Not entirely accurate, I know, but when I think of 1840 Brewing in Bay View, I always picture founder Kyle Vetter in the narrow spaces between the stacks of barrels, working with a small team on unique and interesting beers served at a homey, small-scale taproom up front.
So, imagine my surprise upon seeing the brewery’s second taproom – located on the site of the old Lithia Brewery in West Bend – which opened in April at 401 N. Main St.
The taproom is on the ground floor of a mixed-use development with 177 apartments called The District on Main Street and Washington Avenue.
There’s a huge covered patio on one side and riverwalk access on the other. Inside, the space is bright, thanks to floor-to-ceiling windows, with a variety of seating options, a long bar and a rack of barrels – empty, for decoration – plus there’s a to-go cooler located in a little nook and just outside it, a small merch area.
Oh, and rather surprising, perhaps for an 1840 taproom: TVs!
“You’ve been to Bay View, you know how there are no TVs,” says Vetter. “I never wanted a bar that has TVs on just because we have TVs. So what we did is we took the artist who does all the photography at our Milwaukee spot and here and uploaded a bunch and in a rotation that runs every 30 minutes, these two TVs change, as art.”
“But then during Badgers games, Packers games, the Olympics, playoffs, Bucks, whatever, we can still have TV on and show the games. It's like a little best of both worlds.”
Both worlds is a key phrase because the heart of Bay View – where 1840 opened in 2017 – and the heart of downtown West Bend are not the same places.
Up here there’s a side-pull tap and the Czech-style pilsner is always flowing. Plus, Vetter has been brewing a special beer for this taproom – the 4.2 percent ABV West Bend Lite.
“The other thing we're doing is trying to always keep house beers (available) here, where Milwaukee's always rotating,” he says. “Something we're trying to do in both locations and through distribution is keep the Cashmere Sweater (double IPA) available all year long.”
Having said that, West Bend Lite – a kolsch – is about to be replaced by West Bend Dark – a schwartzbier – in a couple weeks.
“There'll be a little bit of a gap where we don't have West Bend Lite on tap,” Vetter adds. “West Bend Dark is a specialty one-off that we're doing for the season that we'll have for a little while.”
Unlike Bay View, West Bend also has a couple house-made seltzer cocktails available.
“We basically made a high-alcohol hard seltzer and then put it into kegs and cut it with yummy fruit juices,” he says. “We bought farm stand cider and dumped it in and then we cut it down to just under 8 percent and sell it over ice. So we've got these gluten-free options for people who would like to have a cocktail.”
There are some other unique features coming to the West Bend taproom, too, including the long-awaited opening of the kitchen, which will serve Detroit-style pizzas, salads, appetizers, a kids’ menu and the like.
“We’ll keep it pretty simple,” says Vetter, who hopes to have the food service up and running by the end of the year. “It's not a sit-down restaurant model. It's going to be a beer hall model where you order at the window, from your bartender or order from a QR code at your table.
“To me, the social contract that exists between a customer and a restaurant is you show up, you eat, you pay, you leave. That's not the vibe we're going for. I want people to come for coffee and stay for lunch.”
To that end, Vetter has installed a gleaming chrome Airstream trailer into a large open area of the taproom and is working with a third party to run a coffee operation from it.
“Once the coffee shop is open, we're going to be open 7 a.m. to close seven days a week,” he says. “”The first time that we have a customer who comes for a meal ends up saying, ‘oh, I'm going to stay for work,’ and then has their friends meet them for another meal, that's going to be when we've fully realized the model.”
This, says Vetter, was the plan all along for a place this size. There’s 1,100 square feet of covered patio and roughly 4,000 square feet of public-facing space inside the taproom, compared to the Bay View space, which is 1,200 square feet overall.
“We were like, ‘yeah, alright, if we're going to take on a project this big, we need to have something morning, noon and night.’
“If we have coffee in the morning, now we can be open for third shifters to come in for an a.m. beer, all the way through to people having drinks and dinner in the evening.”
Vetter says that while the idea was on his radar, he wasn’t his plan didn’t necessarily include opening a second taproom.
“West Bend City administrators came to us and said, ‘we would love to meet with you’,” Vetter recalls, noting that 1840 had been doing beer gardens already in Washington County, which gave the brewery a presence in the area.
“We'd sell beer at Jeff Spirits on Main or Dooley’s and that was about it. When this project was already well on the way to breaking ground, they came and said, ‘we have this amazing development happening on the river, right where the old West Bend Lithia Brewery property was. They're taking down the old brewery building, building this, the city has expressed that they want to see us develop a or a brew pub and your brewery is one of three whose names have been batted around in the community,’”
Vetter was interested and wanted to learn more. So he met with the developer – Milwaukee-based HKS Holdings.
“We really appreciated the effort that they put into vetting this project,” he says. “They (said) ‘we wanted to have a development in the downtown urban core of a suburban area.’ And they felt that West Bend and the development and the repaving of Main Street and the investment in the Riverwalk really met with their goals and the investment they put in. We were like, ‘all right, we can get behind that.’
“And, knowing how much space we had, we really wanted to create a space that was going to be a community gathering space – morning, noon and night.”
And how has West Bend reacted?
“We opened at the end of April, so we've been through our first summer now,” says Vetter. “The first two months were just bonkers. Then it sort of settled into a rhythm and now we've got a good group of regulars.”
There’s a game room in the back corner overlooking the riverwalk with metal tip darts, Ms. Pac-Man and more. There’s copious parking on the street and in a number of adjacent lots, including one connected by an underpass that allows pedestrians to avoid having to cross the street, and there’s lots of programming underway or in the works, including Tuesday night trivia.
“We're about to start doing a third Thursday mountain bike meetup where mountain bikers in the community can meet here and then go to the trails that they groom in the winter,” says Vetter. “We'll be able to do it all year long and then come next summer, every Thursday will be a bike meeting, with the third Thursday being for mountain bikers and the first, second and fourth will be just regular people coming meet up.
“We have a route that we've planned out that utilizes the amazing river trails that they have here and the different parks like Riverside Park and others. It’ll be like meet here, throw some cans or bottles in your backpack, let's go for a ride. We'll stop at a couple parks to take breaks, throw the Frisbee and hang out, drink a beer and then end up back here for a little social hour.”
Although having a second location – and a large one that’s nearly an hour from Bay View and requires more staffing, especially will longer hours on the horizon – means more work for Vetter, who splits his time between venues, he says the new taproom has given him an opportunity to create something special.
“As a professional brewer, for many years now, I have been to all over the country to a ton of breweries and brew pubs, worked with all kinds of friends and seen all kinds of different things,” he says. And our goal was to try to put our thumbprint on the best of what we'd seen out at these places from around the country and bring a world-class taproom experience to Washington County.
“Nothing like this exists out here. And that they came to us and we're like, oh, let's look into this. Especially because it was this warm introduction. ‘We want you, our community wants you’ ... that was pretty cool.”
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.
