RIVERWEST has found another excuse to raise a glass of its self-titled beverage. This year is the 20th anniversary of the beer that made a neighborhood famous: Riverwest Stein. Towards the end of 1987, commercial production began at the Lakefront Brewery, an operation that Ann Pogorelc of Tony’s Tavern in Walker’s point still refers to as “the Klisch boys from Riverwest.”

The Klisch boys are the brothers Jim and Russ, a cop and a chemist, both born and raised in Brown Deer, who found themselves as young adults sharing a house at 2951 Bremen Street in the early 80s. 

“We were living together and all,” explains Russ to one of the daily tours at Lakefront’s current Commerce Street headquarters, “and I was eating his cooking, which wasn’t that good, so how good could his beer be?”

The Beer that made Riverwest Famous

Turned out to be not that bad, which convinced Russ to do some yeastly experiments of his own. Pretty soon Carson Praefke, who’d grown up next door to the Klisches in Brown Deer, was drinking and brewing along ith them. “It was the brewery that brought me to Riverwest,” recalled Praefke on a recent rainy afternoon over coffee at the Riverwest Co-op. “Jim kinda proved that you could home brew and have it taste good. I’d had home brew before, but nothing drinkable.”

Riverwest Stein, a recipe based on some of Jim’s early tinkering, was first sold at the Gordon Park Pub, at the current site of Nessum Dorma. “One day Jim came in,” recalled Steve Johnson, who opened the Gordon Park Pub back in ’82, “and said that Russ had been winning prizes for his beer recipes at the State Fair, and they wanted to go commercial.”

According to Praefke, that desire was directly inspired by the larger economic forces all around them: “At the time Schlitz was closing, and Pabst was going through merger talks. We were losing local ownership of breweries. If somebody started a brewery owned by Milwaukee people, it would sell a lot of beer.”

“They were right on the cutting edge of the microbreweries,” reasoned Jim Linneman, owner of Linneman’s, still one of the biggest sellers of Lakefront products, “and the tail end of the big breweries.”

“We kinda kicked it around over a few beers a few times,” remembered Praefke, “and once we heard about the microbreweries starting up on the west coast… In Seattle they were using old dairy equipment, and that’s when the light bulb went off for us – because Wisconsin is full of old dairy equipment – that we could really do this.”