UPDATE: As of mid-September, MobCraft has reopened.
Sarah Halstead, who with her husband Michael bought MobCraft Beer’s brewery, taproom and intellectual property last spring, is nearly ready to reopen the Walker's Point taproom, 505 S. 5th St., to the public.
“It’s safe to say early September, but we are seeing how the next few days go with hiring and getting the space finished before we announce a specific date,” Halstead tells me.
“We’ll be announcing things via social media. Everything still has a bit of uncertainty until I get that last necessary permit in my hands.”
Halstead says that initially, MobCraft will not be serving its own beer, because permission to brew from the feds took a long time.
“We will be opening with beer from other local breweries to support them,” she says. “Our TTB license took 125 days, so we didn’t get everything cleared to brew until mid-August. We are working on restarting brewing, but we’ll be launching with a nod of support to a bunch of local breweries for our draft list.
“As we get MobCraft brews finished we’ll be introducing them into the menu.”
So, keep an eye on the MobCraft social media profiles (Insta, Facebook, etc.) for solid opening details, and I’ll update this post, too, once there’s a specific date, but it sounds like next week just might be a go...
“Absolutely earliest would be Sept. 2,” Halstead says, “(but) more realistically later that week.”
Henry Schwartz and brewer Andrew Gierczak originally opened MobCraft in Madison but moved to Milwaukee and opened the Walker’s Point facility with its nearly 3,800-square-foot taproom in 2016.
Born in Brooklyn, N.Y., where he lived until he was 17, Bobby received his BA-Mass Communications from UWM in 1989 and has lived in Walker's Point, Bay View, Enderis Park, South Milwaukee and on the East Side.
He has published three non-fiction books in Italy – including one about an event in Milwaukee history, which was published in the U.S. in autumn 2010. Four more books, all about Milwaukee, have been published by The History Press. A fifth collects Urban Spelunking articles about breweries and maltsters.
With his most recent band, The Yell Leaders, Bobby released four LPs and had a songs featured in episodes of TV's "Party of Five" and "Dawson's Creek," and films in Japan, South America and the U.S. The Yell Leaders were named the best unsigned band in their region by VH-1 as part of its Rock Across America 1998 Tour. Most recently, the band contributed tracks to a UK vinyl/CD tribute to the Redskins and collaborated on a track with Italian novelist Enrico Remmert.
He's produced three installments of the "OMCD" series of local music compilations for OnMilwaukee.com and in 2007 produced a CD of Italian music and poetry.
In 2005, he was awarded the City of Asti's (Italy) Journalism Prize for his work focusing on that area. He has also won awards from the Milwaukee Press Club.
He has been heard on 88Nine Radio Milwaukee talking about his "Urban Spelunking" series of stories, in that station's most popular podcast.
