Supermoon Beer Co. owner creates farmhouse style, barrel-aged beer at Bay View brewery
While a student at Marquette University, Rob Brennan made a visit to Lakefront Brewery for a tour. He returned again and again, home brewing all the while. Then he took a trip to Belgium.
Those pivotal experiences carried him, eventually inspiring Brennan and wife, Maria Keegan, to open Supermoon Beer Co., 3145 S. Howell Ave. The building is a former general store dating back to 1902.
He sold his first beer in November 2020, and he’s slowly been building a following for his approach to barrel-aged fermented farmhouse style with European influences.
Fermentation and fruit are at the heart of his style. There are eight beers on draft, with names like Punchbowl Piquette and Saison Bay View, plus a nonalcoholic kombucha called the “house booch.” Bottles are available in the cooler, and include Marbelle, which features Petite Pearl wine grapes grown in Wisconsin.
A parklet addition in front of the building offers added seating when weather warms. Just past the bar, a recently finished area provides a small space for performances. So far they've hosted two live shows and plan for more small-scale events. The taproom officially opened Halloween 2022.
While the brewery does not offer food, they’ve teamed up with local restaurants for events. Next up, Dave Swanson and Braise will have a pop-up at the brewery May 12 and 13. Sweet Smoke will do a barbecue pop-up in June.
More: Supermoon Beer Company, serving traditional European brews in Bay View, to open taproom this summer
He went from home brewing to business plan
My wife and I went to Marquette University as undergrads. That is where I caught the bug, I guess you could say. I visited a friend who was making his own beer in his basement. I was just interested in the simple fact that you could do that at all. Then I started taking the tour at Lakefront Brewery. It is one of the best tours I’ve ever taken. I was freshly 21, kind of broke. Friday nights I could pay a few bucks to go to Lakefront. I’d get fish fry and a brewery tour with beer and good information.
I moved back to Chicago after school and kept home brewing. I started my career in advertising. I was home brewing the whole time. I took a couple trips to Belgium, which was pretty formative.
I’d started nursing school. Halfway through, two guys I knew were on their way out of Goose Island, which had just gotten purchased by Anheuser-Busch. They started their own brewery, Penrose Brewing in Geneva, Ill. That’s how that started.
I got to be a sponge and see how from the ground up to start a brewery. I stayed there for four years, until we moved back to Milwaukee in 2017.
He bought a building and began a brewery in Bay View
My brother and his wife live in Bay View. We loved the community and felt good here. We started to look for a home. This was a result of that. We weren’t finding a house, so we found this old building that had been on the market for a while. It was in rough shape. We’ll live in the apartment and rent the other space out.
Shortly after we moved in, we found our commercial tenant was leaving. We had never been a commercial landlord. We were looking through all the paperwork. … The building was zoned to be a brewery back 120 years ago. That unique situation allowed us to apply for our federal brewers permit. … I left the workforce in October 2020, a month before we sold our first beer. We’ve been at this ever since.
He found his focus with European-style beers
We focus on what we call Old World rustic farmhouse style beer. Which is a very specific way of putting it. The generalized is to say Belgian and French European farmhouse inspired ale. Generally what that means is the majority of our beer is fermented in oak for long periods of time and then blended much like wine making, or it is a much more fermentation driven and yeast forward beer style.
He wants to create a conversation, not intimidation
It is so important now to have the tasting room because we can have those conversations and demystify things and break down barriers.
Our bestselling beer is Saison Bay View. The word saison tends to trip people up if they've never had it. We say it is basically a pilsner’s weird cousin. It kind of settles things down.
At Supermoon Beer, it’s always about the yeast
Hops are usually the rockstar ingredient. They tend to get the loudest share of people's enthusiasm, and that's great. There's a lot of interesting innovation happening in terms of the hops themselves and hops growers pushing boundaries with hybridization, product development, and brewers doing techniques, but that is not technically the sandbox we're playing in.
We're trying to offer something a little more focused on, and I would argue an equally important ingredient, yeast. That's what we mean when we say our beer is fermentation and yeast driven. We do use hops in our beer, all fresh crop year, primarily from Michigan, all direct from the farms themselves, but they don't tell the whole story of our beers. An IPA, the story is conveyed by the hop profile. Our beers tell their story through fermentation profile and yeast characteristics.
He uses whole fruit, no purees or concentrates
We have committed to using entirely whole, organic unsprayed minimally processed fruit. because I believe that it gives the ultimate glass of beer the most authentic fruit profile you can get, one that you can’t replicate with purees or concentrates.
A good example is in our cherry beer. I hand crush the cherries myself. I leave the pits entirely intact, and as a result you get this pit contact that has this almond sort of marzipan vanilla toasted almond background to the cherry.
Bring on the booch, a nonalcoholic kombucha option on tap
We started making kombucha. We call it our "house booch." We're thinking about packaging it. House is an unfruited traditional kombucha, but we use a ginger peach tea that gives it a passionfruit profile.
He loves local ingredients (especially cold-hardy wine grapes)
We draw from Belgian inspiration; they too use the most local fruit to them. … There is a cherry unique to the region where lambic is produced in Belgium. We don't have that, but we do have these cold-hardy, interesting native hybrid wine grapes.
The state of Wisconsin is sort of an underdog, I would say, but the amount of research going on and grape development and production is fascinating, like American Wine Project, which is doing some incredible (Wisconsin) wine. It is all about taking a slightly different approach. We work with the UW-Madison agricultural research station in Verona. They have a harvest of grapes they are continually researching. I pick them up after harvest. We hand macerate them here and add them to blended beer in our oak fermentation tanks.
What you need to know before visiting
We’re going to be expanding hours. We’ve been open up to this point with the taproom, open Thursday through Sunday. We’ll be adding Wednesday and extending hours so we’ll be open a little more often by mid-May. Hours: Wednesday and Thursday 3 to 9 p.m., Friday 3 to 10 p.m., Saturday noon to 10 p.m., Sunday 12 to 8 p.m.
We do cashless sales only. We typically have eight beers on draft, average price is $7. We have cold bottled beer to go and a growing list of nonalcoholic options, including our house-made kombucha.
Plan ahead if you want to do a 'cellar session'
We don’t do traditional tours. We do this thing called "cellar sessions," more of an intimate sit-down tasting in our barrel cellar. We like to call it a 201 style brewery tour. Once you’ve heard the typical four ingredient brewery tour, we peel a layer back and talk about what it means to put beer into oak, what is sour beer, what isn't sour beer, the nitty gritty of blending in and extended fermentation, things like that. Those are by appointment.
More: Wine, cheese and coconut kefir: Frannie's Market owner sells her favorites
Fork. Spoon. Life. explores the everyday relationship that local notables (within the food community and without) have with food. To suggest future personalities to profile, email psullivan@gannett.com.
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This article originally appeared on Milwaukee Journal Sentinel: Supermoon Beer Co. in Bay View specializes in farmhouse style beer
