Windmill Pointe Brewing Co mixes beer, bikes and sustainability

Question: How far can you ride a bike while hugging a tree? Answer: All the way to Windmill Pointe Brewing Co.

Make sense? It will after you watch the crowdfunding campaign video for Detroit’s newest microbrewery by clicking here.

"We thought, 'How can we make ourselves standout right off the bat?'" says Shawn Grose, co-founder of Windmill Pointe Brewing Co. "How can we be different?"

For those of you who haven’t clicked on the video, this is how Windmill Pointe Brewing Co brews its beer. The microbrewery harnesses electricity generated from riders of stationary bicycles and uses that power to brew its beer. It's a process Shawn Grose and his brother Aaron Grose, the co-founders of Windmill Pointe Brewing Co, are calling pedal-powered beer. They have also developed a patent-pending technology that tracks how many beers each rider’s power has brewed.

"It keeps track of how many beers they have produced for us," Shawn Grose says. "They can spend these credits in the brewery."

So riders who help produce 10,000 beers worth of electricity will receive a gold jersey, a party thrown in their name and have their name etched into the Kilowatt Cup at Windmill Pointe Brewing Co.

The 1-year-old micro brewery plans to open in Eastern Market sometime next year. It has launched an Indiegogo crowdfunding campaign to raise $50,000 to make that happen. So far it has raised a little more than $1,000 as of Monday evening. To find out more about the campaign, click here.

The Grose brothers want to open Windmill Pointe Brewing Co in Eastern Market because of its proximity to the Dequindre Cut greenway and the cluster of slow-food businesses in the neighborhood. Shawn Grose points out Windmill Pointe Brewing Co will be the first brewery in Eastern Market since Stroh's closed its brewery a few decades ago.

Source: Shawn Grose, co-founder of Windmill Pointe Brewing Co
Writer: Jon Zemke

Read more about Metro Detroit's growing entrepreneurial ecosystem at SEMichiganStartup.com.