ProBrew Brings Customized Brewing Solutions to WI Brewing Company Park


ProBrew, a leading supplier in brewing solutions, worked together with WI Brewing Company and the Lake Country Dockhounds to bring world-class beer to fans at WI Brewing Company Park.

Chris Rebels, the chairman of our board, was very involved in the business community in Milwaukee. He knew the folks who were starting this brewery and thought it would be a great idea to boost our visibility by sponsoring the softball park and installing a brewery system here. So that's what we did. It's a great idea because what goes together better than baseball and beer? Perhaps a hot dog, I'm not sure, but I got really excited about this because it gave us the opportunity to build a system that was larger than our tiny little pilot brewery in Verona.

When we started talking about what could make it unique, what would make it different, what would make people want to talk about it, a number of ideas came up. The one that kept coming up over and over again was the possibility of having an in-stadium brewery that would supply a variety of brews and bring creativity and uniqueness.

I was pretty excited. It’s a known brewery in a great community, and it’s local—just down the street from our office. What I found out is right in my backyard, I have a company with a lot of sophistication in a wide variety of disciplines that brewing fits in nationally with. They really knew what they were doing and delivered on time.

This is a five-barrel brewhouse with three vessels: a cereal cooker, a mash/lauter tank, and a boil kettle. We also provided the cellar for the fermentation and cold side of the brewing process. Working with Wisconsin Brewing was very easy. Kirby is very experienced, very knowledgeable, and just great to work with. The equipment I have here is manual but has automation to it, making my life easy. I still get to go up there and really feel like I’m doing things, yet there’s enough automation to help out so I don’t have to do the drudge work.

For me, this is just a little more back to my roots and a little more fun and flexible. This five-barrel system is of enough size to really give me validity in terms of how I could expect the beer to behave as we ramp it up on our larger system. This is a place where I get to kind of hide out, be very selfish with it, take ideas, try to develop them into great beers, and keep evolving our company towards success.