We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Rich Bloomfield a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Hi Rich, thanks for joining us today. Alright, so you had your idea and then what happened? Can you walk us through the story of how you went from just an idea to executing on the idea?

So, there was a brainstorming session and an agreement with the other co-founders and my lifelong friends (Greg & Zack) that opening a brewery is going to be the direction we pursue. With no prior industry experience or any link to a craft beer community, we didn’t have the clearest of direction. In the early phase, we would grasp at anything looking for a handle on something that felt like progress.

We first came up with the name Funkytown Brewery, then defined the values, identity, and culture we wanted to create. Two of our identified values were quality and integrity, which led us to homebrew beer with the goal or learning the ins & outs of the process, making great beer that our friends and family love to drink, and growing continuously in the field. We put our money together and purchased homebrewing equipment, attended a couple fundamental homebrew sessions at the local homebrew supply store and started to brew beer frequently. Brewed a bunch of bad beer batches that tasted like nothing early on, but that only encouraged us to investigate what went wrong and try again. We considered that process Research & Development (R&D), and continue to homebrew to this day. Drinking beer is also considered R&D, I’d like to add.

While homebrewing became routine, we searched for information on developing a business plan for a brewpub, researched the origin stories of other breweries and owners, and developed our own creative ideas of things we’d like to see in the beer space. We kept up with the current happenings and trends in the industry. We visited breweries, brewpubs, and festivals in search of insight and information. In 2019, we attended FreshFest Beerfest in Pittsburgh, PA, which was the only Black craft beer festival in the country at the time. The festival was great, from the panel discussions, the networking opportunities, live entertainment, and premium beer, it all meshed and provided clarity and hope for the vision that we had for craft beer.

From the initial idea to launching our first beer into market took a little over four years. Consistently homebrewing, building out our business plan and networking put us in good position to seize the opportunity to “go pro” when it emerged.

As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your background and context?

We’re Funkytown Brewery, the newest, freshest, funkiest Black-owned brewery in Chicago, Illinois. A brewery dedicated to creating a diverse cultural atmosphere that surrounds craft-beer newcomers and enthusiasts alike. We brew premium craft beer focusing on widespread palatability, low bitterness, and low astringency to introduce underserved demographics to the market without turning their palate off; while also treating the craft enthusiast to a creative, quality beer brewed with a homebrewer’s spirit.

We brew beer because we love it and we know that if more black people, women, and minorities are provided a warm introduction, they’ll find a spot for it in their libations rotation like we did – and expand the industry. Unlike other services or industries, we can build the brand identity on the shared characteristics and experiences of the founders like our love of Hip-Hop and R&B, retro video games, sneakers, fashion, travel and HBCU’s. We can provide perspective on growth, adaptability, diversity & inclusion, self-care, creativity, and originality. We can stay true to our authentic selves.

We’d love to hear a story of resilience from your journey.

Coming from a community where craft beer wasn’t marketed, distributed, or brewed, I can’t say we received much information from our community on what next steps were as we started building on the idea. This is not to say that we didn’t have support, because we absolutely did, but we weren’t able to build the beer network and next steps from our community due the unfamiliarity with premium, locally made craft beer. The lack of diversity in the industry leads to not only a lack of representation on the production, distribution, and consumption side of craft beer, but also a lack of information to share which also works as a barrier into the industry.

Craft beer is such a known commodity, but it felt so unknown as we tried to understand the industry from the production side. We started building our beer community early by sharing updates on our homebrew sessions and providing samples from time to time. Even though we were making progress and growing our understanding of craft beer, it seems as if we went for long bouts of time without being able to provide any meaningful updates to the people that were supporting us. All the founders have decent jobs, so we could’ve easily let homebrewing become a hobby and put the professional aspirations aside. It would have been easy to quit because our community is not a part of the craft beer scene anyway. Nobody would’ve noticed that a new Black-owned craft beer brand didn’t launch. Luckily with each slight success we’d find the motivation to keep pushing forward.

Can you talk to us about how you funded your business?

We would have never put together the initial capital to fund the size of the Funkytown Brewery dream. We thought we would just take a good idea and good beer recipe to a banker to get the money we needed. Luckily, we discovered a brewery incubator called Pilot Project, which looks to lower the barriers to entry. Once we learned of that entry point, we set up our business checking account and began to deposit money into it every month. We received a business credit card with a tiny line of credit that we used to purchase homebrew equipment and graphic design for our logo and labels. We didn’t touch the money we deposited to our checking account and paid a set amount to our credit card each month. This isn’t much, but it allowed us to file tax returns and list our small business expenses and start building a history. This tax history allowed us to qualify for a business line of credit loan. That helped us cover larger expenses and throw a dope launch party! When things got tight with our credit, we had the cash reserves in our checking account to rely on. It was a pressure situation; but we found a way to bootstrap the funding once we discovered a reasonable entry point into the industry.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.funkytownbeer.com
• Instagram: @funkytown_brewery
• Facebook: www.facebook.com/funkytownbrewery.chicago
• Linkedin: www.linkedin.com/company/funkytown-brewery
• Twitter: @funkytown_brew
• Other: Tik-Tok: @funkytown_brewery

Image Credits
One image has “Chitribune” in the file name. That photo if used should be credited to the Chicago Tribune