Does an all-contract brewery make sense in the Chicago beer-making landscape?
“We are not brewers. And we’re very adamant about that fact.”
Not exactly how you expect to start a conversation with the two guys who are starting Great Central Brewing Company, the first contract-specific brewery in Chicago and putting it right smack dab in the heart of the West Loop near other breweries like All Rise, Like Minds, On Tour and a little place called Goose Island.
But that non-brewer-background is exactly how Conor McFerran explains it to me right off the top while telling me about his career thus far– strategic design, communication and strategy while co-owner Dave Avram comes from a family business with a real estate and contracting background — and in a business where contracting means taking someone else’s recipe and executing it perfectly over and over again
…maybe not being brewers is actually the best way to start.
Contract brewing remains, despite endless discussions about its merits, something of a dirty word to many beer aficionados. To some, it says you don’t own your own gear, you don’t have skin in the game, you’re letting someone else do the hard work, you’re just sending a recipe off to someone and you show up a few weeks later and take your kegs out the door.
And yet, many Chicago breweries offer contract brewing services — and many Chicago breweries are built on contract beers. Half Acre and their original lager, of course, is the first example most people bring up, but 5 Rabbit started as a contract-brewed company and are now on the other side of the transaction, serving as a brewer for others. Argus has been contract brewing private label lines for the better part of a decade, and breweries like Ten Ninety, Burnt City and Church Street all have made or currently make beer for other companies.
Still, the all-contract brewery is something of an anomaly, even though one of the Top 10 Craft Brewing companies by volume is largely (though not entirely) a contract brewer: Minhas in Monroe Wisconsin, makes everything from IPAs and Stouts down to bargain-basement light lagers and FMBs along with wines, spirits and liqueurs. One stop shopping. The most notable all-contract brewery is the ever-expanding BrewHub, with a brewing facility in Florida, one underway near St. Louis and three more in planning.
So…why does Chicago need one?
McFerran and Avram met over a decade ago and have been “advocates of beer together” since then, as Avram described their getting to know the Chicagoland craft beer and bar scene. That beer advocacy took a new form a couple years ago when Avram began consulting with a suburban group looking to put together a brewpub. While working on the real estate and financial front, he became a minority partner in the business and brought McFerran in to work on dialing in the concept of the brewery.
Along the way the decision was made to find a contract brewery to build a relationship with, and therein lies the genesis of GCBC.
“We couldn’t find exactly what we were looking for” in a contract partner, Avram explained. “Some of those requirements were: a real genuine consideration for our product. A genuine approach to doing business together. A true partnership. Timeliness of delivery. Guaranteed capacity. Recipe assistance. Things like that.”
“So Conor and I kinda took a step back and thought, why don’t we address some of these problems that we’re running into together, design our own facility for brewers, and really focus in on that.”
One of the things that McFerran and Avram found getting in the way of a good contract brewery partnership? In-house brands.
“For us, the big pivot was, let’s take ourselves out of the equation as an in-house competitor,” Avram said. “I think that was part of what the challenge was with some of these other providers — that they were also putting out their own product. So you get into a contracting relationship and as long as there’s open tank space you’re fine, but the moment that in-house production increases, you become more expendable as far as quality and attention and resources and allocation, all that sort of stuff.”
The decision to not develop a single in-house brand and focus solely on outside contracts puts them in contrast to places like Octopi Brewing, which is contract-focused but is also working on their Third Sign line of beers, and even Brew Hub lists their own Brew Hub Craft Collection beers on their website.
GCBC Founders/Owners Conor McFerran (left) and Dave Avram (right.) Logo (center, duh).
“I think our tagline kinda sums it up,” McFerran says. “We are for the brewers.”
So…whose beer will they be making?
McFerran and Avram declined to say who their initial lineup of contract brews would be for, but was willing to explain it as “[running] the gamut from fairly fresh startups to established guys that are looking to offload capacity, to people that are landlocked and looking to use us for a little bit longer term.” Avram added that it’s “heavily weighted toward Illinois-based breweries and the greater Midwest areas.”
That said, in case you’re thinking you can get your TTB licensing for a beer company and write a check to have them blast out 100bbls of your Schraderbrau homebrew recipe, for example, you should probably look elsewhere.
“We’re not the place for the immediate translation from a 5-gallon bucket to a production run. We’re looking for the partners that have a little more experience and a little more established retail footprint. That’s mostly for their benefit, because we don’t want to get anybody in over their heads,” McFerran says.
You have a brewery that has the staples dialed in and wants to free up some space for more seasonals? Perfect. You need some longterm housing for your gypsy brews? Sure thing. You’re looking for a transition point as you scale up your own facility? Great.
That’s Great Central.
Another thing that differentiates Great Central (and, at this point I feel obligated to say, that if you too find it hard not to call it Grand Central like the train station, you are not alone) is that they are not moving into an existing industrial space. They’re not repurposing an old factory building in Ravenswood, a former church in Irving Park, or an old car dealership in the South Loop.
They’re building this thing from the ground up.
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Not that this was their first choice.
Avram explains, “We spent the better part of …maybe 18 months to two years just identifying and exploring numerous pieces of real estate, and in Chicago it’s an extremely competitive market. Whether you’re in the west loop, or if you’re on the Northwest Side, finding the type of property with the right entitlements to the place, height restrictions and things like that — all sorts of properties had environmental issues or structural issues.”
“We just found that once we examined both approaches, from an economic standpoint, there wasn’t much of a difference to the point where being able to build a facility from the ground up and to try and make it as good, clean, efficient and as environmentally friendly as possible was the right choice for us.”
The 32,000 square foot space is going to have lots of nice toys, too. The Great Central team will be brewing on a 50bbl four-vessel brewhouse system, with four 100bbl fermentation tanks and three 200bbl tanks, so if you were wondering about a little 7bbl test batch of something this isn’t the place for you.
There’s a 100 and 200bbl brite tank, a centrifuge, a rotary keg filler (“a real slick little machine”) that can fill 70-90 half-barrels an hour, and a CFT canning line that can pound out 230 cans a minute in 12oz or 16oz formats.
That’s a lot of beer to jump right into. Who is the Great Central brewing team, you ask?
The last thing that differentiates Great Central from many – but not all – other startup breweries is…they didn’t actually have a head brewer until not long ago. Yes — all the gear was purchased, the construction undertaken and the plans announced to the world without the person who was actually going to make the beer.
The search was completed within the last couple weeks, a process that took some time because as Avram explains, “This isn’t a position for everybody.”
Which is true. Most brewers going into a startup company probably don’t get into this business with visions of making nothing but other peoples’ beers. “It takes a special kind of mindset and approach to be able to kinda check your ego at the door and be very, very driven to make somebody else’s product as best as you can every single day,” Avram says.
“So we’re being very selective about who we’re talking to. We’re really looking for that cultural fit as well as the technical fit. The biggest part of this is knowing our limitations and finding the right people that share the vision.”
I understand an announcement of who they’ve selected as a head brewer will be coming soon, but for now the focus is on the brewery as a whole.
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The final step in the plans is the tasting room.
GCBC will have 24 taps onsite to showcase the beers they’re making in house, which is kind of thrilling to consider. Between the different beers for varying brands, it’ll be like having multiple brewery taprooms in one single spot with fresh beer made just a couple dozen feet away. Also, that thing about GCBC not having dedicated in-house brands that they’re developing alongside their contract beers? That doesn’t mean they won’t be making their own beers to serve in the tasting room, which is a subtle but distinct difference.
“Our position is never to compete with our clients. So if we happen to have some space available in our schedule and we want to provide our team the ability to kind of have a little freedom and have a little fun with the limited distribution of the taproom and that volume limitations that that gives us, it’s kind of a low-risk way for us to have a little fun and put some interesting things out there,” McFerran tells me.
What he said next has me very curious, too: “It also provides a low-risk way for our clients to potentially partner up with us. If they’re thinking about something a little more interesting and they want to test the waters, they can work into it with us and prototype something, see how it sells and take it from there.”
So, if you go in and see something on a tapline with a Great Central handle on it, it might be another brewery’s beer…in disguise. With as much baggage is built into a beer’s perception based on a brand name (for example — how high are your expectations for every stout Goose Island produces?), it’ll be interesting to see who might “hide” their beer in plain sight so they can get some honest feedback from beer fans with no preconcieved judgements.
Bottom line on those house beers from McFerran: “We will [make them] if we can, but it will never interfere with our primary objective and dedication to our clients.”
Bottom line: This could be the riskiest brewery plan we’ve seen in Chicagoland in years. Dropping a 50bbl brewhouse into brand-new construction in the West Loop almost solely to make beers for other people and no brands of your own constitutes pretty much a complete 180 from the many small-batch, artisinal, hand-crafted, mad-scientist personal-life-goal breweries that crop up seemingly overnight around the country.
So basically, we can’t wait to see what happens.
Best case scenario: Brewers from desired out-of-market brands (think Cigar City and Toppling Goliath, both current Brew Hub clients) all show up on day one with ingredients, recipes and a desire to get a foothold in Chicago with screaming fresh beer. Wouldn’t that be nice?
Worst case scenario, we get a bunch of uninspired off-the-rack recipes for Fill-In-The-Blank Beer Company and the grocery store purchases get a little bit more confusing. I don’t think we’ll have to settle for that — I can think of more than a few smaller beer companies that have been idling locally for a while that would likely love to get their hands on some more dedicated capacity. I understand we’ll find out more about who’s beer they’ll be making soon.
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Test brews are underway. Another interesting chapter in Chicago’s brewing story is about to get started. Can’t wait to find out who’s fresh beers we’ll be adding to the city’s landscape soon.
Great Central Brewing Company will be located at at 221 N. Wood Street, just a few steps south of the Goose Island Fulton facility & taproom. You can follow their progress on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.