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Milwaukee’s Pilot Project Brewing, which incubates beer brands, as well as brewing its own beer and also contract brewing beverages for clients, has announced that it will launch British craft NA beer brewer, Mash Gang, in the U.S.
Founded by Jordan Childs and James Loveday in London in 2020, Mash Gang kicked off as a homebrewing project during the pandemic, making low- and no-alcohol beer.
The company has since exploded and U.S. customers have been laying down upwards of $200 just to ship the beer to our shores. But that will no longer be necessary, as Pilot Project will make the beers here and they’ll be available at the Milwaukee and Chicago taprooms and at national distribution beginning Feb. 20.
After testing out a few products in recent months, Pilot Project and Mash Gang will release two beers: Stoop Lite, a light lager, and Journey Juice a mango IPA brewed with Sabro hops and Tajin.
In recent months, Chicago’s revived Seipp Beer brand began contract brewing with Pilot Project, too, in its Milwaukee brewhouse. (Seipp had been contract brewing with Metropolitan, which closed in mid-December.)
Between the small Chicago brewery and the large Milwaukee facility, Pilot Project has the capacity to brew 200,000 barrels of beer a year.
Since it bought the former Milwaukee Brewing Co. facility in late 2022, Pilot Project also hired brewer Andrew Gierczak from MobCraft to help keep up.
Sales of non-alcoholic beer have surged in the United States in recent years, growing 31 percent over the past four years and up 32 percent last year, according to NielsenIQ data.
Just last month, Milwaukee's Lakefront Brewery announced that it was expanding its line of non-alcoholic brews, and in December, Naperville, Illinois-based NA brewer, Go Brewing, moved into the Milwaukee market.
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.
