Russ Klisch and His Craft Legacy at Milwaukee’s Lakefront Brewery

Russ Klisch is the owner of Lakefront Brewery, the popular brewery and restaurant located along North Commerce Street in Milwaukee. 

Klisch and his brother started brewing beer in the late 1980s in the city’s Riverwest neighborhood. 

According to its website, Lakefront Brewery has one of the most popular brewery tours in the United States; over 80,000 people tour the brewery each year. Lakefront was one of the first to offer beer at the beginning, during, and after the tour instead of requiring visitors to wait until the end. 

Klisch was one of the guests on “Milwaukee Made.” The following Q&A is from his chat with show host David Caruso. 

Q: I read that this all kind of started as a sibling rivalry with your brother. Tell me, how did that come to be? I know you and Jim kind of developed this, but it was because you wanted to outshine your brother, right? 

Klisch: “Well, what happened is when I graduated from college, there wasn't a job, so I had to move in with my brother. His birthday was coming up, so I thought I'd buy him something for his birthday since he wasn't charging me anything to live there. And he was talking about making beer. So I went out and I bought him a book on how to make beer and he read the thing and then made a batch of beer, which looked terrible.  

“I remember the floor was sticky. I saw how he did it and it's like, ‘oh gosh, I'll try it.’ And it wasn't that bad after he made it. And so I'm thinking, if you could do it that good, I could do better. And I started to make some beer and then we started winning awards and that all went to our heads. We made more beer, won more awards, and we thought we should open a brewery. And that's how it all kind of came about. And then we found an old bakery building down the street from us in Riverwest (neighborhood).” 

Q: What makes Lakefront Brewery so unique? 

Klisch: “I guess just the fact that it is about Milwaukee. Everything here, from the beer to the beer hall, to the cream city brick building to being on Milwaukee River to the cheese curds, the fish fry next to a big bridge that we have out over here. Everything here screams Milwaukee when you walk in. And so that's one of the nice things about it. So that's why a lot of people come on down.” 

Q: Tell me about maybe some special moments where you've just kind of stood back and looked at everybody activating this space and enjoying each other. For you, how fun is it to see all of that activity here? 

Klisch: “It's very fun. You have a lot of people bringing people in from out of state. They say ‘this is part of Milwaukee, this is what I'm proud of.’ And so that makes me proud. And we have the Friday night fish fry here. We have the two-piece band with the original Lawrence Welk bubble machine that they used to use on the show. And it's a long story on that one, but they actually have it. And so when you see the grandmother up there with the grandchild dancing and they're sitting there taking pictures and everything, it just touches your heart.” 

Q: The other thing I think is fascinating is that from an industry standpoint, you really have tried to be very innovative and I think even some of the first organic beer, gluten-free beer. How important is it to you to also lead the industry? 

Klisch: “It is very important. You kind of feel like you're the rock band in the 1960s around here. You always got to come up with something new all the time, otherwise you don't become relevant. I mean, to me, one of the proudest things is I've been able to keep it going for 38 years. We've done things like being the first organic brewery in town or in the nation. We were also the first gluten-free beer in the country back in 2005. And now it's a big category. 

“We were one of the first to do Indigenous beers, the first beer ever to be made with all the ingredients coming from the state of Wisconsin, our Wisconsinite. And we have a lot of other little firsts like the second brewery ever to do pumpkin beer. But now the other brewery actually closed. So we have the country's oldest pumpkin beer that we make here right here.” 

Q: On your website I saw you really encourage people to come to the brewery, but also to make a weekend out of visiting Milwaukee. What are some of the things that you would really recommend to visitors to our great city? 

Klisch: “You have to get a great meal. We have a lot of fantastic restaurants around here, a lot of James Baird award winning chefs (and) other TV personality chefs. So first you got to look for that. We have great sports. That's one thing about our city is it's very accessible and it's almost all year round from the Brewers to the Bucks to the Admirals to college basketball. The arts are fabulous. You obviously have the Milwaukee Art Museum down on the lake. There's always some good show that that's going on there that you can go and see.  

“And also just walking the town, you can go down Brady Street, you can go down to Third Ward and have a great meal. You can do some great shopping, get some good bites and relax. All those things are fabulous. The river walk is great. You can take the river walk from here all the way down to the Milwaukee Public Market. That's another great amenity of the city that we have. It is very safe and very walkable. I always joke that walk is in the name of Milwaukee, but that's what you find here. And it's not Chicago, but everything's compact. You can have a full weekend doing so many different things.”