When Lion’s Tail Brewing opened its Wauwatosa taproom in 2022, the brewery downstairs was still largely a plan for the future.

The North Avenue location occupied a pair of former retail buildings that had housed a garden center and pet store. The site was walkable, embedded in a neighborhood and close enough to Milwaukee to draw weekend visitors. Alex Wenzel says Lion’s Tail now sells more beer there than at its original taproom in Neenah.

But from the beginning, the renovation also had to make room for something Lion’s Tail was not ready to fully use yet: another brewery.

When Galbraith Carnahan Architects renovated the 4,653-square-foot property, the existing complex consisted of two separate buildings divided by a parking lot. The parking lot became a semi-enclosed beer garden. A new connector joined the buildings, housed bathrooms, provided ramps across a 16-inch change in elevation, and completed the courtyard. Large overhead doors connected the taproom to a covered patio, while murals carried art across the interior and exterior.

The existing buildings also had to accommodate brewing equipment.

A section of the floor was cut away on three sides so the stainless-steel equipment below could remain visible from the taproom above. Wenzel specifically credited GCA with helping Lion’s Tail work through that part of the renovation.

“They were a big help, especially with the floor cut,” he said. “That was a big part of the project—working together to figure out how to do it.”

The brewing operation now occupying that space did not arrive all at once.

“When we opened this location, we weren’t sure how much we’d consume,” Wenzel said. “We kind of eased into it.”

Lion’s Tail continued relying on its Neenah brewery, which Wenzel said can produce roughly 2,000 to 2,500 barrels per year—enough to supply the company’s taprooms and distribution.

Eventually, Lion’s Tail reached that limit.

“We just hit our capacity up in Neenah,” Wenzel said. “That’s why we started brewing here.”

He had thought that point would come sooner.

“I thought it’d happen a little sooner, but the craft beer market hasn’t been great,” he said. “We’re taking our time, but it’s tough out there right now.”

The distinction matters.

Lion’s Tail is not a new brewery trying to figure out whether it has a market. Wenzel describes it as a “big little brewery.” He estimates the company sits around the top 10 percent of breweries in the United States by production, while remaining small enough to face a very different economy than the large producers it competes with.

Those larger breweries can use much bigger tanks and equipment to lower the cost of the beer they send into distribution. Lion’s Tail cannot compete at that scale in the same way. Wenzel said about half of the company’s sales are external, with the rest coming through its taprooms.

“We have a hard time competing as a smaller brewery,” he said.

Major investments therefore happen in stages.

That is still evident in Wauwatosa.

For now, Lion’s Tail handles the grain and initial brewing in Neenah. The brewed wort comes south in 300-gallon containers, where locally sourced water and yeast are added, and fermentation continues in Wauwatosa.

After fermentation, the beer moves into horizontal lagering tanks below the taproom. It is eventually transferred to a bright tank and kegged. Lion’s Tail’s canning line remains in Neenah, so some finished beer still makes the trip back north.

“It’s a little back and forth,” Wenzel said. “It’s not meant to be a permanent solution.”

A kettle and mash tun are planned for Wauwatosa so the brewery can eventually brew from grain there. Wenzel also expects to add a canning line in the future.

In the meantime, the Wauwatosa space has given Lion’s Tail somewhere to expand beyond Neenah’s production limit—and somewhere to specialize.

“We kind of figured out what our space here would be good at making,” Wenzel said.

For beer, the answer is lager.

The horizontal lagering tanks fit within the lower level of the Wauwatosa building and allow Lion’s Tail to hold beer cold for an extended period, following a traditional German approach. Wenzel said lagers produced in Neenah had typically taken about a month. With more tank space and larger tanks in Wauwatosa, he can extend the process.

“Here we’ve got more tank space and bigger tanks, so we can take two and a half months and really take our time,” he said.

For Wenzel, the additional time is part of the point.

“We rush things here, and not just at this brewery but in America generally,” he said. “The Germans take their time. That’s what we’re trying to do here—be a little bit more authentic.”

Once the beer reaches the lagering tank, Wenzel said it can spend a month or two at 32 degrees. The cold allows yeast to go dormant and suspended material to settle, leaving the beer clearer, while the extended conditioning is intended to produce a smoother, cleaner flavor.

The first beer coming out of the Wauwatosa brewery is Good Life.

It is a golden lager based on a German Helles, but not a strict copy. Wenzel described it as an Americanized version of the style, pulling back some of the heavier malt and sulfur character while keeping the German influence.

The recipe uses both American and imported German Pilsner malt, along with German hops.

On August 24, Wenzel was already thinking about the next batch.

That is where the water comes in.

Before becoming a professional brewer, Wenzel worked as a chemical engineer. His background is in water chemistry, which he describes as one of the parts of brewing he “geeks out about.”

“How can I manipulate the water to change how a beer tastes or what it feels like in your mouth?” he said.

That question matters especially for the German-style lagers he wants to make in Wauwatosa.

The local water is relatively hard. Wenzel wants the softer mouthfeel he associates with lagers from places such as Munich and Bohemia, so he alters the water chemistry himself.

He treats the water to remove calcium, magnesium, and carbonate. The minerals react, settle to the bottom of the tank, and are drained away, leaving softened water above for brewing. During the August 24 tour, a tank was already going through that process in preparation for another batch later that week.

Wenzel had softened the water for the first batch, too.

He still wanted to take it further.

“That’s the one thing that bothers me about this first batch is that I didn’t get the water soft enough,” he said.

Then he immediately qualified it.

“I really like it,” he said. “But, for the little tweak I want to make for next time, I want to get that water even softer.”

Good Life takes about 70 to 75 days to make, according to Wenzel. The second batch was scheduled to begin that Wednesday, and the changes he was considering were small enough that he did not expect most customers to notice them.

He would.

That chance to repeat a beer is part of what interests him.

For roughly a decade, Lion’s Tail built much of its brewing identity around variety. Wenzel said the company had often made a new beer every week. Some recipes were brewed once and then left behind.

The tradeoff, Wenzel explained, is that a one-off beer gives a brewer no next batch to refine. With a beer made repeatedly, the process changes. Each batch becomes an opportunity to adjust what came before. Wenzel compared it to European breweries that have spent generations refining the same family recipe until it becomes, as he put it, “the perfect version of itself.”

That does not mean Lion’s Tail has stopped experimenting.

The company now has 43 employees, including three full-time brewers, according to Wenzel. His head brewer develops many of the recipes after the two talk through a concept, while department heads contribute ideas about styles, names and label designs.

Wenzel describes himself as the traditionalist in that group.

“I’m kind of a beer purist,” he said.

Different people on the team like different kinds of beer and bring ideas he would not necessarily pursue on his own.

“But it’s a business, not a hobby,” he said.

Experimentation also means accepting that not everything works.

Lion’s Tail uses a 10-gallon pilot system to test ideas before scaling them up, although Wenzel said small-scale brewing cannot perfectly reproduce what happens on the larger equipment.

It is still cheaper to lose 10 gallons than hundreds.

“As recently as a month ago, we had 600 gallons of beer down the drain,” Wenzel said. “When you’re trying new stuff and pushing the edges a little bit, sometimes you’re gonna fail.”

He has been working that way for years.

When Lion’s Tail began developing Juice Cloud in 2016, Wenzel said there was little information available about making the New England-style IPA he was trying to produce. He made 13 batches on the pilot system while working through the recipe.

Good Life comes from that same willingness to keep working at something, but with a different goal. Instead of chasing the next new beer, Wenzel wants the chance to return to the same one and make it better.

He was already planning a small change before the first batch had finished making its way to customers. The next would use softer water. The batch after that may change again.

Good Life gives him something a one-off beer cannot: another batch, another adjustment, and another 70 or 75 days to see what happens.

In that way, the beer has followed much the same path as the Wauwatosa brewery around it.