NEW BREWERY CARRIES ON WITH BROKEN HEART
Owner opened Glenview business in August. Now his widow is learning to run it.
This is the work that Mike loved to do.
Pouring the bags of malt in the steel tank. Stirring the grain with the long mash paddle so it doesn’t clump. Brewing the beer that brought people together.
But in April, at the age of 44, Mike Welch died. And so, on a recent Friday morning, his widow, Megan, wielded the mash paddle at Macushla Brewing, a small brewery in suburban Glenview that stands testament each day to a family’s resilience.
With her hair pulled back into a ponytail behind her ball cap, sweat forming at her temples, Megan Welch stirred as brewmaster David Kelley hoisted and poured the grain. During a lull in the brewing, she sat down to do the payroll. Then she began removing the chairs from the tabletops to prepare for the day’s customers.
“I’ve learned that I’m stronger than I thought I was. But there are moments when I don’t feel that strong,” said Welch, 41, tugging down the brim of her cap and wiping away tears with the back of her knuckles.
“It’s really hard to do it without him, but I don’t really have a choice.”
Almost exactly one year ago, Mike Welch opened Macushla as a second act after years of toiling at the Chicago Board of Trade. He named it Macushla, a Gaelic term of endearment that means “my pulse,” for his
“Now we have a job to do. We have these kids to raise and a brewery to take care of.” — Mary Welch, mother of Macushla Brewing’s late founder, Mike Welch, father of a teenage daughter and son
daughter. Stenciled on each pint glass is a heart with arteries branching out like tree roots.
Then on April 17, Mike died in his childhood home in Glenview of a heart attack caused by an undiagnosed enlarged heart. He left behind his wife and their two teenage children, Grace and Louie; his mom and brother; and hundreds of friends and family with Mike Welch stories still burning in their minds.
Macushla Brewing continues on, but it hasn’t been easy, particularly for Megan Welch, who has had to learn how to run both a business and a family while grieving her husband of almost 15 years.
“It was not my passion. It was Mike’s passion, for sure,” she said. “But I loved doing it with him and building it together. And I hope to see it grow and expand.”
No guarantee of success
Opening a microbrewery is an arduous undertaking with no guarantee of success. The market for craft beer has become saturated, though the number of tap rooms continues to grow. Consumers have an expanding number of options, making it difficult for a newcomer to stand out.
But Michael Francis Welch — doting father, aspiring farmer, music lover — was passionate about beer, say those who knew him best.
“He’d make me laugh. He’d swirl and swish and smell and then he’d take a sip and be like, ‘I think this is the best one yet.’ … I wish he’d been a vintner instead,” quipped his mother, Mary Welch.
A former baseball standout at Loyola Academy, Welch attended Marquette University and proceeded to work as a bond trader at the Chicago Board of Trade for about 15 years. Some of those years he spent in the now-closed open outcry trading floor, where his athleticism helped him excel.
Welch also home-brewed beer, and at the age of 39, he considered a bold new direction as the stress of trading increasingly outweighed the financial benefit.
He did so with his wife’s support, though it meant selling their house and moving in with Mike’s family in Glenview until Macushla was up and running.
“I was nervous, but I almost pushed him into it more. I was so ready to be done with trading. … It was scary, but it was exciting and a relief,” Megan said of the 2014 transition.
Mike wasn’t starting from scratch. He was a fourth-generation member of the family that founded Hackney’s, a longtime family restaurant with two Glenview locations and one in Palos Park. His grandfather Jim Masterson and grandmother Marcella bought Hackney’s from his great-great-uncle Jack Hackney in 1939.
Hackney’s is still owned by Mary Welch and her six siblings and their families.
Mike Welch opened Macushla across the parking lot from Hackney’s on Lake Avenue in Glenview.
There, in a small building that used to be the laundry facility for the restaurant, he began to draw on his family’s history for inspiration.
“I think maybe out of gratitude, but also out of marketing, too, once he decided he was going to be here, all the beers were named after our grandpa or grandma. … He had this kind of vision, tying into beer’s nostalgia,” said cousin Marcella Landri, 28, who has worked as a bartender and assistant brewer at Macushla.
Take Chalk Eater IPA, for example, which Welch named in honor of his grandfather, Jim Masterson, who as a boy recorded bets on a chalkboard in the Prohibition era. According to family lore, the boy was instructed to eat the chalk if the cops showed up.
In the early months after Macushla opened last August, Welch acted as assistant brewer, in addition to his other roles, and collaborated with then-head brewer Eric Plata on creating recipes and brewing beer.
In early April, Plata put in his two-week notice to take another brewing job elsewhere that offered health benefits for his family, he said. Welch planned to assume the primary brewing duties.
On April 16, the two men brewed all day together, working on a batch of Hoppy Wheeze, a hopheavy American wheat beer, as Plata trained Welch on how to manage the system. “He was unbelievably excited,” said Plata, who’s now brewmaster at Midnight Pig Tap Room in Plainfield. “He did run that last beer all by himself.”
Welch went home that night and ate dinner, pork chops made by his mother, with his wife and kids.
He died in his sleep that night.
The next morning, bartender Kevin Davoren began receiving texts, quickly followed by a call from Pat Welch, Mike’s brother, who told him that, yes, Mike had died. Pat also asked Davoren to open the brewery.
“I never thought it would be a good decision to say, ‘Hey, guess what, Mike’s gone, we’re closing.’ That doesn’t make sense to me and wouldn’t make sense to him,” Pat Welch recalled.
The business of brewing
For weeks after Mike’s death, his phone remained locked until his son Louie correctly guessed the password, Megan Welch said.
And then there was his email and other accounts to access, tax and licensing forms to file, loans and bills to pay to keep Macushla afloat. Megan also had to hire a new brewmaster in the wake of Plata’s departure.
She credits Pat and Mike’s cousins for helping her navigate those challenges, as well as David Kelley, the new head brewer, and the rest of the Macushla team. That the brewery kept its regular hours, even extra hours, is proof of their effort.
“I remember standing on this porch and all of them (Mike’s brother and cousins) hugging me and saying, ‘Don’t worry. We’ve got you. Don’t think twice about it.’ And they’ve helped me every step of the way,” said Megan, on the back patio of Mike’s mother’s house.
Pat Welch deflects the credit right back to her.
“How did he approach his books? His brewing? His recipes? When did he pay his licenses? When did he file for this and sign up for that? … We had to get stuff unlocked and when I say we, I mean she. She was alone for a lot of it, as much as you want to help,” Welch said.
There’s also the hardship that has nothing to do with business. Megan, soft-spoken and introverted, preferred to be behind the scenes even before Mike died. It’s even harder for her now to be the face of Macushla. On May 16, they would have celebrated their 15th wedding anniversary.
“I see her leave every single day in the deepest of her grief and go over there,” Mary Welch said.
When Mike and his family relocated to his mother’s house last summer, it meant moving back onto the property adjacent to Hackney’s on Harms Road where he grew up. A hop vine that he planted climbs to the roof of the house; another sprawls to the ground in a robust tangle along the restaurant’s northern fence.
Mary recalled how once, when Mike was 2 years old, he escaped his mother’s sight and scampered naked to the restaurant’s patio. He was coaxed back but not before snatching a cherry from a woman’s drink.
The three women — Mike’s mother, daughter and wife — laughed together at the family tale. Living with one another has given them comfort.
“I would like to be around for a little while so I can be a witness and see them grow and know that it wasn’t in vain, that all is right and that there are no mistakes,” said his mother, her voice fighting through swells of emotion.
“Now we have a job to do. We have these kids to raise and a brewery to take care of.”
A hard week
Davoren, the bartender who knew Mike Welch since they were teenagers at Loyola, arrived at Macushla at around 11 a.m. on the morning of Mike’s death.
“It was almost immediate that family and friends were coming over. That was really hard,” said Davoren, who worked 12- to 14-hour shifts with fellow bartender Zoe Haracz throughout the week.
Macushla sold a lot of its beer — nearly all of it, in fact — in that week leading up to Mike’s funeral on Saturday at Our Lady of Perpetual Help Catholic Church in Glenview. The Rev. Jim Barrett, a longtime friend of Megan’s family who gave the homily at the funeral Mass, recalled having some difficulty entering the church because it was so crowded.
“You don’t get a funeral with a thousand people if you’re a big idiot,” Barrett said.
Mike Welch is often remembered as “authentic” by those who loved him. He was kind. He was charming in an understated way, they say. People were drawn to him.
“He was a bit of a dreamer, and I mean that in the good sense,” Barrett said.
The funeral party ended up at Macushla that night, the parking lot filled with throngs of well-dressed mourners. In an email to Macushla regulars that week, Marcella Landri quoted from the movie “It’s a Wonderful Life” in honoring her cousin.
“Strange, isn’t it? Each man’s life touches so many other lives. When he isn’t around he leaves an awful hole, doesn’t he?”
‘He’s with me’
On a recent Friday night, Macushla Brewing rumbled to life. A few dozen patrons filled the brewery with the warm clamor of conversation and clinking of pint glasses, and the songs of Tom Petty and the Rolling Stones spilled onto the patio where customers sat beneath the strands of lights on the pergola. A towheaded boy smelled his dad’s beer and scrunched up his nose. An elderly woman on her way to Hackney’s peered into the fledgling brewery, perhaps wondering what exactly it was.
Some were clearly regulars who knew Mike. “He just had this quiet coolness,” said Joe Galo, 47, a longtime friend of both Welch brothers, as he stepped outside for a cigarette.
As he does every Friday night, Pat Welch tended bar. With his wry smile, dry wit and easygoing confidence, he knows he reminds people of his brother, who was two years younger. He doesn’t mind that. Some of the customers stopped to give him a fist bump or a handshake; he greeted them all with attentiveness, ready to fill their glasses.
“At first, it came in waves,” he said of the grief. “(Megan’s) waves are probably still crashing all over the place, where I’m looking to bring him along for the ride.”
Here, at Macushla, his brother is close.
“I like coming here. It’s another chance to pour his beers,” Pat Welch said. “I like to fill as many glasses as I can before I go home and then spend the rest of the weekend with my kids. He’s with me.”