(Louisville Business First) - With a biomedical engineering degree and a love of creating, Johnathan Shrader was working part-time in a brewery in Chicago.
The Louisville native said he was doing the grunt work at Une Annee Brewery — mopping, bottling, occasionally helping to brew. It was then that he made a decision to shape the rest of his life.
"The way I see it is, if you want to just work in a brewery, you start by just mopping floors and doing grunt work," he said. "But if you want to own a brewery, you’ve got understand the big picture."
Shrader wanted to own a brewery, so he went back to school — this time to brewing school at the Siebel Institute of Technology in Chicago, where he could get that big-picture look.
Now, after completing the degree and spending three years perfecting his brewing skills at breweries in South Florida, he's ready to bring his brewing skills back home.
Shrader plans to open a new brewery at 940 S. Third St., in the SoBro neighborhood. He's not sure yet what the name will be, but has a few options in the works.
He hopes to start with the basics on tap — a blonde, a hefeweizen, an IPA and a stout, but then he'll move into brewing more unusual flavors.
Shrader lives in Florida for now, but he'll move back to Louisville next month.
