Milwaukee Brewing Co. plans to expand production by opening a new facility at this shipping building in the Pabst Brewery complex. Credit: Rick Wood

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Milwaukee Brewing Co., the first craft brewery to plant a flag in Walker's Point, plans to expand production by opening a new brewing facility in the Pabst Brewery complex downtown.

The project, one of the last redevelopment pieces at the former Pabst site, is the latest in an explosion of new breweries in Milwaukee, with more than a half-dozen expected to open in the area this year.

"It's kind of refreshing to see Milwaukee coming alive with more variety and more opportunities for beer exploration," said Mark Garthwaite, executive director of the Wisconsin Brewers Guild.

Milwaukee Brewing is working with Zilber Ltd. to turn a former Pabst distribution center at 1131 N. 8th St. into a destination brewery with a tasting room, brewery tours and a rooftop bar that takes advantage of its location on a hill overlooking downtown.

Construction is expected to begin in midsummer.

The distribution center, built in 1977, is one of the last former Pabst Brewing buildings that haven't been redeveloped. Pabst closed the brewery in 1996.

Milwaukee Brewing will keep its space at 613 S. 2nd St. for use as a pilot brewery and to expand its award-winning barrel-aged beer program and sour beer production, said Jim McCabe, brewery president and CEO.

"We've been familiar with the Pabst property forever," he said. "A lot of our equipment came out of the Pabst."

"We're also very familiar with the pace of development over there," said McCabe.

He called the promise of a new $500 million Milwaukee Bucks arena and the commitment to move it forward "a positive" in the decision.

Other former Pabst buildings have been converted into apartments, offices, a hotel and other new uses, and are part of what is now called The Brewery.

That project includes the current conversion of the former bottling house into Eleven25 at Pabst student apartments, which open in August at 1125 N. 9th St. Also, work is expected to begin soon on converting the former malt house, 1009 W. Juneau Ave., into apartments.

And this summer, Pabst Brewing plans to open an innovation brewery at 1037 W. Juneau Ave. Heather Ludwig has been tapped as head brewer and will experiment with Pabst recipes for discontinued brands such as Old Tankard Ale and Kloster Beer, as well as beers made before Prohibition.

More breweries pouring in

Pabst's small brewery and tasting room, which will have a separate restaurant, is one of several new breweries expected in the Milwaukee area in 2016.

Most recently, Good City Brewing was announced for Farwell Ave., with other new breweries opening in the Menomonee Valley, Riverwest, Walker's Point, Glendale and West Allis. The Fermentorium recently opened in Cedarburg.

That kind of growth "is really good for hyperlocal economies," said the Wisconsin Brewers Guild's Garthwaite.

Milwaukee architecture firm Vetter Denk is designing the Milwaukee Brewing space, which will feature a main-floor brewery, a gift shop and a tasting room, where food will be served. The west side of the building will feature windows, something now lacking at the fortress-looking building.

What McCabe is most excited about is the view.

"The rooftop is amazing. You can see the lake from the room and, obviously, the skyline," McCabe said.

The rooftop bar will be constructed in two phases while the brewery figures out what the noise and view impact will be from construction of the Bucks arena. The arena, to be built just north of the BMO Harris Bradley Center, is expected to open in 2018.

The tasting room and the brewery will be on the floor below the rooftop.

"Just about everything of interest is going to be on that top floor," McCabe said.

The building's bottom floor will be used for storage and a possible second business that McCabe declined to name.

Plans include hiring 25 people for the tasting room and the retail side, and another dozen for brewing positions. Down the road, McCabe expects sales and marketing jobs to open up.

Reclaiming an 'albatross'

The new building, which McCabe compared to "an albatross" because it doesn't have the Cream City brick characteristics of the other buildings in the Pabst complex, is nearly perfect for Milwaukee Brewing needs. A 1970s addition, the building was used as a transportation hub for Pabst, and the heavy-duty structure works well with heavy brewing equipment.

"You don't often see a building of this size and suitability for what we're doing in the downtown," he said.

McCabe described the structure, with about 165,000 square feet of space, as "funky-looking" and "big and stout." During the Pabst years, beer would cross N. 9th St. via an overhead bridge and then would go out on trucks.

"It was way overbuilt to handle hundreds of thousands of cases of beer," he said.

One thing Milwaukee Brewing had to do, however, was get a change in the building's heavy-industry zoning, which was put in place when Milwaukee breweries were national breweries. The new wording allows breweries producing fewer than 70,000 barrels a year to be considered light industrial.

McCabe said Milwaukee Brewing is on pace to produce 14,500 barrels a year.

McCabe said production was being squeezed out in Milwaukee Brewing's current location, and the business didn't have room to expand in that rapidly growing neighborhood.

McCabe said Milwaukee Brewing had been looking at two properties off Canal St., but neither worked out. In addition to a lack of space on 2nd St., McCabe said he was worried about the impact truck traffic would have in the neighborhood where homes and retail share space.

The brewery has plenty of company in Walker's Point. Central Standard Distillery moved next door in 2014. Brenner Brewing opened in 2014 at 706 S. 5th St. Urban Harvest Brewing, 1024 S. 5th St., is expected to open this month. MobCraft Beer of Madison plans to open a brewery at 505 S. 5th St. this summer.

And Lost Valley, a cider bar, was announced for 408 W. Florida St. late last year.

Tom Daykin of the Journal Sentinel staff contributed to this story.