Layman Brewing: Corner Bar Meets Ancient Ales in West Allis

by

"We want to mash up the old English pubs with Wisconsin corner bar," says Layman Brewing owner Kyle Ida, while his partner, Sarah Warran adds, "We're looking to do a celebration of bar culture through the ages." It's an interesting concept, and they've launched it as a brew pub in a classic corner bar on 60th Street in West Allis.

And it's not just the vibe or the ambience they're after; their approach to beers and brewing is certainly different from most breweries. Bootleggers, ancient recipes, low alcohol brews, and old European folk ingredients all figure into their theme in what has to be one of the smallest breweries in Wisconsin.

But first, the bar. It's a classic, on the corner of 60th and Madison in West Allis, and it hasn't had a major renovation since 1946 (and of course it's said to be haunted by the original owner, who opened it in the 1890s). When I walked in I was immediately greeted by both owner and customers, and before I even finished taking off my jacket I was in a conversation about old Milwaukee beers with three guys sitting at the bar. So yeah, the vibe is there.

And next, the beer. Their system is tiny but shiny, made by Spike Brewing in Riverwest, makers of home brewing equipment. So their kettles and fermenters are small enough to sit on a table top. "What we love about this equipment and this system is it brings what is usually inscrutable industrial process with big stainless steel equipment down to something that is almost as intuitive and understandable as a kitchen toaster," says Sarah.

Kyle was inspired by his great-grandfather Walter, when his beer recipe on a 3x5 card fell out of an old family album. Walter was a bootlegger in Muscoda, Wisconsin, a small town west of Madison near Spring Green. Intrigued, Kyle started researching how brewers operated during Prohibition, when access to ingredients was often restricted. "We went into a weird deep dive how beer survived the Prohibition. What we found was that he was using these mechanically compressed hops that had a very cheesed flavor or rancidified flavor to them; he was open fermenting in pickle crocks. He also owned a cheese factory and at that time it was a great cover for doing bathtub gin, brewing, and a ton of other stuff."

"I have a background in cultural anthropology so I was kind of like oh, what else were people to make up for what they didn't have anymore," Kyle explains. "We just got curious what our ancestors could do to make beer so we started making a magic stick; we wanted to create a house strain of yeast in our basement at home and we wanted to see if we could create a piece of wood that would become so thoroughly inoculated with yeast that we could just throw it in the beer to start a ferment, and we did. It was quite successful." They're still in the process of refining the house yeast, and the strain they had at home suffered an unfortunate fridge malfunction.

One thing led to another, and the result was Layman Brewing, which got off to a slow start in 2020 due to the pandemic.

Many of these old recipes and experiments feature traditional yeasts, such as Kveik, a traditional brewing yeast used in Norwegian farmhouse brewing (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kveik), and traditional herbal ingredients, and often result in very low-alcohol beers, "because we want people to be able to talk and enjoy themselves and not think about getting buzzed or trashed. It's just a way to show what beer was for communities in a modern context," Kyle says, and Sarah adds, "We're making things as close as we can to traditional brewing methods that alewives used or mom and pop or traditional beer manufacturing facilities on a small scale."

"We found these little kiddie beer recipes that are somewhere between a sarsparilla and a beer," says Kyle. "They'll use wheat bran and anise and alehoof, which is creeping charlie. Creeping charlie's presence here in the Midwest is due to these German brewers who were using a very weird form of Gruit [an herbal mixture used for bittering and flavoring beer before the popularity of hops], and they were doing it to escape taxation in Germany and they brought their traditions over here. And we started looking at like Kvasses (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kvass), which seemed to have a very ancient soul to them. You take a loaf of bread, you mash it up, add some sugar, some lemons and some raisins, and that ferments."

Layman also serves food, and is definitely family friendly. They even carry a selection of mainstream “Dad beers”, even including Rhinelander. They also have a hall which was formerly the parish hall for a nearby church, and they have plans to host music and other events. They recently had a Sea Shanty Sing, something that Sarah has been involved with for a while.

Layman Brewing is located at 6001 W. Madison St. in West Allis. For more info and a menu of their current offerings, visit laymanbrewing.com.