Bittercube will add a bar in move to west side

Bittercube, the bittersmaking company and cocktail consultant, will move from the south side to the west side of Milwaukee to increase its production space and open a bar and a store.

It’s moving to 4828 W. Lisbon Ave., into a onestory midcentury building. The site is triple the size of Bittercube’s space in Lincoln Warehouse, 2018 S. First St., a fivestory building that houses a distillery, brewery and other businesses, including artists’ studios.

“We outgrew the space,” said Ira Koplowitz, the company’s cofounder. “We’re kind of stumbling over ourselves. It’s full of product and pallets” at the current site.

Bittercube will rent the entire 8,700-square-foot building on Lisbon, which is in the Sherman Park neighborhood near the edge of the Washington Heights neighborhood. It’s a block north of West North Avenue and about a mile from Wauwatosa, where numerous restaurants and other businesses have opened along North Avenue in recent years.

About 6,500 square feet of the Lisbon building will be used for production, storage and offices for the company, which had $1.6 million in national and international sales in 2017.

That leaves the rest for a bar that would be open on weekends, at least initially, and a small shop where Bittercube could sell its eight varieties of bitters used for cocktails. It also would sell a new line of what the company calls cocktail elixirs, to which customers add spirits to make cocktails.

For example, a Margarita elixir could contain orange and lime oils, sugar and other ingredients such as lemongrass or vanilla. The buyer then adds tequila to make a drink at home. The company has more than 20 formulas for its elixirs.

Bittercube currently sells the elixirs only to bars and restaurants.

The shop also will sell items such as tonics, bar tools including shakers and jiggers, cocktail books and company Tshirts. It might sell some select spirits by the bottle.

The bar would be open Friday and Saturday nights and possibly Thursday nights. It still would make its own liqueurs, as it did when the company’s Dock18 speakeasy operated in Lincoln Warehouse, but it would use a wide variety of spirits in the new location.

A large area for public parking is across Lisbon Avenue, near the District 3 police station.

Remodeling at the new site will begin next week. If all goes smoothly, production could start as soon as Aug. 1, the bar could open in mid-August and the shop at the end of August. Bittercube also would have tours on Saturdays and Sundays.

Koplowitz said he had been looking for a bigger site for Bittercube for the past six months in Milwaukee’s Bay View, Walker’s Point and other neighborhoods. He finally viewed the west side building at an employee’s suggestion.

“I had the feeling like I had the first time I walked into Lincoln Warehouse,” Koplowitz recalled. “It felt like home.”

He liked that it’s in an active business improvement district, called Up- town Crossing, and that the area has businesses such as the coming-soon Vennture Brew Co., about seven blocks away, giving the neighborhood energy, he said. The rent, he added, “is not as crazy” as in Bay View or Walker’s Point.

To be a business newly investing in the neighborhood is “an exciting thing for us,” Koplowitz said.

“It provides us an opportunity to do something really cool in this neighborhood,” he added.

Koplowitz said the company is on track to increase its sales 40 percent this year.

A deal is being negotiated that could allow distribution of the company’s bitters throughout the European Union in the next few months, he said. The bitters already are sold in Italy, Canada and Australia, in addition to about 30 U.S. states and the District of Columbia.

Bittercube has 14 fulltime employees, including three in Minneapolis, where co-founder Nick Kosevich lives. Several more employees are parttimers who represent Bittercube at product demonstrations and events.

The company expects to add two to four employees in its move to the west side, Koplowitz said.