While for the first time since 2005 more breweries closed than opened in the United States, according to The New York Times, the news hasn’t been bad for everyone.
In the Milwaukee area in the waning days of the year, MobCraft, Enlightened and City Lights closed, but St. Francis Brewery announced it would reopen and two existing breweries bought out two others.
One of the latter, Gathering Place Brewing – which purchased Grafton’s Sahale Ale Works in December – kicked off the new year with a number of projects.
One of those is brewing a new beer at its Riverwest brewhouse for Sahale – a hazy IPA that should hit taps this week.
Another is the return of keg curling to the patio at the East Tosa location, 7208 W. North Ave.
The sport, which mixes a cold-weather classic with brewery equipment, debuted at Gathering Place last winter and proved immediately popular both for league play and for open sign-ups.
"Keg curling works a lot like bocce,” explains Gathering Place owner Joe Yeado. “Players take turns sliding kegs towards the middle of a target or house with each team sliding four kegs. The team with the keg closest to the center or tee wins the end and gets an additional point for each keg closer to the tee than the other team's kegs.
"The team with the most points after 10 ends is the winner. The main difference with actual curling is that players don't use brooms to sweep the ice. With keg curling, people stay off the ice and slide the kegs from the side of the rink."
The first league session kicked off (slid off?) last week and quickly filled up.
“We do leagues Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, and then Friday, Saturday and Sunday you can rent a lane for an hour,” says Yeado. “So it's kind of like bowling. You've got it for an hour, play as much as you want and then move on.”
A second league session is slated for late February.
This year, Yeado expects to be able to keep the kegs sliding longer than last winter, because the ice is now in a tent, which in addition to keeping players a bit warmer, will keep the sun off the ice.
“We should go through March as long as it gets back to freezing overnight,” he says. “It can be in the 40 during the day, but if it freezes at night then it’s fine. It’s four inches thick so it will take a while to melt.
“Even with it uncovered and exposed to the sun last year, it was still ice through the end of March,” Yeado says. “So we're excited about that.”
In more year-round news, Yeado has repurposed what must have been one of the area’s tiniest brewhouses when the space was occupied by Stock House (though the original Inventors Brewpub had more of a brew closet than a brewhouse!).
The space is now a kitchen that will be run by Sam Sandrin’s Midwest Sad, which has been operating out of a small space Downtown at 770 N. Jefferson St. That location will continue.
But Sandrin will also offer a menu of soups, salads and sandwiches, along with some bakery items, whenever the Gathering Place taproom is open (Tuesday-Friday, 4-10 p.m,; Saturday, noon-10 and Sunday, noon-8).
Initially, Gathering Place had planned to use the two-barrel system it purchased from Stock House to brew in Wauwatosa, but that idea faded and the system was sold, leaving the kitchen space available.
“In the spring, I started reaching out to food trucks that we have relationships with, just saying we are looking for somebody to do their own thing within our space, you keep all the food revenue, we keep all the beer revenue,” Yeado recalls. “We had some people interested, a couple false starts over the summer and then we finally connected with Sam from Midwest Sad in October.”
Sandrin set up shop at Gathering Place’s Riverwest taproom for its annual Limb Shaker Day event and, says Yeado, “the food was great and she and I were just chatting and she was talking about trying to expand, and I was saying, ‘this might be crazy, but I have this space in Tosa that's pretty much ready to go.’
“She came out the next week and looked at it and we started putting it together from there. We did a soft launch in between Christmas and New Year’s, and now we're set to go live.”
On the menu at the moment are cheddar broccoli soup, vegan chili, potato salad, Buffalo chicken dip, a spicy garden sandwich, a veggie Philly, ham and cheese, and chicken salad sandwiches.
On the bakery side are a chippy cookie, an Oreo brownie, puppy chow and vegan funfetti.
“We're really excited to work with another entrepreneur and somebody who wants to hustle, wants to get after it, and wants to make a good product paired with good beer,” says Yeado. “It helps our customers. We see this lull around 6:30 because people want to go eat.
“She will serve the taproom here but will also do pickup and third party delivery (Door Dash, etc.).”
Yeado says that the deal is a cooperative one and Sandrin will not pay rent.
“We share some costs like utilities, and now with food operations, we need to increase the frequency of our dumpster getting picked up,” he explains. “But having someone who will manage and staff it on their own (means) it’s something I don’t have to think about, but I know food is always there for our customers and it's good quality food.
“I think that is more valuable than asking for rent. I want them to succeed because I want them to stay and I want our customers to become her customers in this virtuous circle.”
Having someone else to focus on the food allows time for Yeado and his head brewer Matt Cisz to keep their attention on the brewing side, which since Black Friday has included a pair of non-alcoholic THC sodas under the Blossom label.
At the moment there is a strawberry lemonade with 5mg of THC and a cherry limeade with 10mg. Both are available in 12-ounce cans that are sold individually and in four-packs.
“We are looking to start distribution this month,” Yeado says. “Matt and I have been talking about this for maybe about a year, but it was always a project we'd have at a later date. In conversations with our distributor over the summer, they were asking for it.
“So that led us to be a little more serious about it and then decide to do the research both from a flavor standpoint and what is in the market, and then try to develop a brand and flavors that we see as fitting in the market.”
The Blossom products are made with real fruit and are carbonated.
“We're doing it in a way that stays true to who we are and who Gathering Place is as a brand,” says Yeado. “Where we saw an opening was creating a fuller flavored beverage that has restraint sugar, but uses real fruit.
“We see that fruit flavors do well, but I think this is not trying to be a White Claw where there’s no calories, a little taste. My assumption was that people would be willing to trade calories for flavor within reason.”
That seems to be proving true as the two batches made so far are nearly sold out and now Cisz and Yeado are working on a third flavor that could be released in February. It’s likely, too, Yeado adds, that the current flavors will also change over time.
The 5mg cans sell for $6 each or $18 for a four-pack and the 10 mg ones are $7 and $22.
At a time when craft beer sales are stagnant, the income from products like this can help a small brewery ride the current.
“We have all the equipment from the (tank space) – and it goes through the tanks faster than beer does – we have the canning lines, we have the ability to package it. And so we have the things that you would need to get it out and get it out quickly.”
Despite seeing a creep up in THC potency in these types of beverages, Yeado expects Gathering Place will go in the other direction.
“If anything, I think we'll probably do a 2mg or a 2.5,” he says. “Fewer people are doing those, and there's demand for that from the on-premise (customer). Bars and restaurants don't necessarily want to carry a 10mg. They don't necessarily want people mixing those products with beer inside of their four walls.
“We offer them as to-go only for the same reasons. My staff is trained on how to assess someone's (alcohol intake) and monitor that and stop service when it's appropriate, but we're not trained on the effects of mixing these things with beer. So we're offering them, but we're offering them for people to take home.”
Blossom THC sodas are made using a THC emulsion that Yeado says helps ensure that the dosage is evenly distributed within the beverage, which is sometimes not the case in other THC drinks.
“It blends very well with liquid,” he says. “When these first came on the market in different places they were adding THC in a way that separated within the can. What you found is that people would say, 'I had this beverage and it said it was this strength and I had no effect, and I had another one out of the same four pack, and I was knocked on my ass.'
“This truly blends and mixes in. There's no requirement that says we need third party testing, but we wanted to do the best practices for the industry, and we had it tested, and both of them were within three decimal points of what we said on the can. So it is truly the dosage it claims to be.”
Yeado says some other brands can vary in potency by as much as 20 percent from the amount stated on the label.
“I think that as the market develops, these best practices will help certain brands come to the top, and we hope that Blossom is one of those. We've taken the extra steps and taken the time and purchased a product that isn't the cheapest, but it's the best product for what we're doing to where you don't have that separation in the can with some cans being way more potent than the others.”
That costs more, as does using real fruit juice – with cherry juice being especially pricey – but, again, Yeado believes customers are willing to pay for quality.
“They are more expensive for us to produce, but if you look at the spectrum of who is using these products, it's not necessarily the 21-, 22-year-olds,” he says. “It's a lot of people who are in their 30s, 40s, 50s and so we wanted to have an adult beverage to speak to an adult consumer.
"These are at a higher price point than beer, but a slightly older consumer, in theory, has more disposable income to be able to afford them. To get that flavor that we want, it's worth it, and I think so far our customers have reacted to that and responded well.
“The feedback has been really wonderful.”
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.
