Traveling Beer Gardens Begin in May

Sprecher Traveling Beer Garden. Photo by Jeramey Jannene.

Milwaukee County’s annual Traveling Beer Gardens will kick off the 10th-annual season in May.

Sprecher Brewing is once again sponsoring the traveling beer gardens, which operate out of refurbished old firetrucks outfitted with kegs and beer faucets. Though, this year there will only be one traveling beer garden. In years past, the Glendale-based brewery sponsored two traveling beer gardens: one called the Roll Out The Barrel Tour, the other called the Pass Me a Pint Tour.

The tour’s inaugural stop this year will be in Greenfield Park on May 17, where there will be free Sprecher beer and root beer available, as there will be on the first day of every stop on the tour — while supplies last.

Between May and September, the tour will stop at eight parks around the county. It will be open every weekday from 5 p.m. to 9 p.m. and Saturdays, Sundays and holidays from 11 a.m. to 9 p.m.

As the sponsor, Sprecher’s craft beers are considered the featured beverages on the beer list. But the beer gardens will also sell beers from other local breweries like Lakefront, City Lights and Eagle Park. As always, there will be brats, hot dogs and hot pretzels for sale. On the weekends there will also be a rotating cast of food trucks selling food at the stops.

The traveling beer gardens have been a success for the cash-strapped parks system, generating more than $4 million in revenue since they launched a decade ago. The beer gardens in general have become a revenue-generating amenity for the parks system, generating $12 million in revenue since they launched in 2012. In 2021 alone, the beer gardens brought in $2.6 million in revenue.

Sprecher has also made approximately $256,000 in parks investments, according to parks, including improvements to parks facilities that are ADA-accessible.

2023 Traveling Beer Garden Tour

• Greenfield Park: May 17 – 29
• Froemming Park: May 31 – June 11
• Cooper Park: June 14 – 25
• Grant Park: June 28 – July 9
• Lake Park: July 12 – 23
• McCarty Park: July 26 – Aug. 6
• Doctors Park: Aug. 9 – Aug. 27
• Sheridan Park: Aug. 30 – Sept. 4

Juneau Park Beer Garden?

Juneau Park is traditionally one of the most popular stops for the traveling beer garden, and it is absent from the tour in 2023. Parks teased an announcement for the park relating to the beer gardens, stating, “Notably absent this year is a Juneau Park stop, we will have news on why that is in the next few weeks.”

The parks department began looking into a new summer-long beer garden in Juneau Park in 2022 due to that stop’s popularity — averaging 2,600 visitors a week, as Urban Milwaukee previously reported.

Update: The story has been updated to reflect that Sprecher Brewing is based in Glendale, not Greenfield.