The newest kid on Milwaukee’s beer block has been a long time coming.
Solemn Oath Brewery of Naperville, Illinois, will soon begin transforming the former 1840 Brewing, 342 E. Ward St., into its own taproom. It signed a lease for the space just last week, has a goal of opening in mid-2026 and is planning a pop-up takeover in the neighborhood in December.
The brewery’s founder, John Barley – yes, that’s his real name – grew up in Mequon and has been working to foster a connection to his home state almost since he opened Solemn Oath in 2012. It has sold its beer on and off in Wisconsin since 2014, and Barley has been kicking the tires on secondary locations in Milwaukee for nearly as long.
“It was always a dream and always a vision that we would come back and bring Solemn Oath and do something in my home state,” Barley says. “So we’re excited to have that opportunity now.”
And he’s been really close before. It was nearly Solemn Oath, not Eagle Park Brewing, that took over the former Like Minds taproom on the East Side in 2018. Barley was just days from signing a lease on the Hamilton Street property before the landlord instead went with Eagle Park, which was then a small startup operating out of the Lincoln Warehouse. “We had grand plans and then lost it just a couple days before,” he says.
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The space Solemn Oath ended up in carries the weight of loss, at least for now, for Milwaukee’s beer community. 1840 Brewing, widely regarded as one of the city’s best, closed at the end of June amid problems with a long-delayed taproom in West Bend and a cancer diagnosis for co-founder Stephanie Vetter.
Barley is sensitive to the situation, not just with succeeding 1840 but also being an out-of-towner (leaving the Chicago rivalry aside) coming into tight-knit Bay View.
“The way that we operate, I think it’s going to be a good fit for the community there,” he says. “And we look forward to having that chance to kind of find our own ground and earn the respect of the Bay View community.”
It’s a line Solemn Oath, which produces about 6,000 barrels annually, has walked before. It opened a taproom in Chicago proper in 2021, and Barley said he wanted to be carefully attuned to the differences between the suburban customers in Naperville location and the urbanites in Logan Square.
That space, not incidentally, was created to evoke a European pub crossed with a Wisconsin Northwoods dive bar – a theme called Still Life. “We’ve always had that kind of Wisconsin edge woven into it, because that’s part of who I am.” Barley says Solemn Oath Milwaukee will have a similar concept, but of its own.
Solemn Oath’s beer is more of a known commodity at this point. The typically modern portfolio has something for nearly everyone – “a mix of highbrow and lowbrow,” Barley says. And good news for hopheads: Barley notes a common thread running through all of Solemn Oath’s beers is a trademark dryness. The beers most familiar here are Lü Kölsch and Snaggletooth Bandana IPA; Small Wave City Club hazy IPA is its bestseller. Daniel Ray, previously of the acclaimed Brothership Brewing in Mokena, Illinois, joined Solemn Oath in September as director of brewing operations.
Solemn Oath will be barrel-aging beer in Milwaukee but not brewing here, at least for a while. (There is no brewery in the Ward Street building.) Barley says he has a series of local collaborations planned and wants to brew with partners up here to have Wisconsin-made beers available in the Milwaukee taproom.
“We’ve got a lot of friends up there that are brewing, who we’ve done collaborations with,” Barley says. “But the beer-focused, craft-centric customers, we’ve got to earn their respect. We’ve got to make sure that we’re coming hat in hand and showing them what we’re capable of and how we bring our ethos and independent mindset to what we do with beer and earn the respect of the community around it.”
One of those friends is Rob Brennan, who is hosting Solemn Oath’s pop-up from 5-9 p.m. on Dec. 18 at his Supermoon Beer Co., 3145 S. Howell Ave. Brennan, who broke into the brewing industry in 2014 with Penrose Brewing of Geneva, another western suburb of Chicago, was set to become Solemn Oath’s point man in Milwaukee had the Like Minds deal gone through. Instead, nearly eight years later, he’s bringing Solemn Oath to Milwaukee in another way.
“Personally, this is a dream come true for me, what we’re going to bring to what I view as a world-class beer community,” Barley says. “I have the utmost respect for the breweries that are established in Wisconsin. I think people will learn to love us once they get to know us personally. And you know, our goal, ultimately, too, is to make sure we’re sharing some world-class beers and turning some heads on that side, too.”
