A brewery in the works for Oak Park is on hold indefinitely as the entrepreneur behind it, instead, focuses on his family.
Back in May, 38-year-old Oak Parker Brian Keyes told Wednesday Journal that he was trying to startup a small brewery in the village. Keyes estimated that he was 12 to 18 months from opening Off Key Brewing here or in Berwyn, but that timeline is no longer relevant.
Keyes announced last week that he crunched the numbers, and a “nano-brewery” (brewing about 300 kegs a year) just didn’t make financial sense.
“It became pretty clear to me quickly that I was never going to make enough money to be able to quit my fulltime job and pursue it on a fulltime basis,” he said.
Keyes, who’s been home brewing since his college days, recently welcomed his third child, Penelope, into the world. She was born with a congenital heart defect that has already required surgery, and likely will again in about five years.
So he’s hesitant to take a risk and quit his computer programming job to become a fulltime brewer, thus losing his health insurance. Recent health care reform might help, he said, but he’s worried about possible legal challenges in the future.
Keyes is shifting his attention to opening a full-scale production brewery somewhere down the line. But he said such an operation would be exceedingly difficult to bring to Oak Park because of the high cost of real estate and lack of available land.
“It would be really silly to do it in Oak Park because space is so expensive,” he said. “Rents are so, so high, and you need probably between 5,000 and 10,000 square feet to be able to produce enough beer to be profitable.”
Village hall has met with Keyes in recent months since the May article appeared in Wednesday Journal. He said officials seem most interested in attracting a brew pub here, a brewery attached to a bar and restaurant. But Keyes said he has no interest in running a kitchen. However, if the right restaurateur came along who was willing to partner up, he’d listen.
Village Manager Tom Barwin said he still hopes that Off Key Brewing will somehow come together in Oak Park. Officials have pushed for such an establishment here, and Barwin said they’re prepared to relax their ordinances and assist in finding a location.
Barwin said the previous community he managed, Ferndale, Mich., brought a brewery to the community, and it became a “cornerstone” of revitalizing the area.