In Milwaukee Record’s “Meet A Brewer” series, we aim to introduce you to some of the professionals behind the scenes who are responsible for making your favorite local beers. The recurring series continues with Dead Bird Brewing Co. owner/brewmaster Nick Kocis.
Milwaukee Record: So the brewery originally started in Madison. What brought you here?
Nick Kocis: We started in Madison and we put our first beer on shelves in November 2015. So we were there for a while. We were brewing out of a small brewery on the east side called House Of Brews. It was mostly a contract brewery. That brewery was starting to shut down in late 2017 and early 2018. At that point, we didn’t have a brick and mortar location. We were wholesale only. Myself and my main business partner at the time had other jobs and we were just kind of running Dead Bird as a side gig. We kind of had a “come to Jesus” moment about the little side project that’s a brewery. We decided we wanted to keep it and that we needed to get a brick and mortar, physical location someplace.
We started looking for locations that worked. Madison was one clear option, and at the time, my wife was kicking around grad school locations. Madison was one option and UW-Milwaukee was the other option. So we started looking at Milwaukee to see what Milwaukee had to offer. Obviously the city has a lot of beer culture. MobCraft had moved here [from Madison], so we already knew one brewery in town. Milwaukee also had a lot of really interesting incentives for grants and money centered around small businesses setups and environmentally-friendly kinds of things, which we were focused on. Milwaukee really became the top option as all those things converged. That combination of things is really what pulled us here.
MR: Had you lived here or spent any significant amount of time here beforehand?
NK: Not really. I’d been down for a couple of weekends to spend time with college friends that lived here. It wasn’t totally a blind move, but it really came down to “we’re going to pack up our lives and move to Milwaukee.” It was kind of like burning the boats when you get someplace. We are in this. We are going to live in Milwaukee. This is not a two- or three-year thing once we opened the brewery. Milwaukee is my home now. It’s been almost seven years and it really feels like my home. People ask me where I’m from and I say Milwaukee.
MR: In your years living here, what are some of your favorite breweries or individual brewers you’ve developed an affinity for?
NK: When we moved here, we moved to an apartment in Riverwest. We were kind of equidistant between Company and Gathering Place. My tastes tended toward Gathering Place at that point, so I was there a lot early on. I was lucky enough to meet Joe [Yeado] when he was there. He’s somebody that I talk to on the phone. Obviously, the MobCraft guys. Heidi [Dalibor], who was recently at New Barons, was a really good contact. Supermoon, we were keg washing for those guys when they were first starting out, and Faklandia as well. We provide some vegan food items for their menu.
MR: Speaking of the vegan focus of your beer list and food menu, what are a few of your favorite vegan restaurants and food trucks?
NK: That’s actually the surprising thing. People think of Madison as this crunchy place, but there weren’t really any dedicated vegan restaurants when we lived there. When we moved here, we had places like Strange Town and Twisted Plants. Then seeing places like Wonderland, where their entire menu can be veganized, open was killer. Lafayette Place. Comet has been around forever and they’ve always had great vegan stuff. It was really cool to move to a place that has a huge amount of food options. And it’s still growing. That’s been really cool to see. Veganism isn’t as obscure as it was 20 or 30 years ago. There are so many options now.
Ian Shipley
MR: What are one or two go-to beer styles you find yourself gravitating toward?
NK: If I’m going into another brewery and they have a kölsch or pilsner, that’ll probably be my first go-to. It’s something I like, but it’s a really good snapshot of how good those guys are. There’s no room to hide. It’s one type of malt—maybe two—and one or two hop additions, a very particular yeast, then the rest of it is all about the minutia. Is your place clean? Do you have temperature control dialed in? Do you know the chemistry of your yeast? Stuff like that. I’ve also become more of a European lager drinker.
MR: How about on the macro end of things? What’s in your fridge at home or what do you go for at a place without many draft lines?
NK: I mean, I grew up in Wisconsin. We had a Pabst Blue Ribbon fridge in the basement. That was it. I’ll drink a Pabst or a High Life for sure. I also like Corona and shitty Mexican lagers like Tecate. That’s totally my summer jam, those big macro Mexican lagers.
MR: Let’s move away from beer for a bit and talk entertainment. What are some of your favorite bands or podcasts or shows?
NK: I don’t listen to a lot of music. There are some old blues artists I like, like R.L. Burnside. But if I have earbuds in, I’m probably listening to a podcast. It’s a lot of weird stuff. I listen to a podcast about fiction authors from the late 1800s to the early 1900s. Revisionist History is another podcast I listen to a lot. I’m a pretty big geek. I have a science background, so anything that pokes that.
I like horror movies. I recently started watching Kingdom again, which is a Korean zombie show that’s a period piece. I thought Shogun was amazing. I’ll always give a crack at anything Lord Of The Rings or Star Wars. Even if it’s trash, I’ll watch it. I thought The Silo was really good. Anything in the sci-fi, fantasy, or horror genre is definitely my vibe.
MR: Do you have any non-brewing hobbies?
NK: I love classic arcade games and, for some reason, that never really transferred to console games or computer games at home. I do a lot of tabletop and role playing gaming. I sit in my basement with some guys, drink beer, talk in funny voices, and move little bits of doll furniture around. I look forward to that every month. If there’s a pinball table in a bar, I will plug money into it. I’m not particularly good, but I like it. And if anybody has a solid looking cabinet of anything decent, I’ll play it.
MR: What are a few of the goals you have for Dead Bird, both in the near future and way down the road?
NK: I would love to grow our beer portfolio. We’ve been doing a lot of flagships to keep our tap lines full. I would love to do more rotating stuff and seasonal stuff. I would love to find a small community to host a beer garden in. And I’m sure you’ve heard this a lot, but it’s a battlefield out there for breweries right now. A lot of us took hits during Covid that we haven’t really recovered from. So being here is our first goal, and getting people here is our main driving thing. That, and going to beer festivals again and being where the beer drinkers are.
MR: What are some brewing misconceptions you’d like to clear up?
NK: The industry over the past 10 years is night and day. When we got into it, we were right at the very end of the days where if you made really good beer, people would come in and drink your beer. I’ve always said if you want to make beer professionally, do not open a brewery. Go work at a brewery. Find a brewery that’s been open for 15 years and be a brewer or a cellarman and you’ll get to make beer every day. As an owner of a brewery, a small fraction of my time is spent making beer. Most of my time is figuring out what else I can sell because making good beer is not enough anymore. I’ve got to throw four or five parties a year and I’ve got to have four or five different beverage options. It’s crazy how many more things you have to be doing as a brewery owner now than when I got into this industry a decade ago. Making good beer is not enough anymore. That’s the bare minimum now. The bar is so high now—which is what we want in the industry—we want people making good beer because it brings people in.
MR: Keeping with that topic, let’s close it out with this open-ended, fill-in-the-blank: Brewing in Milwaukee is…
NK: Brewing in Milwaukee is great. Customers here are a lot of fun. It’s super supportive with the customers that we have coming in. Also, it’s really supportive [between breweries] with small bits of equipment loaned to people and willingness to answer questions. Even if I haven’t talked to somebody in six months, I know I can shoot a text or ask a question and get a pretty quick response. It’s been a really supportive place to be.
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