Other Half Ramova: The Q&A
Ever since news of the Ramova Theater renovation started circulating a few years ago, a brewery has been a part of that discussion. In October, we learned that the brewery being built into the Ramova project in Bridgeport wasn’t going to be an independent upstart as many expected. It would, in fact, be the first midwestern outpost for Brooklyn-based Other Half Brewing, the brewery famous for their wide variety of dry-hopped IPAs and becoming, as one Punch piece put it, “the official beer of Wall Street.”
Now that they’re close to becoming the newest brewer in Bridgeport, and with the venue in soft-open mode (the Ramova’s first performance will take place on New Years Eve), we thought we’d ask a few questions about what this place might look like, how it’s going to operate and what perspective a New York brewery might have on Chicago.
We reached out to Other Half and had a chat with their co-founder and Chief Operating Officer, Andrew Burman. He’s been coming to Chicago fairly regularly along with other members of the team to oversee the buildout that they were hoping to have open by mid-December.
Since we’re still waiting on an official open date, here’s our conversation about the new brewery and how they got involved. (It’s been in the plans for longer than you might think.)
GDB: We've heard from the developers and we know that they love Other Half. But from your perspective, why open a Chicago location with this development team?
Andrew Burman, Other Half: Enthusiasm, passion. Support for the beer community in the world, in Chicago. We did drops [in Chicago] before, we did FoBAB before. We’ve had our toe in the water a little bit before we even knew this project was happening. It's great in the fact that people love beer there and they love a good product. Where we're trying to be in the world of beer [in Chicago] is different. We don't want to compete on shelves there. We don't really want to compete on certain brewery aspects.
What we want to do is have a really cool experience in this venue and have something in Bridgeport which isn't there. It’s an underserved community of beer lovers. And I think that's where it really played to us is that it's another application, but that's almost secondary to how cool everything else is and how great this venue is, and how great the food is, and how great the community is. And we're just there to help support that.
GDB: Did you get a walkthrough of the theater and facility before you said yes? Or was it just a decision you made sight unseen?
AB: I would never refer to [the walkthrough of the space] as something that would have made my mind say “yes.” When we walked in, the poster for ‘Police Academy’ was still on the wall [from] like 1986. It was musty, there were holes in the ceiling, holes in the roof, water damage everywhere.
There was an antiquated air conditioning system that ran through the floors, so every 18 inches there were these six-inch holes for the air conditioning to pump the air through.
So it was hazardous. In the basement, you walked down three or four steps, and it was just like, a lake. And [I was] like, ‘none of this is a selling point.’ And that probably was five years ago at this point.
We said ‘No’ a bunch to this. And only after a huge amount of negotiations and a huge amount of introspection on our account did we feel like this could be something that we could put our name on and be really proud of.
GDB: What was that negotiation around? Was there an operating arrangement that had to be worked out? Because I'm still not like clear on some things, like, who’s going to be the brewer, what the recipes are going to be, and so on.
AB: We know that it's an Other Half location, but it won't be the same as Rockefeller Center. It won't be the same as Finger Lakes. And that's part of the growth curve we're working with. Because it's a new venture, and it's a new thing. It's working with partners we haven't worked before. It’s working with food vendors we haven't worked with and trying to figure out how we fit into it.
Primarily what this will be is a brewpub. You know, it'll make beer for onsite consumption. It'll make our recipes. It'll make our beers. It's a smaller version of the same system we have here in Brooklyn, [and] it's a bigger version of the same system we have in Domino Park. We have some great brewers that we're trying to hire right now. And we're excited about it. What we're really focusing on is an on-premise experience and having great beers there for that.
GDB: What kind of system will you have in there?
AB: It's a 15-barrel system with 20-barrel tanks. We oversized that, so we could do some heavier beers. What's in there is in there, and nothing else is going in.
GDB: So it sounds like, if someone is an Other Half fan that comes from New York City to Chicago, they can still probably drink some of their favorite Other Half beers at the venue.
AB: Each of our locations makes their own beer and drinks a lot of their own beer, and then we sprinkle in beer from other locations in the tap rooms. In DC and Brooklyn, we both have ten lines of what they've made [there] and then we sprinkle in some other beers and then we have like, probably five to six lines that are made from Philly. Our brew pub here [in Brooklyn] makes beer for us to drink across DC and New York.
GDB: And like you said, you’re not really planning on using this to fill shelf space, not making a big retail play, maybe just still some hot drops here and there.
AB: Exactly. I think right now we drop every four months. We were talking to our distributor about what we should do to support this, and I think it might be a little bit more. But we are really not trying to infiltrate the Illinois market, from Champaign to Chicago.
GDB: In terms of the Chicago scene as a whole, how familiar were you with it at the outset of this project? What excites you about being in Chicago?
AB: We're almost 10 years old, and I think nine or ten years ago we started going out to Chicago. Chicago was different. There was Half Acre, there were some smaller brew pubs and yeah, that was pretty much it. I think when we started this project five years ago was when Hop Butcher started coming around, the Hopewell-s, the things that are a little bit smaller and a little bit more community oriented, which is what we started as. And now it's grown into a much more robust community.
I still would say it seems like there are some big players – there's Revolution and there's Half Acre, but there are still great small people. There are still the Marz-es of the worlds and plenty of small team members that we're looking at in our cohort. We're not [here] as competition but as a rising tide.
GDB: I was going to ask you if you're familiar with Marz since they have put a big Bridgeport stamp on everything that they do, and you guys are very much in the vicinity of them.
AB: Yeah, yeah! And [Marz founder] Ed [Marzewski] is a great guy; we've done tap takeovers with him and we see him when we go out there. I think it's gonna be great to have a beer community. There’s enough people there to support everyone. And I think we're all going off for little different segmentations of the audience.
Because we are going have this music venue attached to us, it's much different than any other location we have, where it has a built-in audience. Usually the beer is the draw. [When] there's a two-thousand person music venue and beer … that's a little bit bigger. We can have a captive audience and I think that’ll be great for us.
GDB: And does that inform the decisions that you’re making? Is all of your beer going to also be pouring next to Coors Light at the venue?
AB: Literally, you could read my inbox and sub out Coors Light for Miller High Life. That is literally a conversation we're having. I’m like, ‘Guys, we're a brew pub. We make beer. If you want a Mexican lager, we will make a Mexican lager. If you want to have an American adjunct lager, we’ll make an American adjunct lager.’
The hard part we're having right now is [figuring out] how much of this are you gonna actually need? Are we doing ten-barrel batches? Are we doing two 15-barrel batches, are we doing two turns, what do we need? And I think that's the hardest part. Yeah, I think we're supplementing a lot at the beginning with what we're making elsewhere. But as we grow into the space and into our systems, we feel like it'll be primarily the beers out of there.
GDB: In my experience with outside brands coming into the city, Chicago can be pretty skeptical about those things. Lagunitas facility aside (since founder Tony Magee is from Chicago) I'm sure you guys have examples in mind – like ‘how do we not end up being the next Ballast Point Brewpub?’
AB: Yeah, I mean, that worries me every night: How to be part of the community and not feel like we're trying to take from it. I think a lot of it, in my mind, [is that] what we're trying to do is on a much smaller scale. We are not trying to be a hundred-thousand-barrel brewery, we're not trying to put in 50,000 barrels of draft into the market at a really low [rate]. We're literally just there to have this venue, have a great time and have something special that no one else can get in Chicago.
GDB: And I feel like you guys know a little more about what you're doing as opposed to Constellation throwing a zillion dollars at a brand because it was the cool thing to do at the time…
AB: [laughing] Don’t get me wrong, we’re still still figuring it out!
We’ll keep you posted on any opening news about Other Half Ramova.
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