Beer, hard seltzer, cocktails, NA, THC, soda and soon cider. Here’s what we can (and can’t) make inside Eagle Park’s Muskego production facility.

We get asked some version of this question pretty often: What can you guys actually make back there?

At this point, the answer is… a lot.

Beer is the obvious one. It’s where we started and it’s still a huge part of what we do. But walk through our production facility on any given day and beer might only be one of the things being made.

We make Kooler hard seltzers. We make SoulBoxer canned cocktails and bottled spirits. We make Solid State non-alcoholic beer. We make THC beverages, sodas and other carbonated drinks.

And through our co-packing work, the list gets even stranger.

We’ve made energy drinks, electrolyte-infused hydration drinks, protein-infused beverages, and other products for outside beverage companies that most people would never know came through our building.

And we’re working on adding another category to what we’re capable of producing: cider.

We’re currently in the process of getting our wine permit specifically so we can produce cider for our co-packing clients. Here’s a fun bit of alcohol-industry weirdness: cider is technically considered wine.

So no, this isn’t a hint that an Eagle Park cider line is coming. We don’t have plans for that right now. It’s about expanding what our facility can make for other beverage companies.

With all of that happening under one roof, it raises a pretty reasonable question:

Can we just make anything?

Not exactly.

One of the reasons we can make as many different things as we do is our tunnel pasteurizer. If you’ve ever toured the brewery, it’s the giant machine that cans disappear into for a while before eventually coming out the other side.

For certain products, after the beverage is put into the can and sealed, those cans travel through the tunnel and are gradually heated, held at a specific temperature and then cooled back down. In simple terms, we’re pasteurizing the beverage after it’s already inside the sealed can.

That gives us a lot of flexibility, especially when we’re working with things like fruit and sugar that can cause stability issues if they’re not handled correctly. But the tunnel pasteurizer isn’t a magic box where anything that comes out the other side is suddenly safe to sit on a shelf.

This is where beverage production gets a little nerdy.

Whether we can safely make something depends on the relationship between things like pH, alcohol content, carbonation and pasteurization. Those things all work together, and changing one can completely change how the beverage needs to be produced. Which leads to one of the stranger facts about our facility: We can make an 8% fruited sour, a canned Old Fashioned, a THC seltzer, an energy drink and an electrolyte hydration drink… but we don’t make water. We don’t make coffee either.

It’s not because we can’t physically put coffee or water into a can. That’s the easy part. It’s everything that happens after that can leaves our building that matters. Will it stay safe? Will it stay stable? Will anything start growing in there? Will it still taste the way it’s supposed to months later? Coffee and water don’t fit the combination of pH, alcohol, carbonation and pasteurization our processes are built around. And that’s something we deal with every time we develop a new beverage.

The first question is obviously, does it taste good? Then the less glamorous questions start. Can we make 100 barrels of it instead of five gallons? Can we get it through our equipment? Can we package it? Does the pH need to change? Can it be properly pasteurized? What happens to the flavor after pasteurization? What does it taste like after sitting in a can for three months? Six months?

Sometimes it works. Sometimes we change the recipe. Sometimes an idea that sounded great on paper just doesn’t cooperate once we try to actually manufacture it. And every once in a while, we figure out how to make something here that we couldn’t have made a few years ago. That’s probably the coolest part.

Eagle Park started as a brewery. Today, on any given week, we could be making beer, hard seltzer, spirits, canned cocktails, non-alcoholic beer, THC beverages, soda, energy drinks, hydration drinks, protein-infused beverages, or something entirely different for one of our co-packing clients. Soon, cider will be another option we can offer them.

So, can we actually make anything?

No. But we’re getting pretty damn good at making a lot of things.