Joe Stanton
Brandon Dorman (left) and Jason Hajdik of BarleyPop Tap and Shop, which has become known for its extensive range of wild and sour ales on tap.
It’s not every day that something new comes along that’s so great, so essential that you can’t remember your world without it. I mean, sliced bread was invented in 1928 and before that was, what? Newborn Athena springing fully-formed from the forehead of Zeus?
The Greek goddess of both wisdom and war, pre-sliced bread in a bag and BarleyPop Tap and Shop. Yep, that sounds about right.
If it feels like I’m overstating the excellence of BarleyPop, 2045 Atwood Ave., consider this: BarleyPop opened after the most recent presidential election, an event that feels like approximately three lifetimes ago. In just over a year, it has become a Required Drinking Location in the Madison beer scene.
In 2015, Texas-to-Wisconsin transplant Jason Hajdik took a trip to Seattle. Hajdik was staying close to a bar called Chuck’s Hop Shop that paired on-site drinking with to-go beer shopping. He was immediately smitten. “We went there every night,” Hajdik says.
“Why does Madison not have anything like this?” he recalls thinking. “I came back, and I started doing research.”
In 2015, bars that filled growlers weren’t completely novel, but most were brewpubs that actually made the beer. Then Trendwatch publications like Business Insider were writing stories with the “What is a growler, anyway?” perspective, and listing a half-dozen examples of bars filling them in hip New York neighborhoods.
Though Wisconsin’s statutory language is still a little fuzzy on the specifics of growler fills, Milwaukee and Madison made changes to their municipal codes to allow non-brewers to fill and sell growlers, in 2012 and 2014 respectively. These codes were once seen as protective of the brewing industry (Illinois still doesn’t allow retail growler fills). But the legislative breeze was blowing in Hajdik’s favor.
“It stuck with me,” Hajdik says of his experience in Seattle. He also drew inspiration from a shop in San Diego called Bottlecraft. “Over the course of that [subsequent] year, I started talking with my buddy Brandon Dorman about it, and he was like ‘Why wouldn’t we do this?’”
After a year spent searching for a location, they found the Atwood Avenue storefront and began buildout in September 2016. The design is spartan but punctuated with color, and the hummingbird logo has a cool art deco-meets-Charley Harper vibe.
Hajdik moved from Austin in 2011 with his wife, who has Minnesota roots and works in academia. He describes himself as “the weird guy” who drank Shiner Bock in college back in the 1990s, the one whose friends would scour the town not for the cheapest Lone Star case but for German imports. And while this was after the Class of 1988 brewery boom — Goose Island, Deschutes, Great Lakes, North Coast and Rogue all began that year — you’ll notice none of those were founded in Texas.
“Options,” Hajdik says, “were limited.”
He homebrewed a little, “enough to learn how everything worked and how much work it is” — and ran a side-gig selling video games online. But Madison was where it all came together, including his friendship with Dorman.
“He got into craft beer when I did,” Hajdik says, “though he jumped into it deeper.” The way Hajdik tells it, he barely has time to drink much more than a can of something pale and hoppy from, say, The Brewing Projekt, after a day at the office. All of his beer energy goes into BarleyPop.
“I’m the exception here. Everyone else has stupid cellars full of shit [at home].” It’s clear by the head shake and a smile that he means “stupid shit” in only the most complimentary way. A walk through the cooler room at BarleyPop shows that even if his home cellar isn’t three rows deep and five shelves high, he still loves to acquire good beer. He just does it by the keg.
Michael Conway
The Atwood Avenue design: spartan and colorful.
BarleyPop has presented an impressive array of quality liquid offerings from day one. Funk Factory Geuzeria even created a cucumber pear lambic exclusively for the shop’s grand opening in February 2017.
More recently, Funk Factory released a very limited collaborative beer with Mikerphone Brewing in 750 mL bottles, called Maple BerryPop, to celebrate the shop’s first birthday. Only 80 bottles were made available for sale, and they all sold. Mikerphone and Funk Factory floated a few ideas past the BarleyPop team before they chose the final flavor profile. As with the day-to-day bottle selection, Hajdik, Dorman and company have a keen eye for what the beer consumer wants.
Hajdik estimates that maybe 20 percent of BarleyPop’s customers come in to buy packaged beer and then leave. Even more buy a six-pack or a crowler, then stay for a tap pour. He’s planning to offer more rare bottles for in-house consumption as an adjunct to the tap program. Expect to see some of those Maple BerryPop bottles appear on the list in the future.
BarleyPop has become known for its wild and sour tap program. “We do really well with Une Année,” Hajdik says, referring to the Illinois brewery that began distribution in Wisconsin in 2014. “People definitely recognize them at this point.” Monthly sour beer nights at BarleyPop typically include at least one of Une Année’s Le Seul series of fruited wild ales, and barrel-aged beer nights almost always feature a Central Waters oaky gem.
“Even with 40 taps, it’s hard [to curate],” he says. “People say, ‘Oh yeah it’s great, you have all this room,’ [but] it’s still a lot of thought process. Our cooler room right now is full-full.” The reason for the traffic jam behind the scenes: those themed tap nights, featuring sours or barrel-aged stouts or pale ales. You have to have a lot of beers to pour a lot of beers, Hajdik notes.
While Hajdik is open to the idea of expanding into an adjacent storefront, he’s far too busy to do so right now. BarleyPop is slated to open a second location downtown at 121 W. Main St., formerly The Frequency.
BarleyPop Live, a craft beer bar, bottle shop and concert venue, is Hajdik and Dorman’s next big thing. “I think it’s gonna be awesome,” Hajdik says. “It’s just taking a little while.” That space is in an old building that needs many improvements. While he’d love to see it open this year, “it may creep into January.”
“I don’t know why we always end up hitting the middle of winter” for openings, he says. “It’s fine. People sit inside and they drink big stouts.”
The tap list at Live will skew slightly more towards the lighter craft styles, lagers like Dorothy’s New World Lager from Toppling Goliath, or the delightful Uinta Lime Pilsner that I fell in love with this summer at BarleyPop.
Crowler service will continue at BarleyPop Live, as it has proven immensely popular at the Atwood shop, and, as Hajdik notes, downtown has few options for fresh to-go beer.
“We [offer] something a little different. We’re not the Northwoods-themed bar,” Hajdik says. “We knew what brewers we liked, we targeted [those] breweries when we came in.” He credits his video game background for his skill with the mechanics of sales and allocation from distributors, getting to the good beer as quickly as possible. But even he didn’t anticipate being the sliced bread of Madison bars.
“This is already happening way faster than I thought it would.”
