Craft brewing has become a major business in Wisconsin, and here locally.
In Manitowoc alone, there are three breweries in operation, PetSkull Brewing on Buffalo Street, Sabbatical Brewing on south 29th Street, and the newest member of the Manitowoc brewing family, Craft Creek Brewing.
Andrew Hogan, along with his wife Brittney, and her brother Mike Rudebeck began brewing beer in Francis Creek back in 2019.
Andrew explained to Seehafer News, “Mike brought a home brew kit. We didn’t know what were getting into. He said, ‘I have something for us to do, but I’m not going to tell you what it is.’ From there, the beer turned out pretty well, and over time we decided that we had to start doing all grain instead of the brew kits, and started playing around and making recipes at home.”
People began to really respond to those recipes, so Craft Creek was born.
As far as the name is concerned, Andrew explained, “It started out in Francis Creek, and being craft beer, we came up with Craft Creek.”
The next step was finding a location to brew and sell their beer.
Enter Paul Hoffman from PetSkull, who at the time was in the process of moving out of their North 9th Street location.
Mike just so happened to have a mutual friend of Paul who gave the trio his number.
Mike said, “We contacted Paul, and he reached out and gave us a phone call. The rest is history.”
Brittney said that the Manitowoc community has been more than welcoming to them, so they return the favor.
“You will find that we will support the community in some of our beer names,” she said. “We have the Coal Steamer, the U.S.S. Cobia, the S.S. Badger Landing, the Woody Squirrel,” just to name a few.
In fact, they have asked patrons for help in naming some of their test batches.
Andrew also said that they try to use as many local products as possible in their beers, including getting 80% of their grains from Briess Malting.
