Local Startup Works to Grow Home Brewing in MKE
What do you get when you mix boiling water, grain, malt, a living organism, time, and a healthy dose of instruction? BrewU.
BrewU is a local startup whose main goal is to help eliminate limitations on home brewers by offering a facility that will provide expertise, equipment, and space to home brewers of all experience levels. We were one of 15 teams that formed out of Startup Weekend – Milwaukee 2013 and received “Honorable Mention” from the panel of judges on Sunday night of the competition.
Since Startup Weekend, we have continued to work on evolving and validating our business. More specifically, we have worked to organize our first official Brewing Workshop. The workshop took place on January 25th at Braise in the 5th Ward and was a total success. We quickly sold out our class with 16 people who were interested in learning the home brewing process. More importantly, we were able to gain a ton of feedback from the participants and will be able to use it, along with our own thoughts to improve the workshops going forward. The second part of our “first class” will be the Bottling Workshop that will take place on February 8th, 2014. The participants that signed up will learn the bottling aspect of home brewing by actually bottling the batch they brewed in January.
Our overall goal for these beginner workshops are to walk participants through the entire home brewing process and ensure that they receive the full experience by actively participating in the class. Our hope is that our newly empowered brewers will want to continue home brewing when they leave the class whether it’s with us or on their own!
We are currently finishing up planning for the Bottling Workshop on February 8th and then will plan out our next workshops for March/April. For the long term, we will be networking, hustling, connecting, and researching to execute our vision which includes continuing to iterate and refine our model, identifying possible investors, securing our own space, and brewing more beer!
Feel free to get ahold of us if you, or a group are interested in a workshop or private team-building event.
We look forward to brewing with you!
BrewU Team
Chris Welker, Drew Stauffacher, Leo Osma, Steven Wroblewski, Tyler Knudtson
The team can be reached at brewumke@gmail.com , on Twitter at @brewumke, and you can sign up to hear about our next event on our website.