Dan Abel founded Pilot Project Brewing in August 2019; a brewery incubator and tasting room in Chicago's Logan Square, one of the most welcoming neighbourhoods for the city's young creatives. When Pilot Project was set up there were more than 200 beer businesses in the wider Chicagoland area, but only about half of them had physical facilities due to the prohibitive cost. Dan and business partner Jordan Radke saw an opportunity to lower the barrier to entry for commercial brewing and give brewers the same opportunities that creatives in other industries have. Over the past 16 months, they've worked with a dozen breweries, with many “graduating”—as Dan puts it—to great success.

The brewery’s taproom reminds me more of a friend’s living room, or trendy coffee shop than a traditional drinking space, its walls clad with some eclectic work by local artists. I love its eclectic lineup of beers—from Spanish sangria and tea IPA, barrel-aged violet sours, to chai stouts and non-alcoholic CBD cider.

There’s also a warm welcome from the staff—you don't have to be a beer geek, or even know the difference between a lager and an IPA to enjoy yourself here. The playful, no boundaries, experimental atmosphere that Pilot Project fosters among their brewers naturally carries over to customers too. The beer list changes constantly, so there's always something novel to try.

Currently, Pilot Project is incubating five breweries, including their own label, Brewer's Kitchen, inspired by the team's food adventures while travelling. There's also Azadi Brewing, which is focused on incorporating Indian fruits, spices and flavours in beers, Odious Cellars specializing in fermentation with Brettanomyces, plus Histrionic Brewlab, and Dutchbag Brew Co., brewing mostly sour and wild beers. Dutchbag's Summer Kings was Pilot Project's best-selling beer last summer—a complex and fruit-forward double gose with strawberries, with a character reminiscent of a natural wine.

“It's not even a style,” Dan says. “It's essentially a saltier, higher ABV version of a regular gose. And he's using all these Nordic-style grains. He was outperforming everything with a style that nobody had ever heard of.”

Pilot Project's outdoor patio can seat about 100 people socially distanced, although the going has been tough during a freezing Chicago winter. They have erected four winter chalets to help protect guests from the elements, but look forward to the day the pandemic is over and they can welcome guests into their tasting room once more. Dan is already looking optimistically to the future, hoping to expand production facilities within Illinois and open two more incubator locations in Los Angeles and even in London, England.

I caught up with Dan over the phone last month to learn more about what inspired him to start Pilot Project, and how the business has evolved, having spent most of its existence so far through a global pandemic.

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Amber Gibson: What inspired your model at Pilot Project, and what do you think it brings to the beer industry?

Dan Abel: I grew up in the arts, music specifically, and as a musician, I had all these resources available to me. I could go to somebody else's recording studio and walk away with an EP. Brewing is a creative industry too. The idea that a talented young brewer would have to build their own recording studio in order to make their beer seems crazy. We wanted to build a “label and recording studio for brewers” so they can do this confidently with a lower barrier to entry. We're not just a contract brewer. We're working with them on their marketing, distribution, every facet of their business. so they can launch their business, watch it thrive, and take all of that data and logic and build their business elsewhere.

AG: How has your vision for Pilot Project Brewing evolved since you first opened your doors?

DA: When we first started, I was anticipating that we'd be cycling 25-30 breweries through here every year. What I learned very quickly—and this appeals a little more to my personal interests—is that we became a full-service agency and more intimate than I anticipated with the brands we are launching. I don't think I realised that I'd be joining investor meetings, helping them to secure business loans, and having as many branding conversations. That level of intimacy just developed naturally in really wanting to help these guys and gals get off the ground.

AG: Why is Chicago, and more importantly Logan Square, where you decided to put down Pilot Projects roots?

DA: Chicago has an extremely open-minded drinking culture. We're taking inspiration from both coasts and congealing them and doing things a little bit different here. I was based in Brooklyn prior to moving to Chicago for Pilot Project. I was drawn to the culture and the economics. Before we even opened there were more than 200 brewing operations in greater Chicago but only 100 had facilities. That stat was the perfect reason for why we needed to exist. You have all of these nomadic brewers that don't have the resources to have their own space, so how could we bridge that gap?

““I think American beer culture is setting trends, and if we’re leaning into more of an open-minded approach as to what beer is, then the rest of the world will follow.”
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— Dan Abel, Pilot Project

We almost wanted to lean into saturation. Perceived saturation is a myth that we wanted to debunk. Go to Sonoma or Napa, and there's a winery every two feet. Why would we have issues with six breweries in a neighbourhood? Logan Square had already proven itself as being a super vibrant beer neighbourhood and we found a location that we loved. We're in the heart of one of the three big beer areas in the city—there's also Malt Row in Ravenswood and then the West Loop/West Town area where Goose Island is. Logan Square has such a young, open-minded vibe, so that was perfect for us.

AG: What's a good example of a success story with one of the brands you work with?

DA: One of the first brands that we launched when we first opened was Luna Bay Booch, a hard kombucha company. They approached us in January 2019 in the midst of construction not even knowing what the timeline of our opening would be, and we got to spend nine months with them doing garage-style R&D. Trying to figure out how the hell to make hard kombucha and how do we differentiate it from what's out there already. Just doing the research to figure out how to do that was really special.

Their product, especially to the Midwestern market, was so novel, and it just exploded. It was cool to see these two women absolutely crush the game out of the gate. It gave us satisfaction to see a young upstart business thrive with our support and it also proved our concept. Pilot Project was a pilot project itself, we didn't know if what we were doing would work. We began distributing them nationally within a few months and graduated them in June of 2020. They are now producing at a contract brewery in Colorado and I imagine that they are doing 3,000-4,000 barrels a year. That's substantial to be doing that in your first 18 months of existence.

AG: What's an example of something that maybe hasn't done so well, and what have you learned from that?

DA: There are certainly styles that have underperformed, especially in the hazy IPA era because they're caught up in competition. With Odious Cellars, for example, everything that they make is incredible. The founder Reeve Joseph is a super impressive brewer with a crazy resume, brewing at Wicked Weed and Lagunitas before they both sold. He does barrel-aged sours and Brett fermented beers, but the unfamiliarity with Brett scares a lot of people unless they are truly beer nerds.

Pilot Project is like a microclimate and we can compare these breweries with each other. Odious Cellars is so unique and it drastically underperforms compared to brands creating hazy IPAs, but the technique and beauty of what they’re doing is so stylistically rich that it's kind of like an abstract painting. Not everyone is going to get it, but when you do get it, you're obsessed with it. It's not a failure by any means, but a clear way to showcase that in the market something as nuanced and specific as this style hasn't taken yet.

AG: What excites you the most in beer at the moment?

DA: The concept of our business is decentralisation. What I'm really excited about is that we as an industry are really looking at what fermented malt beverages [FMBs] are and throwing away all traditions. I've had so many people pitch us different ideas for something that falls under the FMB category but is so vastly different from anything you see in stores. Now with hard seltzers and hard kombuchas hitting the shelves, consumers are a touch more open-minded. I think American beer culture is setting trends, and if we're leaning into more of an open-minded approach as to what beer is, then the rest of the world will follow.

AG: How do you think the pandemic has changed the way we think about beer, both from an industry perspective and as consumers?

DA: From an industry perspective, we need to be smarter. Especially for small brewers who are so reliant on tasting room sales. You're probably packaging most of your product now and your margin is one-third of what it once was. We're having to be more intelligent with how we're brewing, and how we think about sustainability.

On the customer side, I think what's been more interesting is how drinking styles have changed as Covid has lasted longer. The first few months everyone was drinking more, they were drinking earlier in the day. They weren't necessarily paying as much attention to what they were putting in their bodies. A year on, I'm seeing a lot more customers thinking about beer and how it relates to their health. You're seeing non-alcoholic beers continue to increase, along with more hard kombucha, hard seltzer, and other lower-calorie alcoholic products.

AG: How do you think the tasting room experience will change post-pandemic?

DA: We just invested in two very expensive light units that are supposed to kill bacteria at a certain level so that something like Covid can't even exist in the air. But ultimately, I think there will be more formality to the tasting room experience. I really hope that the community component is not lost. Brewery tasting rooms used to be kind of like your college dorm, where the glassware didn't need to be that perfect and the floor didn't need to be that clean, but now tasting rooms are going to be as clean as a Michelin-star restaurant. Ordering and paying at the table takes away the personal touch and I think that's going to stick around for a long time, so I hope that breweries and staff find more creative ways to bring personal elements to the tasting room, so you can still live and feel the brand.

AG: What are your goals for expanding production and distribution in 2021?

DA: Very quickly we learned that we can only support brewers for so long. After that, you'll graduate and fly away like a butterfly. Well, shoot, after 12 months what if they just leave, and we want to keep working with them? For anyone who graduated, if they weren't going to brew their own beer they had to trust somebody else to make their product somewhere else. We have to either expand our production capacity here in Logan Square, or, if this is the incubator, then let's create an accelerator somewhere else. Because of the licensing we hold in the state of Illinois, it makes sense to expand here, and it will help us more readily distribute our brands across the United States.

If we have a production facility that can handle increased production from clients around the world, then let's have an incubator in LA and in London, and if our brewers want to continue to grow with us then we can handle their international distribution. The important thing in all of this is working with brands that are trying to make change in this industry and developing those ideas. We want to go to markets that are going to help stimulate that. The beer drinker in LA is so much different than the beer drinker in the Midwest and the beer drinker in London is even more different. That combination of old-world tradition with new world thinking excites me.