Fifth Ward Takes the Next Step

Zach Clark of Fifth Ward Brewing Company is telling a story you don’t often hear these days from craft brewers. "I’m pretty confident that with how this phase of our growth is going that we could hit 2,000 barrels this year," Clark says. That would be a doubling of Fifth Ward’s 2022 production. In a market segment beset with uncertainty and sluggish growth, Fifth Ward is becoming an outlier.

Zach Clark (left) and Ian Wenger of Fifth Ward Brewing in Oshkosh.

The bullishness at Fifth Ward isn’t merely speculative. The brewery, which has self-distributed its beer since opening in 2017, recently signed distribution agreements with Triangle Distribution of Green Bay, and the Oshkosh-based Lee Beverage of Wisconsin. The partnerships will result in Fifth Ward’s beer being sold in half of the counties in Wisconsin by the end of summer. “This is the step that’s going to get us to the next level,” Clark says.

Taking that step required a few years of groundwork. Fifth Ward’s approach doesn't fit the model that most beer distributors find attractive. Instead of having three or four core brands going into the broader market, the brewery has built its foundation on a constantly changing selection of beers, releasing upwards of 50 different beers a year.

“That’s what kept us from going with a distributor,” says Ian Wenger, who along with Clark is a co-owner of Fifth Ward. “The distributors were telling us we’d have to narrow it down to a handful of beers. But that’s not how we built this. With Lee Beverage, they’d see us around town, going out into the market and talking to retailers and bar owners, so they sort of realized what we were about.”

“And as they started asking around, customers were telling them they wanted to get the new stuff,” Clark adds. “We're pushing the boundaries of distribution for sure, but a lot of this is customer driven.”

The beers those customers appear most interested in fall under the umbrella of Fifth Ward’s Frootenanny series, which accounts for about 30 percent of the brewery’s sales. The base for a Frootenanny is a light and tart ale that gets flavored with different combinations of fruits and other adjuncts to produce a unique beer. These were novel concoctions when Fifth Ward began selling them in 2018. The novelty may have worn off, but the customer appeal has only grown.

“The other day I was up in Green Bay at one of those little bars that has just a few taplines of light beer, and the buyer there told me she wanted to get a Frootenanny on tap,” Wenger says. “It’s finding its way into places like that now.”

The problem for Fifth Ward has been keeping up with the demand. Each beer the brewery produces takes approximately three weeks from brew day to packaging. Last summer, with their brewhouse pushed to its limit, Clark and Wenger found themselves running out of beer. Clark is adamant when he says “This summer we are not going to run out of beer.”

A $300,000 expansion of the brewery that began last year has quadrupled Fifth Ward's capacity. “When everything is in place, we’ll be able to get 4,000 barrels of beer out of here,” Clark says. The upgrade includes three, 35-barrel tanks that can both ferment and carbonate beer, a 30-barrel conditioning and packaging tank, and a new cooling system that helps shorten brewdays. In the wings are two 16-barrel fermentation tanks acquired through the dissolution of the Ale Asylum Brewery in Madison.

Fifth Ward is now the largest brewery in Oshkosh in terms of capacity. If Clark’s projections are correct the brewery will become the largest in Oshkosh in terms of production in 2023. The brewery and taproom has 10 employees in addition to Clark and Wenger. Clark says the next step is to hire a full-time salesperson and begin looking towards the Madison and Milwaukee markets.

“It’s always going to be a challenge,” Clark says. “It’s always going to be a lot of work. But I still think this is just the start.”

A slightly different version of this story appears in today's Oshkosh Herald.