Explorium Brewpub Looks Back On 5 Years In Greendale

GREENDALE, WI — When Mike Doble decided to leave his career as a land development consultant in 2016 to take on the challenge of building a brewery in Greendale alongside Joan Doble, some may have found their choice of location unconventional.

Fast forward to 2022: Explorium Brewpub—the result of Mike and Joan Doble's venture—is celebrating five years since its founding at Southridge Mall. There's a second location in Milwaukee's Third Ward now, too.

The Milwaukee-area brewpubs draw "from the best of the original Doble family brewery," Explorium's website reads. The original Doble family brewery was one Mike Doble's parents opened in Florida, he told Patch.

He told Patch about how the brewery started when he was looking to establish a brand in the Milwaukee area, about how Explorium has become more than just a restaurant, what it's like to be working in the Milwaukee brewing industry, and what it's been like to run a restaurant during the pandemic.

Choosing Southridge Mall

"Most craft breweries open up in industrial areas or old historic buildings, or, you know, whatever else," Doble said. "The only place that I could find that met all my criteria was, oddly enough, Southridge Mall."

He said it took some convincing at first, but after a mall manager gave him a pitch about the baseline traffic, parking, and tons of room for an outdoor patio, an "interesting epiphany happened."

"She's right, this fits all the criteria, never mind the fact that Southridge really is a historic building," Doble said laughing, "let's hope it doesn't become a relic."

Doble's sentiment may strike a chord with the Greendale Village Board of Trustees. In December of 2021, the Board approved a development that would bring retail space and hundreds of apartments to the former site of the Boston Store at Southridge Mall.

"The development of Boston Store will be the next evolution of this piece of land," Doble later said in an email to Patch. "Adding living units to the place where you can work and relax is the trifecta and what we've been hoping for!"

"We will continue to work with property owners in the Mall area to continue the effort that led to the revitalization of the Southridge Mall area," the village said in a statement marking the proposal.

Benevolent Competition In The Brewing Industry

When Doble opened Explorium Brewpub, he joined an industry Milwaukee is well-known for.

He said he found a community of "benevolent competitors" in the craft brewing space.

"We like each other's beers, we hold each other accountable, we share ingredients, if you know, somebody who's in a pinch, and they need help, but in the purest sense, we're still competitors," Doble said. "If I see Russ Klisch in a bar, I buy him one of my beers."

The friendly sense of competition is different than the engineering world Doble comes from, he explained.

"When I was an engineer, you know, the engineers at the other company, 'they're not good engineers, they're terrible,'" Doble said. "But it's not like that with brewers."

"When you combine what's normally a pretty benevolent community of craft brewers that work together with the friendliness of Milwaukee, it takes that just takes on a whole new level of 'hey, what can I do for you,' bending over backward."

"It makes this job, which is challenging at times, it makes it a lot of fun," Doble said.

An Explorium "Family" Forms

Doble says one of Explorium's biggest achievements in the past five years has been the community that has formed around it.

"What's most gratifying to me about what we've been able to do there is get a lot of people from the surrounding community to just become really part of our family, and to become close friends," Doble said.

"It's kind of interesting to me," he added. "What essentially amounts to a restaurant in a mall, you don't normally associate that with the kind of place that people come back to on a very regular basis, sometimes multiple times a week, and, you know, you've become close friends with all these people that just really enjoy what you're doing, they support you."

"We knew we'd have some regular customers, not to the extent to which the brand has developed into five years later," Doble said.

The COVID-19 Pandemic And Explorium

Explorium Brewpub hasn't been immune to the far-reaching effects of COVID-19 on the restaurant industry.

The many impacts COVID-19 has had, such as labor shortages or meat production shutdowns, boil down to one thing, Doble said: "what does it cost for a burger off the menu?"

"We've tried our best to maintain, to keep a level head and understand that this too, shall pass," Doble said. "We got to try to ride the storm, and at the same time, try to make our place feel as normal as possible."

In pursuit of the balancing act of normalcy and COVID-19 precautions, the restaurant still has fewer barstools. They don't seat people as close together they used to, Doble said.

"Those were all kind of big parts of how we developed community around our pub, by bringing people together and whatnot. And now, with current circumstances, that's a little more challenging," Doble said. "So that's been the biggest impact to me, is that you get a lot less co-mingling of the guests."

More information about Explorium Brewpub in Greendale, located at 5300 South 76th Street, 1450A at Southridge Mall, is available on its website.

The Third Ward Explorium Brewpub is located at 143 Saint Paul Avenue in Milwaukee.