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Mothership Cocktail
The Mothership is a Bay View gem, situated at the corner of Lincoln and Logan Avenues. Owned by Ricky Ramirez, the cocktail bar opened in April 2019 and features a massive cocktail list, a broad spirits selection, reliable favorites on draft, comfort food and more. Juxtaposing a party atmosphere with an attentive culture of belonging and benevolence, The Mothership is a distinctively charming neighborhood destination.
Born in Providence, Rhode Island and raised on Milwaukee’s South Side, Ricky Ramirez developed ambition overtime to have his own bar from years in the service industry and traveling around the country visiting other establishments. “After a while, when you’re working for someone else, you can love a place to death but it’s not your place to say you want to do this or that,” Ramirez explains. “At the end of the day, I would just be there to make drinks, and I wanted to do something more.”
He had previously helped open, manage and curate several Milwaukee spots including The Vanguard, Transfer Pizza and Strange Town. Places reaching out to him for his input helped build his own creative vision for a business. Ramirez recalls the arduous timing of opening The Mothership, “It was something where I needed to do it right then and there or else Paul Jonas (who owned the previous bar, Urban Bay View) would have had to sell the place. I put a concept in it that I thought would be successful for the neighborhood and that I believed in. It was a very fast process in a matter of like four weeks. It was terrifying, but we made it work.”
Unique Concept
While developing his bar program, Ramirez sat down with local bar owners including from Blackbird, Newport and Burnhearts to endorse The Mothership’s unique concept. “We have such a camaraderie around here,” he notes about Bay View. “I talked to each of them about how I wanted to be different. Like, I wasn’t going to ask any of their bartenders to come work for me. I kind of put myself in a box immediately because part of Bay View’s draw is having a bunch of places that are all their own thing.”
COVID hit only 11 months into The Mothership being open. Ramirez and company kept busy during quarantine running food and diapers to single-parent service industry workers. “COVID sucked,” he put it simply. “The only good thing about the shutdown was having the time to figure out how we were going to keep executing. We survived it, and I feel extremely fortunate that we did.”
As the bar’s name and UFO logo suggests, The Mothership is sci-fi-themed. Ramirez coined the bar’s name as both a way of honoring his mother and from watching Close Encounters of the Third Kind around the time he took over the place. He elaborates, “I was looking up the movie on Wikipedia and I vividly remember the word ‘mothership’ in one of the first paragraphs. It’s funny because people come in and nerd about Star Wars and things like that when really I’ve never been an outer space guy… I’ve always been way more intrigued with stories and movies where they come here. My competitive side was thinking that I wanted the bar to be the “mothership” bar for other service industry people, and for cocktails too.”
Classic Design
Artist Nicole La Brie designed the logo and worked with Ramirez on much of the bar’s initial branding. “She rules,” Ramirez praised La Brie. “Nicole made it look so immediately classic-looking. I worked hand-in-hand with her and tattoo artist Jon Bartels on a lot of the original design.”
Vibrant, multicolored lights and paper lanterns adorn The Mothership’s ceiling. The bar has fun with their humorous sign verbiage and demeanor on social media. There is an outdoor patio, pull tabs, gambling games and TVs that often have horror movies, irreverent cartoons or bad reality shows playing. Merchandise such as shirts, hoodies, hats and stickers are for sale.
The Mothership boasts four cocktail menus—classic “OG” drinks, remixed “OG” drinks, “Mothership in Paradise” (tiki-style concoctions featuring fresh-squeezed juice and house-made syrups) and draft cocktails. They do not carry flavored spirits; The Mothership’s drinks are all hand-built with precision and intentionality. The bar also features a number of draft beers, wines, non-alcoholic options and other packaged beverages.
“Our staff is on-point and amazing,” Ramirez adds. “They all come from different realms of cocktailing. Everybody’s got their own specialty. It’s a cool amalgamation of brains here.”
Hamm’s Beer has prominently been associated with The Mothership; upon opening, the bar notably counted how many kegs of the beer they went through after Ramirez bet a skeptical distributor he could sell 50 of them in a year. The Mothership won the bet in just five months. While they no longer keep count, they still have Hamm’s readily available.
Bar Discoveries
Ramirez describes his ideal customer interaction being where someone discovers a new cocktail that they like, followed by them ordering a glass of their favorite cheap beer. “We set the bar up for that kind of thing,” he remarks. “Recently we had a group of guys come in saying that they used to come here to drink Hamm’s all the time, but just then realized that we also have a crazy whiskey selection. We want to have a bit of everything for everybody.”
Basketball is typically the only sport The Mothership shows on TV since Ramirez is a die-hard Milwaukee Bucks fan. They do not put on football or baseball; he shares why, “You just kind of see a homogenized party at other bars - like, everybody has a Packers party. I didn’t want us to be a bar like that. I wanted to be a Bucks bar because I’m passionate about them. Paying for Spectrum really sucks though (laughs).”
Originally, The Mothership offered gourmet, gas station/convenience store-inspired cold sandwiches made by local chefs. The bar acquired a food truck in 2022; vegan “third culture” comfort food pop-up Maya Ophelia’s currently serves daily from 4 to 8 p.m. “Jack and Chase are like family to me,” Ramirez said about the Maya Ophelia’s folks. “We love having them so much. They’re very special and a very good representation of what Milwaukee food should be like.”
The Mothership celebrated their four-year anniversary in April with a party that featured guest cocktail professionals (including LP O’Brien, who recently won Netflix’s “Drink Masters”), a Sweet Smoke Barbecue pop-up and new merchandise. In terms of having more themed parties and live music, The Mothership is slowly easing into doing them more again. Events they hosted in the past year include the “Bewitched” drag show series, Dale Novak’s pop-up art show, a 21st Street Co-op Fundraiser, and DJ nights with Selector Max, David Arnevik and DJ Goodboi.
Programming Music
Touching on the music and ambiance of The Mothership, Ramirez explains, “When we’re building playlists to fit the programming of this place, it’s important for us to have a very diverse sound. I don’t want Harry Styles or My Chemical Romance or anything like that (laughs). We play a lot of Afrocumbia and Asian music. Selector Max does a really good job of playing the music of people from the Afro-Latin world. Any other DJs we have, it’s intentional. We know that the weekend warriors and Yelp reviewers might be out on nights we have DJs, but we’re really just here to celebrate the diversity of people.”
The Mothership emphasizes Ramirez’s values in terms of sustainability as well. The bar uses no plastic straws or soda guns, composts all their food waste and has multiple ice machines. Ramirez has also been vocal via The Mothership’s social media in support of Black Lives Matter, taking COVID safety measures seriously, championing reproductive rights and taking other socially conscious stances.
He contends, “I know that we might lose followers because of the positions we take, but it’s one of those things where it’s like, being a Person of Color who owns a business in a gentrified neighborhood, I want everybody to feel welcome and heard, especially in Wisconsin. It was important for me to open The Mothership in Bay View because we need to deal with these problems here. Every single day we open, we’re opening for everyone in Milwaukee, and we’ll always find a way to make our advocacy part of the business.”
Prior to COVID, The Mothership hosted Milwaukee sexual violence support group TeamTeal365 for seminars educating service industry workers about abuse prevention and ensuring that their spaces are safe. Ramirez mentions that the sessions were well-attended and important to do, so he hopes to continue hosting more like-minded organizations in the future. “We’re working with social justice advocacy groups more behind the scenes right now, just because we’re still navigating how to facilitate big groups of people. But we’re still actively using our voices to speak on what’s important to us.”
On the biggest things he has learned from his journey with The Mothership, Ramirez reflects, “If you want to make a lot of money, be as neutral as possible (laughs). But honestly, what I’m most happy with is that what we did five years ago was extremely original, and I’m still trying to sell it to people in Milwaukee because we still get people who have never even heard of our bar and randomly stumble upon it. Just the fact that we have such a welcoming South Side corner establishment is great. A lot of PR people don’t even know if they want to take us on because we have such a one-of-a-kind voice - but it’s cool that we’ve had a voice in the culinary scene where chefs want to talk to us or food writers will put us in cocktail magazines. You just have to find a way to open a place with your own ideas. The voice matters and the originality matters.”
The Mothership (2301 S Logan Ave) is open daily from 4 p.m.- 2 a.m. (2:30 a.m. on Friday and Saturday). Visit their website at themothershipmke.com. Follow them on Instagram @themothershipmke.
“2024 is going to be weird,” Ricky Ramirez concludes. “I have no clue what’s going to happen, but we’ll see how it goes. We’re figuring it out every day. The sky’s the limit."
