stroke of fortune propels a beer, too, like when my brother called me from San Francisco, where he was at a special release for a brut IPA and was raving about it. A what IPA? I had never heard of this subset of IPAs, which is inspired by brut champagne, has a white wine fruitiness, high carbonation and crystal clarity. In short, it’s a direct response to the hazy IPA craze, really a bit of a manufactured West Coast vs. East Coast repartee.

Leave it to Clint to build a recipe on the fly and brew our own brut IPA two days after learning that it was even a thing.

March 5, 2018

We unlocked the doors at 3 p.m. and, lo and behold, people came in. And they bought beer. Our beer.

And they kept coming and buying beer and, all of a sudden, we’re jam-packed and understaffed because there’s so many people buying so much of our beer. This wasn’t real.

Couple this with significant sleep deprivation, adrenaline, anxiety, a seven-months-pregnant wife and 4-½-year-old son at home, and you have a solid recipe for disbelief.

I kept repeating, this doesn’t feel real.

Two years ago, when my mom asked me what needed to happen with all the brewery planning before it would feel “real” to me, I didn’t know how to answer. Even after all those things actually happened, I still couldn’t answer.

But as I’ve thought about it, I’ve come to see the brewery as the poets and artists on staff, the parents with their infants strapped to their chests hanging out on a Saturday, the cyclists peeling off the bike path for a break, and yes, the steam and sweet bread and herbal smell of a beer brewing.

The joining of all those worlds. And that’s what’s made it, finally, real.