Robin Shepard
Cans and tulip glasses of various Brewer's Kitchen beers on the bar at the tap room.
The Milwaukee tap toom has a bigger selection of beer than is currently being distributed in Madison.
Among the most interesting finds on Madison store shelves recently have been the Brewer’s Kitchen beers from Pilot Project Brewing. It’s been fun to watch what turns up in the small-batch, limited releases of this young and growing brewery that has facilities in Milwaukee and Chicago.
Pilot Project beers have been sporadically appearing here over the past eight months, and more recently have been easier to find as the brewery gets a better handle on its production schedule and distribution outside of its Milwaukee taproom.
Pilot Project was created as a brewery incubator that can assist start-up breweries in testing their ideas, without having to build their own brewhouse.
The company is led by Dan Abel and partners Jordan Radke and Glenn Allen. Both Abel and Radke have ties to Madison, having earned degrees at the UW. Head brewer Glenn Allen has a strong industry track record with prior brewing gigs for Chicago’s Revolution Brewing and Goose Island Beer Company.
Pilot Project was launched in 2019 in Chicago’s Logan Park neighborhood with a 10-barrel brewhouse. When the Milwaukee Brewing Company closed its location in downtown Milwaukee, Pilot Project jumped at the chance to move to a bigger brewhouse that could make enough beer for larger scale distribution. In 2022, Pilot Project purchased the facility at 1128 N. 9th St. in the heart of the historic Pabst Brewing Company complex. Abel, Radke and Allen restarted brewing there about a year ago, ranging from four-barrel to 240-barrel batches. The Chicago brewhouse is now used mostly for recipe development.
Pilot Project has helped launch more than 20 brands, including its in-house beers called Brewer’s Kitchen. Among its best known contract clients is the Indian-led Azadi Brewing, whose owner is from Mumbai, and Funkytown Brewery.
Funkytown’s brews have been turning up in Madison both in cans and in a handful of taphouses. A few of my picks include Black is Beautiful Baltic porter ($16/four-pack), made with dark chocolate malts and blackberries. Another is the American pale ale called Hip-Hops and R&Brew ($13/four-pack) was the beer that launched Funkytown and is considered the company’s current flagship brew. From what I’ve seen around town the easiest to find is Cuffin’ Season ($11/four-pack), an Irish red ale with a solid caramel and toffee-roasted maltiness.
The Brewer’s Kitchen beers are the most enticing, I find. Abel says his goal is to give his brewers a playground to try out new ideas and approaches. “Brewer’s Kitchen is a realization of their talents,” Abel says. “I love how the team comes up with new releases and fun stuff all the time.”
Beers from Brewer’s Kitchen that have made an appearance in Madison shelves include an Italian pilsner called Il Serpente, which is light-bodied with herbal and floral hoppiness. Two Falls, a hazy IPA, has strong tropical notes of pineapple and mango. Green Mountains Only is a big double IPA at 8% ABV and lots of citrus from a triad of hops — Citra, Simcoe and Amarillo. Brewer’s Kitchen beers don’t shy away from adjuncts, either; the IPA Mañana de Mallorca is made with Spanish tea, and A Little Idiom, a kettle sour, is made with Japanese lemon.
My top pick of Brewer’s Kitchen lineup so far is the hazy IPA Mountains Calling Home. That beer is brewed with New Zealand Nectaron hops that lend hints of nectarines and peaches. Four-packs of 16-ounce cans of Brewer’s Kitchen range from $12-$14.
Pilot Project’s Milwaukee taproom features a greater selection of Brewer’s Kitchen beers. During a spring visit my favorites included Reefton IIPA, with soft melon hoppiness, and the Czech dark lager Stone Patterns, which has nutty malt and piney hops flavors. And don’t miss crisp, sharp and dry Obelix, a pale ale made with French malts and hops.
Pilot Project’s method of following or sometimes defying trends “by getting new pilot beers out quickly to test the market and then scaling them up,” as Abel describes it, is a great way to unleash brewhouse creativity. It is a similar formula to that of Octopi Brewing in Waunakee and its Untitled Art series.
I have preferred the beers I had on tap during visits to the brewery’s Milwaukee taproom to those on Madison store shelves, but as Pilot Project ramps up the process of getting its best limited releases into cans, more of those beers will make it to Madison shelves. In the meantime, watch this brewery closely.
