MillerCoors prepares for Gettelman move
Back brewery is nearly gone but house stands
The unwieldy smashed pieces of wood from the malt house look dangerously close to the 1856 farmhouse and original home of the Schweichart/Gettelman brewery.
The wrecking ball picks and chooses which parts to destroy. The idea is to keep the original house intact but to sweep away the back buildings of the 19th-century brewery on the MillerCoors campus at 4000 W. State St., to make room for additional truck and employee parking.
“As we committed to the Milwaukee Historic Preservation Commission, we will move the former Schweichart/Gettelman farmhouse to an area facing State Street adjacent to the Miller Visitor Center parking area,” MillerCoors Martin Maloney wrote in an email.
“Right now, we are performing all the work necessary to prepare for the move, which includes leveling parts of the building that are not the farmhouse,” he added. “The plan is to lift and move the building to its new location once the prep work is complete.”
The buildings were among the last few of the old Gettelman Brewery, established on Milwaukee’s west side where Gettelman once brewed $1000 Beer and Milwaukee’s Best. Others have been repurposed by MillerCoors.
Miller Brewing bought Gettelman in 1961 and operated it as a stand-alone brewery until about 1970, when production was folded into the rest of the Miller Valley campus.
The building was used for brewery engineering offices and as the sales and marketing offices of the Plank Road Brewery, which marketed Icehouse and Red Dog. The offices were abandoned in the 1990s.
Last fall, Milwaukee’s Common Council approved the designation of permanent historic preservation to a the original home portion of the Gettelman Brewery.
Maloney expects the move to occur in September.