Kyle and Stephanie Vetter created something special when they opened 1840 Brewing Co. in the summer of 2017. The husband-and-wife team didn’t take an easy approach to brewing. Kyle, the head brewer, relied on oak barrels for aging, blending and fermentation, and he took his time while crafting each batch. In its first year, the “urban farmhouse brewery” was only open one weekend a month, and its mantra was “drink slow beer.”
The Vetters built one of the best breweries in Milwaukee. Now, they’re closing it. Not solely because of the financial pressures and challenges of running a business in the service industry, but because family takes precedence. In November, Vetter announced that Stephanie has stage 4 pancreatic cancer. The two of them have decided to channel the enormous amount of time and energy required to run a brewery into spending more time together and with their daughters, Cora and Risa.
“We’re a small family-run business, and it’s just the two of us and our staff,” says Vetter. “We’re at the point now where we’ve got a lot of doctor appointments and care that’s needed. It just got to be too much to try to run the business and be present at home.”
The Vetters named their brewery after the year commercial brewing began in Milwaukee. And slow or not, 1840’s beers quickly earned a reputation for their quality and complexity. Its Plumpy series of fruited sours were standouts, as was The Cashmere Sweater, a double IPA that became the brewery’s biggest seller. (When the last keg of Cashmere kicked on Sunday at the taproom, the staff played a recording of taps over the sound system.)
Beers closer to Vetter’s original “slow beer” vision, meanwhile, won national recognition. At the 2023 Great American Beer Festival, Vetter took home a gold medal for I Don’t Want to Wait, a kriek-inspired beer made with Door County cherries and fermented in wine barrels. That beer also took home bronze at the 2024 World Beer Cup, and it spawned the amazingly named Mariah Karaoke, a saison that won gold at the 2023 U.S. Open Beer Championship.
“The neatest part of the journey is how we started from testing the model to see if people in Milwaukee would be open to the wild world of craft beer that wasn’t really represented here (in 2017),” explains Vetter. “We sort of caught lightning in a bottle. People lined up for our releases and were shoulder-to-shoulder when we were open. We realized that the model worked and that we needed to do more. We quickly evolved from being open once a month with a very focused approach to being open all the time making every type of beer style under the sun. And we were recognized by our community for doing that at a high level. When the awards started coming in, it was cool to realize the growth we had. What started with just Steph and I and some volunteers grew to a team of 15 people creating high-quality beer with passion. It was a fun journey to get that point.”
Earlier this month, 1840 announced that it was closing its West Bend taproom, which opened in spring 2024. That announcement cited financial trouble caused by 11 months of delays and trouble with the contractor for the project – part of a large new development downtown.
This part of the 1840 journey will end on Sunday. Hours at the taproom (342 E. Ward St.) are 11 a.m. to 8 p.m. on Sunday. They’ll be pouring until 10 p.m. on the days leading up to the finale.
“Our team has been phenomenal,” adds Vetter. “They’ve stepped up in so many ways and helped take the pressure off. They’re the only reason we were able to get to this point. We’ve only got one fight in us, and that’s the fight at home.”
