Launching a brewery typically takes years of building a network, creating a consumer base, and experimenting with products. At Pilot Project — a Chicago-based brewery incubator — the process takes about three months.
Co-founders Dan Abel and Jordan Radke launched the Pilot Project, including a tasting room and café, in Chicago’s Logan Square neighborhood in 2019. The concept was to mix the business structure of the music industry — which Abel previously worked in — with the duo’s passion for brewing.
“You wouldn’t expect a musician to build their own recording studio in order to record an album, and to launch a label in order to distribute,” Abel told Brewbound. “So we kind of called ‘shenanigans’ on that and decided to build basically the recording studio equivalent for the fermented malt beverage industry.”
Pilot Project holds bi-annual auditions of breweries hoping to take advantage of the incubator’s resources, which range from production, recipe creation, marketing, distribution (Pilot holds a license to self-distribute), and brand building. Abel said they receive about 300 applications a year, with potential partners pitching their business plans “Shark Tank style.” About three or four breweries are selected at a time.
“You don’t necessarily need to come with a stellar beer or beer recipe. We have a suite of services from scaling up your beer recipes, to distribution and marketing,” Radke told Brewbound. “We want to look for the story — that you have a good story behind it, that you are driven and have this desire to kind of make your way and presence in the industry.”
Since its founding, the Pilot Project has helped launch 12 companies, ranging from traditional beer brands to hard kombucha. The overarching theme for its breweries is to give opportunities to passionate Chicagoans, particularly those looking to represent communities that have less of a presence in the industry.
“Day One, we immediately saw not just the need for creativity and barrier-lowering [in craft], but also the need to actually give a nod to all the nuanced businesses that could exist in this industry if a business like ours existed,” Abel said.
Julie Kikla, founder of ROVM hard kombucha, told Brewbound that there was “no way” she would have been able to launch her brand so quickly this year without the help of Pilot Project.
“From the moment that our product is ready, we can actually have a tasting room where people can go try it right away, which is really helpful both from a feedback and live data perspective,” she said.
Pilot’s taproom sells offerings from each of its member breweries, as well as hosts new product launches and other events for its members. Although the goal is to provide every resource a new brewery needs to succeed, including a physical space, Abel emphasized that each brewery still acts autonomously.
“They have to be their own brand. It cannot come from us, otherwise we’re going to pull from best practices that we’ve used before. And then it’s all going to kind of meld into one,” Abel said. “It’s very much a partnership. While we have the sales team and we make the deliveries of products, more often than not, [the breweries] usually come to us with at least six to a dozen accounts that they’re like ‘we need to make sure these ones get in.’
“And then it’s really important for them to get out there and pound the pavement,” he continued. “We require that the breweries have a presence on social media, and we require that the breweries spend so much money on marketing dollars every quarter.”
This month, Pilot Project launched Funkytown Brewery, the second Black-owned brewery in Chicago, created by childhood friends Richard Bloomfield, Zachary Day and Gregory Williams.
The trio started homebrewing in September 2017, and were officially inspired to start their own brewery two years later after attending Fresh Fest, a beer festival in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, that showcases Black-owned breweries. At the festival, the group met New Haven, Connecticut-based Rhythm Brewing founder Alisa Bowens-Mercado, who introduced them to the concept of contract brewing, which led them to the Pilot Project.
“It’s better than contract brewing because that’s just kind of providing a recipe and hoping they do the best and they’re not necessarily handling distribution, or PR or any of that marketing stuff,” Bloomfield told Brewbound.
Funkytown launched with a party at the Pilot taproom that was attended by more than 200 people, including co-workers from the founders’ full-time jobs, old schoolmates, and even their sixth grade teacher. Within two days of the launch, Abel said the brewery sold out of all its cans (about 100 cases).
“I think one of the greatest things about the partnership with Pilot is we were able to come in as ourselves,” Day said. “We didn’t have to put on a show, we didn’t have to put on a front.
“And that goes back to the transparency that we saw from them. And then that gave us an ability to be transparent as well,” he continued. “We’re allowed to be goofy, we’re allowed to put artwork on cans and labels that reflect the culture, that reflect underserved people and reflect minorities. And that’s only because we were able to come in and be ourselves without anybody saying anything to us ‘hey, tone it down.’”
On the production side, Pilot brought on industry-veteran Glenn Allen, who previously worked as a brewery manager for Chicago’s Revolution Brewing.
“When you’re new to an industry, you really rely on mentors, advisors, people that have done it a lot. And so having a head brewer that [was] formerly at Revolution, and having someone who started a brewery before, a sales team, all of those things in one spot, was really beneficial for us to start off with,” Bhavik Modi, co-founder of Azadi Brewing, told Brewbound.
Azadi launched through Pilot in November 2020. Modi was inspired to start the company after traveling around the world, and noticing that while most countries throughout South America, Asia, and Europe each had a beer brand associated with their cuisine, India’s national beer brands were older and lacking in innovation. The brewery now has 10 rotational beers inspired by Indian flavors, including Kavi, a cardamom golden ale, and Gir, a kesar mango IPA.
“As much as we auditioned for Pilot, we auditioned Pilot,” Modi said. “Is the sales team going to represent our brand appropriately when they’re out in the market with customers? Because there’s a lot of liquor store owners that are Indian, so you have to know how to pronounce the names. You have to know how to describe the flavors. Is there a brewing team that’s willing to collaborate and experiment? And we found all of that in the discovery process, and had enough trust that we said we can work with these guys long term.”
When creating such a range of unique recipes — from Azadi’s cardamom ale to ROVM’s blueberry yuzu hard kombucha — Pilot’s production team relies heavily on a data-driven system that tracks every aspect of the production process.
“Data is a huge aspect to our relationships with our partners. And so for our content management system, we didn’t go with any huge guys, we went with a smaller company that focuses a lot more on the brewing side of data. And so we’re able to take all that — literally every single second, every single temperature change — and flip that back to [the breweries].” Pilot co-founder Radke said. “The idea is when they open up their own space or go to a larger facility, they can take exactly every single batch spec. sheet and duplicate that again.”
This concept is key for Pilot: The breweries they help incubate will have the ability to graduate to bigger opportunities.
“The phrase that we keep using is we’re building the brewers network where it’s almost like microbreweries that have the supply chain of a macrobrewery,” Abel said. “They all want to be their own independent businesses, but they are calling on us as a centralized conduit for their success.”
Pilot, itself, has expansion plans for its own facilities.
When it launched two years ago, Pilot was meant to support production for breweries at its facility for 12-18 months. Instead, the facility reached capacity within three months. As a result, the incubator contract brews 100 barrels a month at third-party facilities.
Next year, Pilot plans to open a new facility within the greater Chicago area that will increase its production capabilities tenfold. Abel intends for the new space to open with an annual capacity of 30,000 barrels, with the ability to increase production to 100,000 barrels over time.
Pilot Project is also exploring launching future small incubators both in the U.S. and internationally, in places such as London, Tokyo, Brazil and Vancouver.
Nevertheless, Chicago remains the first priority for Pilot and its member breweries.
“You’ve got to take care of home first, that’s always been the No. 1 thing,” Day said. “It’s almost the same as music. If you’ve got an artist from a local area and you can’t take care of home first, and get that kind of love and support first, whatever love you get outside of that is not going to be sustainable. So you want to make sure that you take care of home first, and then everything else will come after that.”