Fox Point Turns 100 This Year. It's Also Getting Its First Taproom.

"There's no fixed nightlife here, or even afternoonlife," John Degroote told Milwaukee Magazine this spring, talking about the village where he has lived for years and where he first wheeled a converted beer trailer up next to the public pool back in 2022. He wasn't complaining. He was explaining why he kept doing it, summer after summer, in a folding-chairs-and-picnic-tables kind of way, until it turned into something bigger.

That something bigger is landing in the same year Fox Point turns 100. The village is spending 2026 throwing itself a proper birthday party, with cover bands and a community run and a time capsule that won't get opened until 2126. But the detail that will actually change a Tuesday night for people who live here isn't on the centennial calendar at all. It's a service station on Port Washington Road that has sat empty for about twenty years and is finally about to become a brewery.

Four Summers Of A Trailer In A Parking Lot

New Barons Brewing Cooperative, the Bay View co-op that opened its own taproom on South First Street in 2018, started showing up in Fox Point in 2022, parking a converted trailer outside the public pool at 7040-7098 N. Santa Monica Boulevard. It was a summer thing. Show up, buy a beer, watch your kids swim, pack up when the season ended.

It didn't stay at the pool. The beer garden migrated to Longacre Pavilion at 7343 N. Longacre Road, where it's now back for its fifth summer. By the time Milwaukee Magazine checked in with Degroote in March 2026, he was describing four full years of the same pattern: a handful of scheduled evenings each summer, strong enough turnout that the village kept inviting it back, and nothing resembling a permanent address. The demand was proven. The building was not.

"There's no fixed nightlife here, or even afternoonlife."

That's the gap Degroote kept running into, and it's the reason a pop-up beer trailer eventually turned into a real estate project.

The Service Station That Sat Empty For Twenty Years

The building in question sits at 8000 N. Port Washington Road, near Bradley Road, and it used to be the Northpoint Service Center. According to BizTimes, the roughly 1,700-square-foot structure had been vacant for about two decades before New Barons proposed converting it into a production brewery and taproom, with the village's Plan Commission and Village Board reviewing the plans through late 2025.

Degroote received final approval from the Village of Fox Point in December, clearing the way for what he's calling Acronym Brewing Co. He told OnMilwaukee that part of what made this possible now, rather than years ago, was a zoning change the village had made along the Port Washington Road corridor, one that made it easier to convert older commercial properties there for new uses. A building that used to be hard to repurpose under the old rules became workable under the new ones.

The plans, per Milwaukee Magazine and BizTimes, call for the existing structure to become the production space, with a new addition of roughly 2,000 to 2,200 square feet for an indoor taproom and an outdoor patio as large as 4,000 to 5,000 square feet. Indoor seating is planned for 11 spots at the bar and 54 at tables. The brewhouse itself is designed at 10 barrels, with capacity for roughly 500 barrels a year and room to grow. Degroote has said he's aiming to open before the end of 2026, though he's been clear that the timeline depends on how construction and financing go.

The beer itself is meant to be uncomplicated. Degroote has talked about brewing well-made lagers and classic IPAs rather than heavily adjuncted specialty releases, with names built as acronyms that double as descriptions. One in the current lineup is POINT, short for Pale Oat IPA, New England Type.

Two Versions Of The Same Idea

Put the beer garden and the brewery side by side and the difference isn't really about beer. It's about permanence.

One of these has been the trial run. The other is the actual store opening.

A Centennial Calendar Running On The Same Clock

It's worth noticing that almost everything else the village has planned for its 100th year follows the exact same seasonal logic as the old beer garden. The Fox Point Foundation's 2026 lineup is built around one-night and one-day moments, not new places:

• June 24 — Boys & Toys, a classic rock cover band, at Longacre Pavilion (rain date July 1)
• July 15 — The Taxmen, a Beatles cover band (rain date July 22)
• August 19 — Mixtape, playing 80s and 90s covers (rain date August 26)
• September 19 — the summer's closing show, headlined by AM FM, described by the Foundation as "playing the history of rock"

Wisconsin Athletic Club is running free fitness classes from 5:45 to 6:30 p.m. before each show, no registration required. Earlier in the year, the village held a Freedom 5K along a course built to pass historic landmarks, with proceeds benefiting the Fox Point Foundation, followed by a Centennial Celebration with family activities. There was also a tree-planting and plaque dedication on the boulevard of East Community Place, between the Police Department and Stormonth, as part of the same run of centennial programming. The village's farmers market, which sets up weekly in the North Shore Congregational Church parking lot, is running its regular 2026 season alongside all of it.

Every one of those things is genuinely good. None of them changes what happens on a random Wednesday in October. They're built to happen once, or once a week for a few months, then pack up.

What Changes When The Doors Stay Open

That's the actual news buried under the birthday-party version of this story. Fox Point has spent a century being a place people live, and the last four years testing, through a folding table and a rented trailer, whether it could also be a place people just show up to. The answer was clearly yes. What's opening on Port Washington Road this year is the first attempt to make that answer permanent, with a kitchen-adjacent patio and barstools instead of a rain date.

If you've lived here through the last four summers, you've already watched the pilot program run. The trailer at the pool, the move to Longacre, the packed picnic tables on a Thursday night, all of it was Degroote and his neighbors figuring out, in public, whether a fixed spot would work before anyone spent real money building one. Now someone's spending the money. The centennial just happens to be the year it landed.

Fox Point doesn't need a hundredth birthday to be worth paying attention to. It's had a good one anyway, and it's about to get something that will still be standing long after the cover bands pack up their gear for the season.

If a year like this makes you think differently about your own place in the village, or you're weighing what a move here or away from here might look like, Elissa Berkoff would welcome the conversation. Let's connect and talk through what your home is worth in a Fox Point that's changing in some genuinely interesting ways.