MobCraft Beer closing its doors in Woodstock, another loss for Old Courthouse

MobCraft Beer is the latest business to close inside the Old Courthouse in Woodstock.

The Milwaukee-based brewery has been for sale for the past several weeks, but its future after this week had been unclear.

Henry Schwartz, CEO and president of MobCraft, said the company had been working with several interested buyers, but those deals take time, and they still are working through negotiations.

“We, unfortunately, don’t have the runway to keep operating on our own past [Nov. 30], but if any of these deals work out, we hope to reopen as MobCraft (just under new ownership), or as a new concept if that’s what the new owners are interested in doing,” Schwartz wrote in an email to the Northwest Herald on Wednesday.

Schwartz said the company was looking forward to its Stout Fest and then the Lighting of the Square, both of which are happening Friday. The brewery then will have a final day in business and a “blowout sale” Saturday.

“We have had a complete blast serving the craft beer fans of Woodstock and beyond this past year and look forward to a last hurrah weekend,” Schwartz said.

The company also is shutting down its Milwaukee location in addition to the Woodstock one. Another location in Denver closed last year, less than a year after it had opened. MobCraft said on its website that the Denver location shut down “due to circumstances beyond our control, with our Denver lease and a myriad of unfortunate events.”

The company, which billed itself as a crowdsourced brewery, started in 2011 and moved to Milwaukee in 2016 after it had outgrown its space in Madison, Wisconsin, according to its website. The crowdsourcing concept involved people sending in their beer ideas several times a year. The ideas went up for a vote through customer pre-orders. The beer with the most pre-orders won, and then got brewed and was made available for pickup at the brewery, according to the website.

In Woodstock, similar to Public House – the restaurant in the Old Courthouse that abruptly closed earlier this year – MobCraft has a revolving loan with the city, which owns the Old Courthouse and is MobCraft’s landlord. MobCraft received a loan of $68,500 for brewery-related expenses last year, and the lease for the space was approved in October 2022.

The loan term was for seven years, and the monthly payments from MobCraft were about $905, with the first principal payment due starting in September 2023, according to city documents.

Danielle Gulli, the city’s executive director of business development, said the city has been showing the MobCraft space to potential tenants. She also said a letter was sent out Tuesday to MobCraft operators saying any assets used to secure the loan have to be left behind. She said MobCraft has been very cooperative during this process.

Mobcraft’s closure comes the same month that the Squire on the Square restaurant opened in the basement of the building, replacing Public House.

Public House also had a revolving loan with the city that covered COVID-19-related downtime and assistance to get it through the renovations of the Old Courthouse. The city approved a settlement with Public House in June, the terms of which included $75,000 plus interest and $161,000 of assets. It also put the process back in the city’s hands, and two months later, officials announced that Squire on the Square would be opening.

More departures followed Public House. Algonquin-based DIY crafts store Makity Make closed its Woodstock location in May, although the Algonquin location still is open. The Records Department record store quickly outgrew its space in the incubator located inside the Old Courthouse and moved to a larger space in downtown Woodstock this past summer.

Seleta Scents, the other incubator business, continues to operate inside the Old Courthouse. Other remaining original entities operating in the Old Courthouse include the Woodstock Area Chamber of Commerce and Industry offices and visitor center, and Events by Ethereal’s Courthouse Square.

“It has been an absolutely wild ride, and a really fun albeit short existence in Woodstock, and we appreciate every single customer that visited the taproom,” MobCraft said on its Facebook page Tuesday. “The community has been amazingly supportive from day one.”