Kristine M. Kierzek

Amorphic Beer co-owner Ron Hockersmith doesn’t like to be bored. That’s probably a good thing for beer drinkers in Milwaukee.

Hockersmith had spent decades working in office settings, brewing beer at home after hours to stay busy. In 2021, brewing became his full-time gig when he and two partners, Alan Willhite and Joe Broeckert, opened Amorphic at 3700 N. Fratney St. 

A Czech dark lager was the first thing they brewed, and it is a style that remains a staple along with sours and seltzers. Some of the brews bear names that may appeal to space fans, like Silentbarker and Artemis Orange — nods to Hockersmith’s long-ago aspirations to be an astronaut.

Barrel-aged beers will take center stage on Black Friday, when the brewery opens at 10 a.m. for special releases. The brewery also will mark its two-year anniversary Dec. 9 with new beer releases plus Pizza Ortolana and Romero’s Mexican on site, live music from Wave Chapelle, Floor Model, Secret Menu and Thick Needles.   

Amorphic Beer is also part of the Riverwest Brewing Syndicate, which offers a neighborhood shuttle service between five local breweries from 2 to 7 p.m. Saturdays. The shuttle also will operate on Black Friday this year.  

Hockersmith recently talked about his background and Amorphic.

How an Arizona native became a brewer in Milwaukee

I grew up in Arizona, went to undergrad there and worked at an aerospace company. I got bored and went to California Institute of Technology in Pasadena. … I chased a job and a lady to Milwaukee, worked at GE Healthcare. That’s where I met the two other owners of Amorphic, Alan and Joe. Joe still works at GE. Alan is here with me today. We run the place. 

I liked Milwaukee so much I decided to stay. I like the support of the friends I have here. … I also wanted to be in control of my own situation each day instead of answering to someone else. I was “early retired” for about a month, but I fixed everything there was to fix on my old 1902 Victorian. My life partner told me I needed to get a job. I ended up working at Company Brewing for about a year. 

When I moved here from California in 2003, the beer scene in Milwaukee was not up to par with the West Coast. I struggled to find beer I wanted to drink. I was flying to California and loading suitcases and bringing them here. I started home brewing. 

I wasn’t the normal home brewer. I probably did more complexities, and now we do that at Amorphic but with scaling that I learned at Company. The guys I worked with at GE, we used to joke about starting a brewery. I said yes.

Building on local history

This is actually the building that in 1915 was A.H. Petersen and Company, making the first hand drill for Henry Ford. It later became Milwaukee Tool. They moved in 1923 because of a fire, but there is a lot of neat history in the building. 

Why Riverwest is the right spot for this brewery

We looked at Bay View, where I live, and Walker’s Point and Riverwest, where there are already great entertainment options, food and drink. On Fridays, that’s where I was going: Bay View, Walker’s Point or Riverwest. 

We met the guy who became our landlord. He had bought the building and always wanted to have a brewery. He put in the glass garage doors. There was an industrial sewing company that made wet suits here. … We walked in, the Cream City brick was covered in lead paint. It looked like a dump, but we could see it would work. It had a floor drain, the guts were here. … We spent seven months building it out. 

The basics of the brewery

We have a 10-barrel brewhouse and a half-barrel brewhouse to try out new things. We’ve made 120 batches of beer so far since we opened.

How they chose the first beer they sold to customers

The first we made on a commercial scale, not an experimental one, it was strategic. We didn’t pick it because it was our favorite, we picked it because it was a style that is good at hiding flaws. … The first thing we ever made was a Czech dark lager. It has that dark roasty flavor. If it is sweeter or drier, it will still work. If you burn the crap out of the wort because you’re still learning the burner, it might actually make the beer a little better. … The third batch of beer we made was a light beer and it got way over caramelized. That’s how we learned.

The first beer he made at home

What I was craving was hops. I’ve always been a hop head. … When I came here, I don’t think Lakefront or New Glarus even had an IPA. So the first thing I made, today we’d call it a West Coast IPA, but back then we just called it an IPA. Then I learned over the next 15 years that I didn’t like the bitterness. I liked the citrusy and floral and sometimes fruity of the hops. By 2006 and 2007 I was making IPAs that were citrus- and fruit-forward. I called one an oatmeal pale ale. Today they call that a hazy IPA. That’s what I made at home most of the time. 

Funky fun with fermentation 

We do have a series here now, our third one so far, where we use our French wine barrels. It spends about a year in the wine barrels with wild yeast and bacteria. Our barrel-aged, wild-fermented beers are super funky and not too tart, which is what I like. 

His Arizona roots in a Milwaukee brew

The second beer we ever made, I wanted a beer that was bright pink and reminded me of home. In my Arizona front yard we had cacti and hibiscus flowers. We developed a beer that was a prickly pear, cactus fruit, and hibiscus sour. I was trying to make a fruited sour I would actually like. It was called “And the Horse You Rode In On,” and we were amazed at how well that sold. 

Sweet science, and why their beers are vegan

Things are changing even now, but in our first year about half our sales were IPA. People like to rip on them, but it still sells. Then it is about 25% Czech lagers and about 25% sours. 

We’ve been learning. Milwaukeeans like sweet beer. Some breweries use lactose, the sugar from milk … We try to make everything vegan, so we don’t use lactose. We try to not use artificial things, so nothing like maltodextrin, either.

How sours and seltzers became big sellers

We were surprised at how much Milwaukee liked the fruited sours we were making. Now we always have one, sometimes two, on tap. 

We always have seltzers. We were getting Untitled Art from Madison. We were selling so much that we started (making and) selling our own. That has been a pretty big hit, almost as much as the IPA actually. Ours are nothing like “the claw,” as we say on our menu. We wanted vegan, and made a coconut and orange. It tastes like Orange Julius like you’d get at the mall. If you want the seltzer because of the 50-calorie can, ours definitely has more. But people like them. 

Right now we have a fall-themed seltzer, apple cranberry and candied ginger. A fun fact: We name all of our seltzers after rockets and rocket things. 

His approach to hops

I don’t get invited to Yakima (Washington) to fly out and pick the hops we want. We aren’t big enough and never will be, but we have found the hops matter a ton, especially in an IPA and especially a Czech lager, which is more hoppy than a German lager. I have dozens of questions before I purchase hops. … For example, the Wisconsin IPA Fest at Third Space this year, we decided we wanted to win. So what’s going to differentiate an IPA? I spent a whole month picking the hops I wanted, and spent extra money to get it. We put in the best hops we could possibly get. It won People’s Choice at Third Space’s Wisconsin IPA Fest. Hops matter.

Barrel-aged for Black Friday

Last year we made our first barrel-aged beer. We didn’t do anything too fancy. We were still learning the barrel-aged process. I liked it a lot, some good bourbon flavor. We did divert one keg into a pilot brewery and aged it on top of toasted coconut. That batch was 40 times better, so this year we have a bunch on top of toasted coconut aged in Heaven Hill bourbon barrels.

Any way you slice it, their approach is different

We have a cucumber gin botanical kolsch beer made with about 50 pounds of cucumbers we slice. No one wants to come help at the brewery that night. 

Special anniversary brews and food

For the anniversary party (on Dec. 9), we’ve got one new beer and we’re bringing back two favorites. … One is Dumbbell Indemnity, it is the name of a “Simpsons” episode. Homer goes to a fancy restaurant with Mr. Burns, he orders the first most expensive thing on the menu stuffed with the second most expensive. So this beer has Riwaka hops, the most expensive in the world, from a region in New Zealand. 

We’re bringing back Artemis Orange, the hard seltzer that tastes like Orange Julius. Then we have a new one. I usually try to brew things as low alcohol as possible but still get all the flavors, but we made our first triple IPA, with Nectaron, Motueka, and then Mosaic Cryo, a concentrated hop. That will be around 10.5% alcohol in an IPA.

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