Incubating More Than a Brewery

While I was in Chicago, I got to visit two very interesting breweries—and felt like I was peering into the future. Liz Garibay, director of the Beer Culture Center (formerly the Chicago Brewseum), encouraged me to meet with Funkytown’s Rich Bloomfield, and Javier and Jose Lopez of Casa Humilde. They started these two newer breweries in separate collectives or incubators, a structure that allows start-ups to enter the market with lower capital costs while they build their brand.

That alone makes them interesting case studies, but the two had more in common than just a business structure. Both began homebrewing at around the same time with the same goals—to figure out how to launch a brewery. Both came from under-served communities and wanted to build breweries around the interests of their communities, which meant both had distinct visions for the kind of beer they wanted to make and the kinds of brands they hoped to create. Now, several years after launch, both have achieved success and are looking to expand.

Funkytown

I met Rich Bloomfield at the Pilot Project taproom in Logan Square. He is one of three co-founders of Funkytown, along with Zack Day and Greg Williams—friends he’s known since elementary school. They were homebrewers dating back to 2017—this part of the story is familiar—but the idea to start a brewery really came into focus when they went to Barrel and Flow, the groundbreaking Black-centric Pittsburgh beer fest, in 2019. “A lot of the people pouring the beer were CEOs,” he said, marveling. They decided to start homebrewing “with the idea of going pro” after that.

This is where Funkytown’s story diverges from a typical craft brewery’s. Among their community, craft beer wasn’t a thing. “You walk into a craft brewery and you’re going to see zombies and skeletons. People I know don’t see themselves in there,” he said. Chicago has one of the largest Black populations in the US—almost a third of the city. Depending on how broadly you define Chicago, the city contains more than a hundred breweries. Yet, including Funktown, just three in the city are Black-owned. That’s a huge disparity, but also an opportunity to put good beer in the hands of people who have never explored it. “People were always curious, asking why we liked it,” he said. “They just didn’t drink it.”

The founders considered the traditional path of fundraising and building a brewery, but instead discovered Pilot Project and saw it as a better way to get into the business. The concept came from music, not beer. Dan Abel, the founder of Pilot Project, wondered why every beer company had to own their own brewery. He had a background in music, and it looked like an inefficient system. “In music,” Rich explained, “you don’t build your own studio.” Pilot Project has become a studio for breweries. They can use the communal brewhouse to make their beer, the self-distribution license to deliver it, and Pilot Project also offers help with marketing and consulting. And of course they have a taproom where you can buy the beer—the one the two of us were sitting in. I was drinking a Funkytown beer, but I could have had something from Azadi or Brewer’s Kitchen as well—other current incubatees.

The entire business concept is also more specific than many breweries’ are. It’s both pure Chicago, and a beacon to Black consumers as well as women, who have so often been overlooked. The Chicago piece is especially distinctive. Take Woo-Wap-Da-Bam, an amber ale. That term is Chicago slang for “etc etc.” (This is an excellent explainer by the Chicago rapper Saba.) Cuffin’ Season refers to the practice of “handcuffing” yourself to a partner to endure the cold months. That one may not have originated in Chicago, but it’s a common term there. The flagship, an excellent pale ale, is called Hip Hops and R&Brew. On the colorful labels you find people of color as well.

Beer is culture, so the products Funkytown offers are tailored for its audience. They offer zero IPAs, what to speak of hazies. (The pale is the closest thing they have to an IPA.) Instead, they are using styles more common twenty years ago to introduce Funkytown to an audience unfamiliar with craft beer. Woo-Wap-Da-Bam is a good example of the kinds of beers they’re making. It’s an amber lager, but drinks more like an amber ale. It’s got a caramel nose and sweet fullness, with hints of berries and red fruits, and very little hop character. “These beers need to be low in bitterness,” Rich said. “You can’t give a crazy IPA to someone who only drinks regular beer.”

The brewery had a successful launch and soon found an audience. This year, they won Boston Beer’s annual Brewing the American Dream project, which will give them further visibility and some expert advice and resources in developing their business. The plan is to open their own taproom in a neighborhood of under-served beer drinkers, possibly in West or South Chicago.

Rich and I spoke for a couple hours, and I was struck by the way he saw Funkytown in a larger context. Many people get into beer because they are laser-focused on a particular beer or style. The three grade-school friends went to Grambling State University, an HBCU in Louisiana, together. That helped them understand what Black communities are up against. For Rich, the brewery is a vehicle for community change. “Did you know the number of businesses owned by Black men has actually dropped?” He asked. (I did not.)

Starting a business was one way to change those statistics, and perhaps more importantly, become an example for younger potential entrepreneurs coming up. Beer is a social beverage, so it has obvious community-building elements, and that’s how Rich sees the brewery. He’s into the beer, for sure, and we geeked out on styles for a while as I worked through a flight of Funkytown beer.

But this isn’t the 9,710th brewery in America—it’s the third Black brewery in Chicago. There are so few partly because Black Americans don’t have the family wealth of White Americans. The incubator allowed Rich, Greg, and Zack to get into the business with far less capital than they would have needed to start their own brewery. They now spend their money and time on promoting Funkytown. This model allows more people to get into the production side, and that will affect the supply side, especially in areas craft beer hasn’t sold well. Rich was bubbling with excitement about his brewery at a time when many brewers are dour—and why not? Funkytown has the potential to be a growth engine in an industry mired in stagnation.

Casa Humilde

Amazingly, there’s more than one incubator in Chicago. About three miles southeast of Pilot Project in the West Loop is District Brew Yards, home to four breweries. One of them is Casa Humilde, a project launched by brothers Javier and Jose Lopez. Like Funkytown, Casa Humilde (“Humble House,” which is also an awesome name) is a brewery with beers designed to appeal to the founders’ community—as well as some of Chicago’s better eateries. In this case, the Lopez brothers are reaching out to Chicago’s large Latino population (about 29%).

A decade ago, Jose was a working musician, and Javier was a pretty serious beer geek. Javier was doing what people did back then, collecting beers and trading them at bottle shares—and drinking as much of the bounty as he could find. “Before I knew it, my fridge was full of beer,” he said. When Jose would visit, he said, there wasn’t any room for food in the fridge—it was all beer. They both chuckle at the recollection.

District Brew Yards doesn’t call itself an incubator, but the arrangement is similar. There’s a house brewer, but the individual breweries buy their own ingredients and design their own recipes and formulations. There’s a twist, though. The taproom at the Brew Yards is a pour-your-own set up. Customers use a card and may pour beer in any volumes they wish. Each beer is priced by the ounce.

“Around 2015, I thought, ‘Why don’t we make beer?’” Javier said. I was starting to get a sense of his personality as he described what came next—he does not do things halfway. While they started out with a starter homebrew kit, pretty soon it had escalated into a multi-thousand dollar nano in Javier’s living room that was so sophisticated they could do their own yeast propagation. They were having larger and larger parties, which functioned as product development. “We were doing 20 barrels a year as homebrewers!”

To get more professional experience, Jose took a job at Omega Yeast and then spent a year at Hopewell Brewing. They actually started with a generic craft beer name—Auxiliary—before deciding to lean into their Mexican heritage. Their parents both came from Durango, but actually met in Chicago, which is where their sons were born. They looked around and saw their large community not drinking craft beer, so instead of a generic “Auxiliary” brewery, they made it fully Mexican-American all the way through.

The beers appeal to their friends and families on different wavelengths. They wanted some offerings to be familiar to older drinkers, which meant lagers. Their flagship is called Maizal, a light Mexican-style lager. I was impressed with Humilde’s whole range, but this beer was a standout. It surely satisfies drinkers used to Modelo or Pacifico, but has a lightly toasted malt flavor and undertones of the corn mentioned in the name, yet it’s as clean as a bell and perfectly clear. It has the flavor of a craft lager, but the appearance and polish of a mass market beer.

They also do beers flavored with Mexican fruits like pineapple, coconut, prickly pear, and lime that appeal to younger drinkers new to craft beer. I visited the place a day before meeting the Lopezes and had their Viva La Frida, a tart hibiscus lime lager with a very crisp, quenching and slightly tart palate. Yet whether they’re reaching out to younger, experimental drinkers or older, traditional ones, their beer broadcasts their heritage.

Humilde, like Funkytown, isn’t interested in dropping two new beers each week. “We’ve only made forty to fifty beers in the four years we’ve been open,” Jose said. “We’re really interested in brand-building,” Javier added. They want to create beers they can use to build a customer base. It’s an interesting contrast to the hundred-beers-a-year approach many conventional craft breweries have used. In those cases, breweries are offering new flavors to keep a more mature audience engaged. But at Humilde, they want people to find and fall in love with their beers. (It doesn’t hurt that these are beers they’ve made many times and which have a dialed-in, professional presentation.)

Perhaps because of their quality and strong brand, they’ve had a lot of success placing their beer in restaurants, including some of Chicago’s best. “We’ve actually done more collaborations with restaurants than breweries,” Jose said. I joined the two for lunch and can confirm that the Maizal is an excellent partner to carnitas. They’ve also begun roasting Mexican coffee beans under the Humilde name—and of course using their own coffee in their beer.

The Lopezes are looking to open their own place one day. “With us, it’s important to do a lot of stuff with the community,” Javier said. Their adventure started with parties and homebrew, and they have continued to host events, bringing in their other passions with good food and music. All of this appeals to their community that, like Funkytown’s, has been overlooked by craft beer. They will keep things focused on their heritage, and would love to do some fun projects along the way. Javier mentioned an idea of doing a different beer for each of the 31 states in Mexico. It’s a rare brewery still focused on innovation while so many invoke “retrenchment.”

Expanding opportunities for BIPOC ownership has been an explicit goal within the industry for years, but operationalizing it hasn’t been too successful. The idea of the incubator model is an intriguing way to lower the barriers of entry, and Funkytown and Casa Humilde are examples of Black and Latino beer fans taking advantage. In most places, craft beer drinkers skew more male and more White than their communities. One way to expand the market is by increasing the number of breweries that appeal to these underserved groups, and perhaps the incubator model is an easy solution. I hope we see more of them elsewhere, and more people taking advantage of them.