Doom and gloom? Not at Wiseacre in Memphis, Tennessee. Instead, let’s call it boom and bloom.
For the boom, look no further than Tiny Bomb—the little light lager that blew up way ahead of its time.
One of Wiseacre’s core beers upon launch in 2013, Tiny Bomb remains a regional dynamo that accounts for nearly half the brewery’s production. It’s also beating out bigger beers at the judging tables, taking home silver for German-Style Pilsner at the 2025 Great American Beer Festival. Building on that beer’s success, Wiseacre recently launched another light lager brand—Sky Dog—that’s growing quickly and already winning gold at the highest level.
For the bloom, behold Wiseacre’s mid-2025 plucking of Nashville’s Bearded Iris and its own powerhouse, Homestyle IPA—Tennessee’s second largest craft brand after Tiny Bomb. More than a broadening of reach and leveraging of capacity, the fusion brings together longtime industry friends who can now focus on the nuts and bolts of quality in some of the region’s most popular IPAs.
While the acquisition surprised Tennessee beer lovers, it wasn’t an overnight development.
“It took a long time,” says Kellan Bartosch, who cofounded Wiseacre with brother Davin, the brewmaster. “You know, this business is our baby, and Bearded Iris—the three founders there, that’s their baby. So, we had good, long, open conversations about it, to where it made sense for all of us.”
Wiseacre produced about 23,500 barrels of beer in 2024—enough to rank it 102nd nationally on the Brewers Association list of craft breweries by volume; that followed slight declines the two previous years. Wiseacre produced 26,500 barrels in 2022, two years after opening a larger downtown brewery that quintupled capacity. Combined with Bearded Iris, the company could produce about 40,000 barrels in 2026.
“It certainly was not some sort of hostile takeover situation,” Kellan says. “It’s 2025, so there’s all kinds of stuff that you weren’t thinking about in the past. Just the state of the industry, timelines on leases, and cost of equipment—all of this stuff, trying to figure out how to make a decision on what to do with your business. And we were friends with them.”
For Wiseacre, flat volumes the past couple of years weren’t only a reflection of a flattening market. In tune with another industry trend, the brewery has allowed its footprint to shrink so it can rationalize sales and dig deeper at home. Wiseacre currently distributes to 22 states, “but a lot of stuff that’s farther away,” Kellan says, “we’re not trying to support it and grow it in ways that we were. A lot of those are falling off, and that’s okay.”
Now, especially with Bearded Iris, “so much of our volume is concentrated in Tennessee, between the two brands. It’s hard to consider things elsewhere.”
The Cautious Trajectory
Davin is brewmaster, but Kellan lists his own title as “captain of industry/teller of tall tales.”
If you could engineer two siblings to run a business together without turning on each other—the legal name of their company is Abel Brewing LLC—you’d want to give them complementary skill sets. In the ’00s, while Kellan worked for Tennessee beer distributors and later as a sales rep for Sierra Nevada in Las Vegas, Davin graduated from the Siebel-Doemens World Brewing Academy into a head brewer job at Rock Bottom in Chicago.
That wasn’t serendipity—the Bartosch brothers had been playing the long game for years.
Their dad, Henry, and his sisters came from St. Louis, and the boys grew up watching them all enjoy beer. “There were kind of early associations with that being a dad thing,” Davin says, “or something you do when you’re in the hot tub or hanging out with friends, or you just finished mowing the lawn. I feel like my dad was inventing occasions to drink beer. And seeing that, I was like, ‘Oh, that’s what you do when you have success.’”
(“The hot tub is very important,” Kellan says. Davin adds: “You gotta have a beer in the hot tub.”)
Davin was always getting into different creative pursuits, including cooking—their parents even sent him to a cooking camp and had him cook dinner for their friends. “I think that he always had that desire to create,” Kellan says. “Especially around things that taste good.”
Initially, however, that wasn’t why Davin got into homebrewing while in college. “I definitely was trying to save some money,” he says. “Figured out I could make beer for less than I could buy it for.” But he soon became absorbed in the craft. “I started brewing and then, immediately, you have the first beer you ever made. And you think, ‘Oh, I could definitely do this better. I just have to keep working.’” Kellan encouraged the habit, telling his brother: “You’ve got to figure out how to make this your career. You’re not going to find some normal job.” That continued after they’d both graduated from college. “‘We’ve got to figure out how to do this together,’” Kellan says he told Davin, with “full confidence he would figure out how to become a great brewer.”
Besides their dad’s love for beer—today, Henry still writes all the draft lists at their original taproom by hand—he influenced their career in other important ways. Henry worked for years at FedEx but urged his sons to learn how to be independent and work for themselves. While Davin pursued brewing, Kellan resolved to learn the business side—taking night classes while working for a beer distributor and developing the business plan for what would become Wiseacre.
They were in no hurry—it took almost a decade for the brothers to put the pieces together. Davin says they took the “overly cautious, make-it-take-forever-to-figure-out-how-to-do-this” path. Meanwhile, they watched the number of U.S. craft breweries double from about 1,500 in 2003 to 3,000 in 2013, the year they opened. Tennessee was not exactly a hotbed.
Not long after Yazoo opened in Nashville in 2003, Davin was living there, visiting that brewery as often as he could after his early shifts at a FedEx Kinko’s. He was bothering Yazoo cofounder and head brewer Linus Hall for a chance to help out. “You know, I realize now that I was probably more annoying than helpful,” Davin says. “But he indulged me as much as he could, so I worked there for a while, for free—it was back when people worked for free—and liked it. I was happy about it.”
After the Siebel program, Davin was head brewer at the Rock Bottom in Warrenville, Illinois, before moving to the downtown Chicago location at the age of 33. (A news release from when he accepted that gig says that he likes “racquetball, cooking, and sleazy bars.”) Davin eventually left Rock Bottom to open Wiseacre with Kellan, who stepped away from his work for Sierra Nevada. Their trajectories were part of “a large-scale, long-term plan to open a brewery,” Davin says. “But we wanted to make sure that we really knew our respective parts of the business well.”
Kellan’s sales perspective proved to be at least as valuable as Davin’s German-inspired approach to beer quality: While those 3,000 craft breweries in 2013 would triple over the next decade, there were plenty of micros that didn’t need to fully understand the distribution side of the business.
Those times are over.
“It’s so important,” Kellan says of understanding the needs of distributors, especially in a tightening market. “There are so many startup breweries, and I think everyone’s inclination is to think like, ‘Oh, they don’t matter. We don’t need you. Just deliver the beer for us and get out of the way.’ And that’s not the right way to think about it. … How do we partner with them? We’re trying to grow together—we help each other.
“And it’s not going to be perfect,” he says. “But neither is marriage, and you’ve still got to work on it.”
The Tiny Bomb that Went Off
Tennessee’s best-selling craft beer is an easygoing pilsner of 4.5 percent ABV. German brewing tradition informs Tiny Bomb’s flavor and profile, even if the addition of local honey—currently about 5 percent of fermentables—would be verboten there.
That honey, Davin says, “is just another way to dry the beer out and make it more drinkable—you know, make it to where you have a sip, and you want another one almost immediately.” Many drinkers have wanted another one almost immediately: Tiny Bomb—which pre-dates today’s craft-lager renaissance by almost a decade—represents 46 percent of Wiseacre’s production, not including the Bearded Iris brands.
Tiny Bomb’s origins go back to a Craft Brewers Conference talk in 2008 or 2009, when Davin heard a convincing argument that “there basically should be infinite runway” for American brewers to sell flavorful lager. “And I thought, ‘Why wouldn’t we do something like that?’” While working at Rock Bottom, Davin says, he’d go out to the bar and ask people about their favorite beers—and they’d usually say Bud Light, Miller Lite, or Coors Light. “And when you ask them why, ... the answer is always either ‘I can drink a lot of them,’ or ‘It doesn’t have a lot of calories,’ or ‘It doesn’t get me super-drunk,’ you know? No one ever says, ‘It’s delicious.’” But that was his goal with Tiny Bomb: “We just were trying to make something that was delicious, that people would find they were able to drink a lot of. … It’s definitely still my favorite beer that we make.”
Kellan credits his brother’s stubborn conviction. “It wasn’t a great marketing idea,” Kellan says of brewing a light lager. “I was like, ‘What are you talking about?’ Because at the time, the whole point of craft beer was to be so different from Bud-Miller-Coors and domestic.” By then, of course, Davin was a geek-turned-brewer who’d passed through all the bottle-share and Belgian-style phases to emerge as a lager enjoyer. “So, he was really bent on, ‘We can do this really well, and there’s a reason to do it.’”
For a few years, Tiny Bomb sales were neck and neck with Wiseacre’s core IPA, Ananda. A turning point came around 2015, when the brewery entered the New Orleans market. Kellan says it was harder to sell IPA there. “But I can walk in anywhere and say, ‘This is the best pilsner you can get.’ And we can get a tap handle. We can get a placement. That was big.”
A Lighter Light Lager that Wins
Tiny Bomb peaked at 49 percent of production. The slight downtick, Kellan says, is “primarily because we’ve had another light lager catch fire for us—which, in 2025, if anything catches fire, it’s kind of wild.”
Sky Dog debuted in 2024, winning GABF gold for American-Style Light Lager the same year. Brewed with corn grits and Saaz hops, it checks in at 4 percent ABV. Cans display its 99 calories and Spanish name: Perro del Cielo.
“We sponsor a music festival in Memphis,” Davin says, “and we were tired of people saying they wanted Miller Lite. So, we made our own light lager.”
Kellan says the beer “has really taken off” in Memphis, with sales up 180 percent in 2025 as the brewery added 12-packs and 16-ounce cans. Vendors are pouring lots of it at FedExForum, the basketball arena that’s home to both the NBA’s Memphis Grizzlies and the Memphis Tigers college team. “It’s exciting,” Kellan says. When locals tell him things like, “[Sky Dog] is all my friends drink,” he says it reminds him of the buzz from when Wiseacre first opened.
While Tiny Bomb is light in strength, it’s also flavorful—and many people simply want something even lighter and easier to drink. “We’re definitely getting some new people into the fold with Sky Dog.” The potential is such that Wiseacre is already building a Sky Dog brand family. It so far includes Sky Dog Chelada, with lime and salt, and the newer Sky Dog Amber lager—which won GABF gold in 2025 from the first batch of it they ever produced.
(Davin was opposed to submitting the Amber, but Kellan insisted. “Entering these competitions is expensive,” Davin says. “I’m pretty cheap. I was like, ‘We’re not entering that beer. That’s crazy.’ And Kellen was like, ‘We have to try. It’s delicious. It has a chance.’ And he was definitely right—more than a chance.”) When the goal is to move lager in volume, it helps to have a lower retail price. That is Wiseacre’s goal with Sky Dog, but the brewery can do only so much to encourage it. Distributor relationships help. “We do have a price to try to be competitive with premium and not with craft,” Kellan says, “but we don’t get to control what retailers do either.”
For example, there are several independent retailers and one larger one that insist on charging the same for Sky Dog as for other Wiseacre beers. “They’re basically like, ‘We know we sell a lot of it; we’re just going to make more money on it’ because they get it at a lower price. … There’s nothing we can do about it, and they’re still a good partner of ours.”
Even when bigger retailers put Sky Dog at premium-beer prices, they often place it right next to Wiseacre’s other brands. “Until it moves from the craft doors to the premium doors and close to domestic, you might miss some of those people,” Kellan says. “So, there are challenges there. But then at the same time, we’re seeing how something like Garage Beer ... is showing up next to those beers. So, we’re like, ‘Hey, we want that, too.’” For a beer like Sky Dog, Kellan says, the affordable price is important. “I think that was at least part of my dad’s Midwest mentality, too,” he says. “Beer is for everybody. We don’t want that price to be a burden of entry for someone to want to try it and see if they like it. And, you know, it’s not fancy tequila—it’s beer.”
More IPA, from Ananda to Homestyle
Among the Wiseacre brands, Ananda IPA (6.2 percent ABV) is the second-best seller after Tiny Bomb. The Bow Echo hazy IPA (7 percent ABV) also sells well, and behind that sits coffee milk stout Gotta Get Up to Get Down, which enjoys a strong local following.
Wiseacre has moved away from brewing double IPAs—a shift that pleased Davin and the production team. Besides being labor-intensive, “it’s really hard to make money on double IPA,” Davin says—especially considering the costs and the price competition from New Belgium Voodoo Ranger.
“Your distributors and every retailer [are] like, ‘Can you do something like this?’” Kellan says. “And you think, ‘Man, I’ve got to go after that.’ But it can’t work for most people. … Davin was like, ‘If you want this to taste good, it can’t be cheap.’ Those are real conversations. Because if you want to hit $1.99 for a 19.2 [ounce can] in a convenience store, it’s going to taste like garbage if we want it to be profitable.”
One beer that won’t be available at that tier is Bearded Iris Homestyle, which typically goes for $4 per 19.2-ounce can. However, bringing Bearded Iris into the fold means rethinking the company’s approach to IPA—for example, the Double Homestyle, Attention Please, and Queen Bee IPAs all sit at 8.2 percent ABV. There’s also the Triple Homestyle, at 9.5 percent ABV.
Bearded Iris maxed out its own 30-barrel brewhouse in Nashville years ago. In 2021, it made a splash by announcing that it was joining a collective “platform” of breweries called IndieBrew, hosted by Scofflaw in Atlanta. The idea was to share resources, including sales teams, easing the costs on breweries at a tricky stage of growth in a market bruised by the pandemic. Scofflaw also took on production of Homestyle for wider distribution.
In that context, Wiseacre’s acquisition should allow the Bearded Iris brands to grow while bringing production of Homestyle closer to, well, home.
The Bartosch brothers remember when they maxed out their original Broad Avenue brewery and had to outsource logistics and warehousing. That was only three years after opening, and they began to lay plans for the downtown production brewery that would eventually open in 2020—but the market was very different in 2016 than it is today.
“Those things can be painful,” Kellan says. “I mean, there were weeks where we were going five in the morning until midnight, five days in a row. … And you’re packaging a case of beer and throwing it out the door to a truck—there was no margin. And I think that’s a place where they’ve been, too, and that’s super-challenging.”
Would Wiseacre have made the same choice to build in 2025? The Bearded Iris cofounders faced that choice in a flattening market—while Wiseacre, which made that call in a more optimistic time, now has the capacity. It also has a 50-barrel Braukon kit and top-of-the-line packaging equipment that can handle a range of formats. (And the brothers praise its ability to minimize dissolved oxygen—a fact that can’t be fully separated from Wiseacre’s recent run of medals.)
With Bearded Iris, Wiseacre goes from being a company that makes mostly lagers to one that makes mostly IPAs. Davin, meanwhile, is relishing the technical challenge of making Homestyle the best beer it can be—in full collaboration with its creators. “It’s been really fun to try to take something that’s really fussed-over at their breweries and make it here in a way that everyone’s happy with,” Davin says. “That’s been really rewarding.”
If a collab is an ideal way for two brewers to each learn something new, then we might think of combining two established craft breweries as a supercharged collaborative learning experience—especially when those cofounders are still involved. The beers and brewhouses are different, but the commitment to quality and character is shared.
“You look at things where you’re like, ‘Oh, we can’t even do that here,’ or ‘We have this different way of making the same thing happen, but we can’t do exactly what you’re doing,’” Davin says. “Or even stuff like, we have a purpose-built lauter tun, and they were working with a combined mash-lauter, and just what does that bring to the party? We’re getting way less malt astringency than they were. So, how do we come up with something that we all are happy with at the end? And even stuff like—it seems minuscule—but even fermentor geometry and hydrostatic pressure really change the way yeast performs.”
For detail-oriented brewers, there are countless details to consider—especially when there are expectations around an established brand.
“When you’re doing collaboration, you’re just like, ‘Let’s throw some shit at the fan and see what it looks like on the other side,’” Davin says. “And this is more extremely intentional. And every batch that you make, you’re dissecting to get to a better, more idealized version the next time.” Yet there are more voices in the mix than usual “because we have some people that… This is their baby. And it’s our baby now, too.”
The Growing Team
When asked about his approach to quality, Davin immediately praises the entire production team.
“There are 22 people who touch the beer at some point,” he says. “If any of them didn’t do their job… Well, you don’t win, right? So, it’s really a testament to how much the people who work with us care about what they’re doing.”
He specifically names brewhouse manager Sam Tomaszczuk and Fabian Beller, manager of packaging and QA/QC, for their experience and expertise. “We’ve got to be pretty close to 35 years or something among the three of us,” Davin says. “So, a lot of experience and a lot of people looking out for what the other people are doing, trying to improve process and improve people’s effort all the time.”
That experience doesn’t just help set a standard. It helps whenever problems arise—which, in brewing, is always.
“It comes down to knowing what to do when things don’t go exactly the right way—because they never go the right way,” Davin says. “So, it means a lot of transparency with staff because if people make mistakes, I want to know immediately. I want to be able to show them how to fix the problem. And, you know, it’s amazing. ... We have stuff go wrong that no one’s ever seen before, which is crazy to have 35 years of professional brewing experience, and everyone—all three of us—can look at each other and be like, ‘What the hell? How did this happen?’”
When there are infinite variables, however, you can’t control them all. “So, our job as brewers is to try to control as many variables as we possibly can,” Davin says. “And that’s an impossible task. So, I feel like we have a unique set of people’s attitudes that are based on aiming for perfection and accepting the fact that that’s not possible. You can only do so much, but we’re constantly looking to improve every single time we ever make a beer.”
The recent medals are proof that the approach is working. That team-based approach extends across the whole company, which now includes more than 70 with Bearded Iris in Nashville and part-time taproom staff. Someone else who’s integral: COO Amanda Thompson, who worked her way up from the taproom bar to help run the company.
The brothers say all these people are why they still love what they do.
“It’s definitely a business,” Kellan says. “I don’t know what people imagine that we do. There are ups and downs, but I have fun doing it still—for a lot of reasons, but it’s because I do it with my brother and the people that work here, more than the beer.
“I think that’s actually the right answer.”