A new Brew Pub is expected to open its doors this Fall on Manitowoc’s southwest-side. Sabbatical Brewing, owned by Will & Cassie Schneider, will be housed on the former Oriental Milling property at 835 S. 29th Street. The Schneider’s manage ABLE Community Options for children, families & young adults with special needs located just a few hundred feet from their new venture. Will says they’ve built a strong management team there to allow them to take this leap of faith. As for the origin of the name of the business Cassie explained, that “…sabbatical means to take a break. We see this as kind of taking a break from our career, everything we’ve known to open up the brewery.”
Will said beer making is a new found passion of theirs, but they really became serious about this in 2017 when he started a program called Barley to Barrel. “It’s a brewery incubator out of Milwaukee,” Will explained. “ As far as I know, it’s the only program of its kind at least in the state of Wisconsin.”
The Schneiders added they even brewed beer for their own wedding in New Hampshire, Cassie’s native state. Will said he walked away from that Milwaukee course, knowing that’s what they wanted to do. Then, Cassie says things began to fall into place just over a year ago. “Equipment was posted on the Barley to Barrel Facebook page,” Cassie told us “We saw it and decided ‘Alright. This is a sign’”. They drove to Iowa to pick up the equipment and had it sitting in their basement until they were able to begin moving into the old mill.
Before buying the property on S. 29th Street, they had looked at some downtown locations but felt the old mill, with approximately 5-thousand square feet, also offered more parking space. The Schneider’s say when they do open later this year, they want to encourage a sense of community when patrons walk through the door. Cassie envisions a place where “you can sit down with somebody and you may not know them, but you start up a conversation with that person.” Will said that the one common denominator with everyone that walks through their doors is that “they are there for a good beverage, and that’s the perfect starting point for a conversation.”
Will says a contractor has been hired for renovations hopefully to start in the middle of next month, but he adds a lot of mechanicals need to be added to the old mill building because it wasn’t designed to be a brewery. Eventually, the Schneider’s hope to have a rotation of food-trucks on Saturday’s, following a similar path of PetSkull Brewing in downtown Manitowoc. Will walked through the empty building with us, and said that he has a lot of plans that they really want to implement, but many will have to be held off due to financial restrictions. He did explain that they want to have a stage put up to help support local musicians.
