Photo by Alana Swaringen
Pilot Project Brewing
Pilot Project Brewing
Located in the historic Brewery District, Pilot Project Brewing (1128 N. Ninth St.) is a spacious venue open on two sides in the warm months with a patio upfront. It’s a bar with good food and it’s something more. Pilot Project is an incubator for start-up breweries, “helping to support talented brewers in an industry with exceptionally high barriers,” says Pilot Project’s Madelaine Goldstein.
Pilot Project Brewery will be the site for Tap into Milwaukee, a Shepherd Express event with a curated lineup of beers, crisp ciders and hard seltzers from Brewer’s Kitchen, Devious, Standard Goods, Ope! Brewing, Water Street Brewery, Third Space Brewing, Supermoon Beer, Sprecher Brewing, Dead Bird Brewing, Coop Bev Works, Cache Cider, Bavarian Bierhaus, Arizona Beverages/Hornell Brewing and more. Enjoy bites from local food vendors, live music from Tinker Boys, games and raffles. Tap into Milwaukee is scheduled from noon- 4 p.m., Sunday March 9.
Since its 2019 inception in Chicago, Pilot Project has launched 20 beverage brands, including women-founded Luna Bay Hard Kombucha and ROVM Hard Kombucha; Black-owned Funkytown Brewery; travel-inspired Brewer’s Kitchen; Indian-led Azadi Brewing; Devious Cocktails and others. Pilot also helped the non-alcoholic Mash Gang expand to the U.S. from the UK last year and did the same with Mexico City-based brewery Cerveceria Paracaidista.
Milwaukee’s Pilot Project opened in November 2022 and “serves to launch and scale start-up breweries, offering assistance with fine-tuning recipes, production scaling, business development, marketing, distribution and more. We then feature the brands in our restaurants and have the network to scale them nationally,” Goldstein says.
As a tasting room, Pilot Project serves beer, hard kombucha and ready-to-drink cocktails on tap from its brewery partners as well as wine and cocktails. Bill Wilkinson, the Milwaukee venue’s executive chef, oversees a lunch and dinner menu that includes shareables such as cheese curds and ahi tuna poke nachos, salads and a variety of handhelds such as a smash burger, steak sandwich, fried chicken sando and a vegan falafel wrap. In January, Pilot Project Milwaukee launched a Sunday brunch serving unique items such as candied bacon benedict, créme brûlée French toast plus a bloody mary bar and bottomless mimosas served with a juice flight.
Pilot Project’s owners chose the Brewery District, whose castle-like buildings once housed Pabst Brewery, to connect with our city’s heritage of beer. But history aside, they found an ideal spot with “massive square footage for a production facility, multiple private event spaces, stunning views of the city from the rooftop bar, and a large restaurant with more than 30 beer taps,” Goldstein says.
For tickets, visit shepherdexpress.com/upcoming-events/tap-into-milwaukee.
