Pilot Project Provides Resources To Help Start-Up Brewers Launch

Dan Abel and Jordan Radke discovered an unusual disparity six years ago: it was easier to get started in creative fields like music or photography than it was to begin a brewery.

Abel, who had previously was a musician, and Radke, who had been in photography, realized that both music and photography had built-in help for beginners. “I did the whole move-out to L.A. without a dollar to my name to pursue my dreams, and as a singer-songwriter, but I had a host of resources,” Abel says. “If I wanted to book a tour, I worked with a manager and agent. If I wanted to record, I worked with a recording studio and sound engineer. The risk of me jumping in head-first into the music industry was mitigated by the resources available.”

After two years in L.A., Abel was drawn to the business side of music, and he eventually ending up back in the Midwest in 2016, working for Reverb in Chicago. It was here that he reconnected with Radke, his best friend from childhood and college, and the two began brewing beer in Abel’s garage. “We quickly realized the parallels between the music industry and photography, and we started wondering what it would take to start a brewery,” Abel says. “We quickly realized there weren’t those resources or brewery incubators.”

So Abel and Radke started researching and identifying everything that a would-be brewer would need, and in putting them all together, they established the Pilot Project in Chicago in August 2019.

“We started with five brands to incubate, and four were beer and one was hard kombucha,” Abel says. “We knew our concept would take some work for the public to understand, but the brewers, who were our main focus, immediately got it.”

Julie Kikla, Lake Tahoe adventurer and kombucha enthusiast, is one brewer who immediately understood the concept. After a long weekend of skiing and hiking, Kikla was inspired to create her own kombucha brand, but she quickly saw that establishing ROVM Hard Kombucha would be challenging.

“When I realized the capital and lead time it would take to get ROVM off the ground, it felt like a non-starter,” she says. “The baseline was unreasonably high, and there was no way I would be able to comfortably validate an entirely unique product in a young beverage category without more data than just friends and family.”

Kikla reached out to Pilot Project during the start of the pandemic in 2020, and they began working with her. “Without Pilot, we would have never made it from ideation to launch, let alone growth,” she says. “There were too many roadblocks. Their support and expertise helped transform ROVM from a backyard booth to a fully competitive, award-winning craft brew.”

In the nearly three years since Abel and Radke began the Pilot Project, they’ve successfully launched 13 brands, including five women-owned businesses, only the second black brewery in Chicago and an Indian inspired brewery. “With every brand we launch, our network grows bigger, and each of our new brands gets to launch on the shoulders of the brands that came before them,” Abel says.

A successful launch, Abel says, is to get the brewer to the 1,000 barrel threshold. “When we first launched Pilot, it would take between nine months to a year to reach that, but today, we can get them to that point within about six weeks. “Once you reach that benchmark, you’ve outgrown our system,” Abel says. “With our incubator, the aim is to put you in your own location, if that’s your goal, or to have a subcontract, if that’s your goal.”

“For us, Chicago is our test market, “ Abel says. “It’s tough market, it’s (known) as the craft beer capital of America so we knew if we could validate this concept in this city, then we have take it to other markets.”

The Pilot Project is in the middle of raising funds to do just that – to take their brewery incubator concept nationally and even internationally. “We would like to be launching 50 unique ideas every year,” he says.

Funkytown Brewery is one of Pilot Project’s most recent success stories. Rich Bloomfield became friends with Zack Day and Greg Williams at school in Oak Park, and the three of them then attended Grambling State University together. In 2017, they began brewing at home, with the goal of starting their own brewery. “We wanted to bring a Black brewer perspective to the beer industry, which is less than 1 percent Black-owned,” Bloomfield says.

The three friends began working with Pilot Project in mid-2021 to then launch Funkytown Brewery in October 2021. “We felt that we had an amazing tasting product, a great marketing strategy and solid business acumen to handle the challenges that would come, but we didn’t have the means to produce a beer at scale,” Bloomfield says. “Pilot Project filled in all the remaining gaps.”

“They helped us launch in a competitive market with a professional presence that we wouldn’t have been able to achieve on our own or with a traditional, contract brewer,” he says.

Within six months, Funkytown has grown to more than 200 retail partners across the greater Chicagoland area. “Pilot Project is like a brewery in a box,” Bloomfield says. “You bring your vision, product, marketing strategy and grit.

“Then, you open the Pilot Project box, and have a sales team, distribution network, PR team, business consultants, marketing consultants, brewing equipment and knowledgable employees serving your beer on tap.

“In our most ambitious dreams, we didn’t expect to grow this fast.”