One Barrel Brewing founder thought about selling after COVID-19 shutdown. Now he's planning grand reopening
Table Chat: Peter Gentry
It’s been a whirlwind year for One Barrel Brewing Co. founder Peter Gentry. He opened his Madison taproom in 2012 followed by a Door County location in May 2019. The business grew from hobby brewing with his dad to sales of 5,000 barrels in 2019.
Then came the pandemic.
Sales dropped to 3,500 barrels. His taprooms closed temporarily, and sales around the state were their lifeline. The 2020 opening of a planned patio addition in Door County also proved to be a huge help.
Around this time last year, Gentry was seriously considering selling the Madison taproom. He had a buyer lined up when his landlord stepped in and offered a deal to help him stay. Gentry saw light at the end of the tunnel.
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Now, he’s anticipating the Sept. 17 grand reopening of the Madison taproom with the addition of food service by Boutique BBQ. The Madison location’s new fall hours will be 4 to 10 p.m. Wednesday through Friday, noon to 10 p.m. Saturday, and noon to 8 p.m. Sunday. Boutique BBQ serving starts at 4 p.m. Thursday through Saturday. The Egg Harbor location in Door County has remained open, and specialty brews like Paradise Pils and Olbrich Oktoberfest are on hand along with the bestselling Commuter kölsch, Up North, and blackberry and apple hard ciders.
Gentry talks about brewing, what he’s drinking, and the newly reopened taproom.
Question: How did you first get started brewing beer?
Answer: I got a kit. I was just out of college, but still playing club soccer with some guys in college. One of them was in this class at UW-Madison where one of the projects you could brew beer. I had a car, and he didn’t. He got his kit and I got mine, something to do with my dad …
I started entering these home brewing contests and taking home awards. The main catalyst was I won a home brew contest that allowed me to brew at a little brewpub, The Grumpy Troll in Mount Horeb. It was a licensed brewery, and they entered this beer into the U.S. Beer Championships, a nationwide tasting contest. It took an honorable mention. … The plaque for that is still at The Grumpy Troll.
Q: Tell us the One Barrel story. How did you go from hobby to business?
A: All the way back to the very beginning, I was in newspaper print ad sales. I was at the very end, the manager for The Onion newspaper. … I was looking for new opportunities. I was doing well at home brewing contests. I decided to open a bar with a hook, and that was almost nine years ago. At the time it was a brand new idea in the Midwest, to have a taproom where you’re brewing your own beer. That took off in the Madison area, and we got a lot of requests from folks who wanted our beer at their establishments.
Fast forward to COVID times, luckily we had opened Door County a year earlier. When Madison shut down, that was all our tap room revenue, plus our wholesale revenue, which is about half our revenue. Even Door County shut down in the beginning, in the colder months we weren’t doing anything inside.
The crazy part is I was in Asia at the time (everything shut down). We flew through the Seoul, South Korea, airport. No one was there. We got bumped up to first class. There were maybe 20 people, and we were on the plane with the boy band BTS. I didn’t know who they were.
We left Asia and everything was canceled. We got back to Wisconsin on the 15th (of March 2020). … State of Wisconsin shut down on the 17th, and from mid-March to mid-May we were shut down entirely. Our wholesale was still doing something, people were still buying beer to drink at home, that at least kept us hopeful.
Q: What was the biggest impact of having to shut down, even temporarily?
A: Madison, it was scary. I actively tried to sell the taproom portion of the business just to get some cash. I got an offer and I went to my landlord and said these guys want to buy and I want to transfer the lease. My landlord said he’d match the purchase order if I put that money back into the building with a remodel.
Q: So that’s the big reveal planned in Madison on the 17th?
A: Exactly. I didn’t go through with the sale. We spent the last six months doing a remodel in Madison, adding a back bar, adding food. We hired a chef I’ve known for a while, he was down in Asheville, N.C., for six years getting into the barbecue scene. We don’t have a lot of room for ovens. He got excited about what he likes to call Boutique BBQ. What is boutique barbecue? We don’t have one of those big smokers. … We purchased a convection steamer type oven. We retrofitted that.
Q: What can people expect with the barbecue?
A: If you’re a barbecue purist, you won’t see the pink ring when you cut into the meat, but the flavor is all there and he’s fanatical about sauces. We’re going to make some sauces with our (Sturgeon Bay) Scotch ale.
Our goal is to keep this hyper-local. We give our spent grains from brewing to farmers who have pigs and cows, so we will get our meat direct from people we know. Because of that it will be fairly limited quantities.
Q: What’s your top selling beer?
A: Number one is the (Commuter) kölsch, a light beer but still flavored. Then we’ve had some really great success with a new IPA that we released earlier this year that was going to be seasonal, but now will be year-round. It is called Ninja Dust. It is starting to creep into the Milwaukee market a lot more, and you’ll see tap lines of it all over Madison and Green Bay now. It is a juicy IPA. The can is kind of cool, the penguin in a glossy black suit, you can’t see him unless you look at it in the right light.
Q: If you’re not drinking your beer, what are you drinking?
I love wine almost as much as I love beer. the flavors are nuanced, and the story is a little more global almost. In fact, we are finishing our basement, an ill-timed COVID project. … I’m putting a 350 bottle wine cellar down there.
Q: If you could only brew one beer, what would it be?
A: I still go back to the Commuter kölsch, one of the ones I developed in my basement. It is not the easiest to get consistent, but for me it is a fun beer to make. … That would be one I could drink forever. I think you can find that at American Family Field now, too.
Q: What are you working on that people can look for in the near future?
A: We’re getting the one barrel system in Madison ramped back up, that’ll mean a lot of creative stuff coming out. You can look for upcoming products, Cookie Monster, an imperial chocolate milk stout, will be available. We’re looking to release an apple crisp hard cider, a riff on our champagne hard cider. That’s coming in November.
Table Chat features interviews with Wisconsinites, or Wisconsin natives, who work in restaurants or support the restaurant industry; or visiting chefs. To suggest individuals to profile, email psullivan@gannett.com.