Husband, wife brew beer at different Green Bay breweries, but homebrew together
He brews beer at Hinterland.
She brews beer at Titletown Brewing. Together Neil and Whitney Froelich brew beer at home. For fun.
For Neil, it’s a chance to use what he learned at Hinterland. The return of Hinterland’s Kozmic Kolsch motivated him to write his own recipe and brew a Kolsch-style beer at home.
For Whitney, it’s brewing “weird stuff” like her sushi-inspired beer named That’s How I Roll. She describes the beer as blonde ale base with Sorachi Ace Hops brewed with adjuncts like sushi rice, carrots, seaweed and little bit of toasted sesame seeds before being aged on cucumbers.
Neil said it’s his favorite beer brewed by Whitney. It also sparked the idea to use rice in his homebrewed double IPA that drinks like two of his favorites — big hoppy beers and big Belgian beers. Whitney said that double IPA is her favorite beer brewed by Neil to date. That’s big compliment from Whitney, who doesn’t like most IPAs.
She even has an IPA face, Neil teases, as the couple sit in their living room. Hanging in the dining room is a vision board for their own brewery — the next step into an unlikely journey into the craft beer industry.
Becoming brewers has been a trip to greater fulfillment.
Journey to homebrewing
Neil and Whitney started dating while attending Green Bay Preble High School.
“We’ve always done everything together. Which is strange,” Whitney said.
“I honestly think that’s got a lot to do with why our relationship works and why it’s lasted so long, is just because we do so many things together,” Neil said.
They worked together at Bay Tek Entertainment in Pulaski for nearly a decade.
She worked on graphic design and marketing for the ticket redemption game manufacturer.
He worked as a service technician. “I learned a lot about electronics in that job,” Neil said. “A lot of where I am today it wouldn’t have happened if I hadn’t taken that job.”
He used that experience to build control boxes for their recirculating infusion mash system, kegerator and keezer.
While amassing electronics knowhow at Bay Tek and other companies, Neil began drinking beers beyond domestic lagers like Miller Lite — a beer he still likes but “has its place.”
His admission draws a “blech” sound and face from Whitney.
Whitney didn’t like any beer until her late 20s. That changed during a Milwaukee Brewing Company tour.
“I was so surprised that I liked every single beer I tried,” she said.
As Whitney expanded her taste for beer on brewery tours, Neil wondered what it would it be like to work in a brewery.
His transformation into a bit of a homebrewing “mad scientist,” as Whitney says, began innocently enough.
“It started with one of those goofy Mr. Beer kits,” Whitney said. “I found one on clearance at Fleet Farm and I got it for him for his birthday.”
That was about seven years ago. How did that first batch turn out? “He was like, ‘this is the worst beer I’ve ever had, this is horrible,’” Whitney said.
Neil thought he could do better.
Brewery in the basement
Neil quickly moved through the typical homebrewing stages, from the stovetop to turkey fryer to a computer-aided design program that helped him build a vent hood in the basement, where he connected the home’s natural gas line to a burner.
OK, the last bit isn’t typical. But that home ingenuity helped Neil land a brewing job at Hinterland.
Whitney built their first mill with a table she found on Craigslist, a food bin from a restaurant supply store and other secondhand parts. It worked for a while, but last year they upgraded to a bigger motor and roller grain mill.
She was going to surprise Neil by building a keezer (a chest freezer converted to store kegs and dispense beer) but thought “he’d be disappointed if he didn’t get to participate in the process.”
They worked together and had fun building that piece of brewing equipment.
“A lot of enjoyment I get from homebrewing is building and designing and building my own stuff,” Neil said.
The keezer and kegerator (a converted refrigerator for dispensing beer) sit next to each other, both on homemade wooden carts with wheels so they can be moved for cleaning the floor underneath.
A video clip of the custom-built homebrew system during a chance meeting provided a much-needed change for Neil.
From home to full-time brewers
Neil was sleepworking through paperwork when he had a “What am I doing?” moment.
“Clearly this isn’t interesting to me anymore,” he said. “There are many other things I’d rather be doing with my time, like ... designing recipes, brewing beer, making something unique, being a part of a craft. I got to do something else.”
At the time, Whitney said, they were brainstorming ways to do their own thing. Like opening a brewery. She had a few “half-written” brewery business plans.
“I think that got us to thinking about going into commercial brewing,” Whitney said.
Whitney’s interest in beer led her to become head of the Green Bay chapter of Girls Pint Out. She organized the group’s first gathering since the start of COVID-19 at Hinterland. When owners Bill and Michelle Tressler joined the small gathering, she texted Neil to come talk with Bill.
Whitney showed Bill a video of the system Neil built.
“He was impressed, and Neil showed up and they disappeared into the brewery,” she said.
After returning from the the brewhouse, Neil told Whitney he thought he had an interview the following week.
It was to meet the rest of the team before starting his assistant brewer job at Hinterland in June 2021.
At the time, Whitney had left her job at Bay Tek and was working multiple part-time jobs.
Neil encouraged her to pursue a brewing job.
“Why don’t you take a chance? What have you got to lose? You have plenty of marketable skills. Try it out. See if you like it. If you hate it, oh well. Get a job what you were doing before. Everybody is hiring these days,” Neil said.
Whitney started helping with homebrewing. It wasn’t until she organized the Titletown Open homebrewing contest in 2018 that she decided to brew a beer of her own to enter in the contest.
She brewed a coconut porter. It wasn’t great, she said, but good enough to encourage her to brew more beers and eventually her sushi inspired beer.
While organizing the event, she met Jed Petrie, Titletown Brewing’s brewmaster.
Last year, she reached out to Petrie about working in the brewing industry, then interviewed with him and Scott Kraft, Titletown Brewing’s CEO.
She started at Titletown in September and has been given opportunities to do more than brew beer, including graphic design work and branding.
On the brewing side, she led a collaborative brew at Titletown for the Wisconsin chapter of the Pink Boots Society. The beer named Octavia White IPA honored Octavia Van Dycke, who owned O. Van Dycke Brewing from 1881 to 1908, by using a wheat base that replicated the brewery’s flagship weisse beer.
“I was excited they let me do that only a few months into my time job there,” she said.
The Octavia White IPA tap handle now adorns one of the tap lines in their kegerator at home.
Now they’re working at two different breweries.
“It’s interesting to talk about the differences between the breweries. We compare notes a lot,” Whitney said.
For Neil, getting the job at Hinterland was another piece of broadening his outlook on life.
“I struggled a lot over the years with self-confidence and just thinking I was never going to be good at anything,” he said. “That’s not the way to look at it. Even if you aren’t the greatest at something, give yourself a fair shake. Don’t give up. Have some confidence in your ability and it will take you very far.”