OnMilwaukee.com Pioneering Water Street Brewery celebrates 30 years as city's first brewpub OnMilwaukee.com When Water Street Brewery opened at 1101 N. Water St. in 1987, the idea of a tavern that made its own beer was so new to the city that a newspaper headline put the phrase "brew pub" in quotation marks. R.C. and Rick Schmidt flung ...