Beer Shop – the culmination of a lifelong dream

Lee Reinsch

Contributor

August 19, 2024

SPARTA – The owners of a former auto repair shop in the City of Sparta are proving there’s more than one kind of filling station.

Jeanette and Beau Burlingame own and operate Beer Shop, 200 W. Wisconsin St., which is housed inside an 85-year-old gas station building.

Beau said the establishment specializes in craft beers from Wisconsin and the Midwest and serves as a gathering spot, retail beverage shop, concert and entertainment venue, gift shop and a place to hang out and play board games.

Beer Shop also has ciders, sodas and sparkling water – all crafted in the Midwest.

The outside beer garden, he said, more than doubles the capacity of the indoor space to 100-plus people.

Beau said patrons can even bring their (well-behaved) canine friends and relax on the patio in summer. 

The retail shop features customized Beer Shop merch – hoodies, t-shirts, work shirts, mugs, beer glasses, insulated beer sleeves, specialty beers and more.

A dream come true

Opening Beer Shop, the Burlingames said, is the culmination of a life-long dream.

“I’ve always been a beer nerd,” Beau said.

Enough so, he said, that a worldwide pandemic didn’t prevent them from opening a brand-new business.

After years of envisioning the possibilities, putting together a game plan, visiting the bank and getting their proverbial ducks in a row, the Burlingames said they zeroed in on the perfect building.

It just so happened, that perfect building, he said, was a 1939 standard filling station, built at a time when gas stations had attendants who filled customers’ tanks for them, cleaned their windshields and topped off their fluids.

Beau said he had ogled the building at the corner of West Wisconsin and South Court streets many times – at the time, it was a working service station, the former Loren’s Auto Service.

With its curved front, he said it had an Art Deco aesthetic.

When it came up for sale, Beau said the time just seemed right, and in 2020, they closed on the building.

“A month later, the country shut down,” he said.

At that point, Beau said they figured they had to make a go of it, no matter what.

“As soon as we got the building, we were in here cleaning the walls and ceilings and painting and getting things ready to go,” he said. “We really pushed forward as much as we could and as fast as we could… It was a pretty good, pretty quick process.”

The Burlingames opened Beer Shop five months later.

“It was a very interesting project, especially because of COVID-19,” he said. “We had to do a lot of work ourselves because a lot of contractors were either not doing things in the beginning, were delayed or were moved back on their schedules.”

The pair said they invested almost as much as they paid for the building to remodel it – swapping out the old white garage doors with glass garage doors that let in light and replacing the windows with more efficient ones to save on heating and cooling.

Beau said when it was built in 1939, the building had only one garage bay – noting that a second was added in 1942.

The originally white exterior, he said, they painted a silvery gray – keeping the wide blue band across the top and adding another one on the bottom for good measure.

Beau said the font used for the Beer Shop logo is reminiscent of the building’s original Art Deco style. 

“Other than the paint changing, it’s pretty much kind of stayed the same base building it was when it was first built,” he said.

Beau said inside, they kept the polished yellow bricks that were on the walls.

“It’s got a lot of really unique kind of charm to it, and the bricks inside are really beautiful,” he said.

He said the royal-blue color scheme and logo are carried through on Beer Shop’s communications, clothing, event posters and the entity’s Beer Shop truck – a 1956 Chevy panel truck the Burlingames bought from a Minneapolis brewery in 2020.

Every Wednesday evening in summer, Beau said the Beer Shop truck can be seen at  Evans-Bosshard Park dispensing beer at the Sparta Chamber’s free Concert in the Park series.

He said it’s also been known to serve as an impromptu cooling unit on the hottest of days. 

“There was a festival in town and it was really hot, so we sent it over with some kegs of water in it and let people use it as a hydration station,” he said.

The renovations, Beau said, included the addition of a bar and 16 tap lines (which is now 22) for beer.

Beau said the Beer Shop has a mural of Sparta native and astronaut Deke Slayton with a beer and a portrait of Birch the cat (the establishment’s late barn cat) in a space suit.

Slayton was chosen to be one of NASA’s first group of astronauts, the Mercury Seven, in 1959. 

A tabby cat named Haze has taken over the duty of resident bar cat.

Beer Shop is open from 3-9 pm. Tuesday through Thursday, from noon to midnight Friday and Saturday and from noon to 9 p.m. Sunday.

For more on Beer Shop, visit beershopsparta.com.

More on the Burlingames

Beau grew up just outside of Milwaukee, while Jeanette grew up on a 40-acre farm outside of Westby. 

Before moving to West Central Wisconsin, Beau said they lived in Milwaukee “about a two-beer walk, probably about 15 to 20 minutes,” from Miller Park.

When they first met, Jeanette said she thought beer was gross, and Beau thought he’d never live further than 20 minutes from the Brewers stadium.

However, Beau said the Milwaukee market was too competitive to gain traction for a small new craft beer place, so seven years ago, they relocated to Sparta to pursue their dream.

Though his background is in manufacturing – working in the quality assurance and quality control sector – Beau said when they moved to the area, he took a job with Pearl Street Brewery in La Crosse to get more experience in hospitality.

Beau said at first, they missed the hustle and bustle of Milwaukee but are now very much rooted in Sparta.

“We’re very involved in things going on (in the area) – whether it’s volunteer work or just operating our business, expanding things and offering people things they didn’t have before,” he said. “We’re really proud of that and happy to be here, and we are just going to keep plugging along and try to get bigger and better.”