The Explorium Brewpub is acquiring Good City Brewing and the latter's four locations – added to two existing Explorium Brewpubs – will form the new Explorium Hospitality Group.
According to The Explorium co-owner Mike Doble, the details of the financial transaction are expected to be settled in a couple weeks.
Both The Explorium and Good City were founded in 2016.
The Explorium has brewpubs in Southridge Mall in Greendale and in Downtown Milwaukee/Third Ward, while Good City has its original location on Farwell Avenue on the East Side and others in the Deer District, Mequon Public Market and The Mayfair Collection in Wauwatosa.
Good City's warehouse property at Century City is not included in the deal.
Effective Jan. 1, the new hospitality group will be owned entirely by Mike and Joan Doble, who founded The Explorium with a silent partner.
“We bought out our silent partner,” says Mike Doble. “We are looking to the future and what we want to do and how we want to grow. Our silent partner wanted to focus on other endeavors, which is fine.”
The local craft scene is seeing big changes at the moment. In addition to the closings of MobCraft last Nov. 30 and Enlightened on Jan. 5, earlier this week it emerged that Milwaukee's Gathering Place Brewing has acquired Grafton-based Sahale Ale Works and that City Lights Brewing would shut on Jan. 4.
"We have always been interested in exploring different merger, purchase or sale opportunities going back to 2019 because with such explosive industry growth, it just seemed like that was the logical next step for the industry," says Good City co-founder Dan Katt. "What we usually found was there were a lot of brewery founders, a lot of investors and not many people who understood the taproom business.
"When we started talking with Mike and Joan from Explorium, things clicked immediately because we were speaking the same language and really thought about the business the same way. Since (co-founder) David (Dupee) and I had already stepped back from the day-to-day over a year ago, it was really easy to see how the organizations could roll-up together without David and me getting in the way."
For the Dobles part of looking to the future meant building brewing capacity, which led them to consider, but ultimately pass on, the options that were coming on the market.
“The reason we didn't look at MobCraft is because their brewing capacity is too much. It's much more than we need,” Doble says. “It's a 30-barrel brewhouse and some very large fermenters. And the lack of a legitimate kitchen was problematic for us.”
That’s because, Doble says, The Explorium remains committed to the brewpub model.
“I love their tap room, their space is great,” he says of MobCraft, which closed without a buyer, “but, you know, we are now going to become The Explorium Hospitality Group, focused on hospitality. We're not focused on being a brewery taproom. We're not a brewery, we're a brewpub and we want to remain a brewpub.
“Our focus is on hospitality, which is something that we've done since day one, which is have something for everybody – lots of dietary restricted options, gluten-removed beers and everything else. The x factor (versus brewery taprooms) for us is that people walk in and we look and feel like a restaurant.”
The same consideration arose when news emerged that Enlightened was closing.
“We saw that Enlightened was going out and, you know, we were like, ‘that that might be an opportunity.’ But we discounted it right away because of the whole kitchen issue and and then it's so large.
“Then I got a phone call from Dan Katt and he was like, ‘Hey Mike, are you, sniffing around the market for an expansion? Well, if you want to buy our equipment and whatever, we'd be willing to sell. We want to keep our brand so in the future we can bring back Good City beers. If you guys are sniffing around, you might want to consider us. And so that's how it all started.”
"Mike and Joan are great operators and we are excited to see what they are going to do with the business going forward," Katt says.
For now, during a transitional period, the Dobles will license the Good City brand name and continue making those beers. In fact, the changes to the four Good City locations will not be sudden or even necessarily immediate, says Mike Doble.
“In the short term, they'll just continue to operate as they have been,” he says. “Then eventually, we will reimagine a couple of the spaces. At least one of them will turn into an Explorium right away ... over the next 30 days or so.
“It doesn’t make any sense to disrupt anything at the Deer District before the Bucks season is over. We would probably reimagine how the Farwell locations operates, but for at least the first 90 days it's going to remain what it is, or least until we establish what we want to do there.”
Doble says the Mequon location will also get an Explorium-style makeover in terms of menu, etc. But the changes are expected to be more immediate at The Mayfair Collection location, which opened in spring 2021.
“The Wawautosa location will happen pretty quickly,” he says. “To us that's like the low hanging fruit. It already almost operates like an Explorium. So we're talking about doing a little bit of remodeling and rebranding and re-menuing and then hopefully in February before the patio season starts, we'll get it flipped over to an Explorium.
“It's super important to us to, to keep the employees employed, first of all,” Doble says. Joan and I went around to every location on Saturday (the day after employees were notified) and basically said to (any employee we encountered), ‘hey, my name's Mike, did you get a letter about an acquisition? We had that conversation with as many employees as we could just to get our face in front of them and get a name with our face and make sure they understood that we’re trying to protect their jobs.”
Over the long-term, The Explorium will neither continue to brew Good City’s beer recipes nor use the Good City name.
“The beers will slowly be phased out,” Doble says. “Dan and David wanted to retain ownership of the brand and I wasn't willing to pay for it. I have my own brand and I don't like to confuse our brand with anybody else's.”
Katt did not say what he and Dupee will do next, nor what plans there are – if any – for the Good City brand in the future.
“Good City was created out of friendship, a commitment to Milwaukee and our love of craft beer," Katt says. "We are incredibly proud of not only what we built, but of our role in advancing Milwaukee's craft beer scene over the past nine years.
"David and I were just a small part of this – our employees, guests, friends and family have been the driving force behind our success since the beginning.”
Born in Brooklyn, N.Y., where he lived until he was 17, Bobby received his BA-Mass Communications from UWM in 1989 and has lived in Walker's Point, Bay View, Enderis Park, South Milwaukee and on the East Side.
He has published three non-fiction books in Italy – including one about an event in Milwaukee history, which was published in the U.S. in autumn 2010. Four more books, all about Milwaukee, have been published by The History Press.
With his most recent band, The Yell Leaders, Bobby released four LPs and had a songs featured in episodes of TV's "Party of Five" and "Dawson's Creek," and films in Japan, South America and the U.S. The Yell Leaders were named the best unsigned band in their region by VH-1 as part of its Rock Across America 1998 Tour. Most recently, the band contributed tracks to a UK vinyl/CD tribute to the Redskins and collaborated on a track with Italian novelist Enrico Remmert.
He's produced three installments of the "OMCD" series of local music compilations for OnMilwaukee.com and in 2007 produced a CD of Italian music and poetry.
In 2005, he was awarded the City of Asti's (Italy) Journalism Prize for his work focusing on that area. He has also won awards from the Milwaukee Press Club.
He has be heard on 88Nine Radio Milwaukee talking about his "Urban Spelunking" series of stories, in that station's most popular podcast.
