Chicago’s Funkytown Brewery Ready for Next Phase of Business

Chicago-based Funkytown Brewery is already seeing the benefits from winning the Samuel Adams Brewing the American Dream Brewing & Business Experienceship this summer.

The two-year-old, Black-owned craft brewery was celebrated in Denver Friday during Samuel Adams’ annual Great American Beer Festival (GABF) media brunch. The event came two months after Funkytown was announced as the winners of the 12th annual experienceship, beating five other finalists at the Crafting Dreams Beer Bash in New York City.

Through the experienceship, Funkytown receives “unparalleled access to brewing and business resources from experts” – including Samuel Adams founder Jim Koch – and will collaborate with the Boston-based brewery on a specialty beer, according to a press release. The company’s founders Rich Bloomfield, Zach Day and Greg Williams were also awarded a trip to this year’s GABF.

“The mentorship and the coaching and learning the dos and don’ts that they [Samuel Adams] went through, it’s going to help us get to where we need to be,” Williams told media members in attendance Friday.

The brewery has also started to see increased business opportunities from winning the experienceship, with accounts willing to take Funkytown products after hearing the Samuel Adams name, Day said.

“The Sam Adams experience added another level of validity for us,” Day said. “To have someone with this type of cachet … this type of respect, to look at your company, drink your beer, hear your story and say, ‘We are willing and able and capable of putting our best foot forward to make sure that you guys have an opportunity to expand and be successful,’ it means the world.”

Childhood friends Bloomfield, Day and Williams began homebrewing in 2017 and officially launched Funkytown in October 2021 through Pilot Project, a Chicago-based brewery incubator. In December 2021, the brewery won Brewbound’s Pitch Slam competition at the Brewbound Live business conference. Last fall, Day was also named one of the scholarship winners of the Michael James Jackson Foundation’s Sir Geoff Palmer Award for Brewing.

Funkytown’s mission is to create community-focused beer that connects craft beer with consumers who are often excluded from the segment, including women and people of color.

For the past two years, Funkytown has been focused on “guerilla marketing,” getting the word out about their brand through tasting events and face time with potential consumers. Now, the company is focused on raising money to scale other aspects of the brand, such as merchandise, an official website and beer map, Bloomfield told Brewbound in an interview prior to Friday’s event. Having a digital beer finder would “just make it all a lot easier” for drinkers to find Funkytown products,” and allow the founders to focus on other areas of business, he added.

Winning the Brewing the American Dream experienceship is a “game changer,” Bloomfield said.

Funkytown’s needs are similar to what Koch was looking for when he started Samuel Adams more than 40 years ago and why he wanted to start Brewing the American Dream, Koch said Friday.

“There are two things that I wish I’d had, but I couldn’t get,” Koch said. “One was, I wish I could have gotten some money. That would have been nice. No bank would touch me.”

The second is the access to “solid nuts and bolts business advice,” he continued.

“I really wish they could have had advice about things like how do I make a sales call?” Koch said. “How do I get publicity? How do I negotiate with my vendors to make sure I’m not getting screwed? How do I negotiate and sign a real estate lease, how do I design a package? How do I set up a payroll? I didn’t know any of those things.”

Over the last 15 years, Brewing the American Dream has given more than $100 million in loans to more than 4,200 small businesses, creating more than 11,000 jobs across the U.S., Koch said. About 70% of those businesses are led by people of color and other disenfranchised communities, he added.

Funkytown hopes to have its website and merch ready this fall. The company also hopes to open its own taproom late 2024, creating a Funkytown space separate from Pilot Project’s taprooms in Chicago and Milwaukee.

The taproom will be both an “anchor” for Funkytown’s distribution business, as well as “ground zero for the Funkytown culture,” Bloomfield told Brewbound.

The company is looking for a location on the Westside of Chicago, which has been “heavily divested since the Martin Luther King riots,” but is starting to see reinvestment, Bloomfield said. The area also connects back to the Funkytown founders’ roots as “Westside folks.”

“Being able to employ people [and] engage people in the community, that’s what we want to do,” Bloomfield said. “And if we have an opportunity to do it where it also makes business sense, we’re all for it.”

Funkytown plans to produce its rotating seasonal offerings at the new location, with Pilot Project continuing to produce its core, high volume offerings, such as Hip-Hops and R&Brew pale ale.

“The goal is to just continue to work with Pilot so we can scale up sustainably,” Bloomfield said. “We’re talking about our first taproom and that’s the main focus, but the vision is like Monday Night Brewing and Hi-Wire … the multi-taproom strategy. That’s where we’re going.”

“We need to flesh out our entire Funkytown idea,” Day added. “When you see Funkytown you either see the product or you see us or the brand label or whatever. But to fully flesh it out, we need that taproom space or satellite places.

“That fully fleshed out Funkytown idea really can’t come to fruition until we have these taprooms where you can visually see it without us being there,” he continued.