Explorium Brewpub is a craft brewery inside Southridge Mall in Greendale, and yes, that sentence requires a moment to settle.
I know how it sounds. A mall brewpub. The kind of thing you’d expect to serve watery IPAs next to a Cinnabon. But Explorium is legitimately good — consistently, unexpectedly good — and I’ve been going back for a few years now without any embarrassment about it.
The brewery opened in 2017 and occupies a large, industrial-ish space near the food court end of the mall, though it has its own entrance from the parking lot on the south side, so you can walk in without passing a single kiosk selling phone cases. The interior is high-ceilinged and open, with fermentation tanks visible behind glass. It feels like a real brewery because it is one.
The beer list runs maybe fifteen to twenty taps on any given visit, rotating seasonally. Their Mango Wheat is the one that gets mentioned most, and for good reason — it’s light, actually fruity, and not cloying. But I’d steer you toward whatever lager or pilsner they have on, because those are harder to do well and Explorium does them well. The Flight of four four-ounce pours runs around nine or ten dollars, which is a reasonable way to work through what’s new.
Food is better than it needs to be. The pretzel comes with beer cheese that’s made in-house and tastes like it. The burgers are solid — thick, properly cooked, served on brioche. The fish fry on Fridays draws a real crowd, the kind of mixed-age Milwaukee crowd that takes fish fry seriously, and the beer-battered cod holds up. Dinner for two with a couple beers each runs somewhere in the forty-five to sixty dollar range depending on what you order.
What I actually like about Explorium is that it’s comfortable in a way a lot of Milwaukee bars aren’t. It’s loud enough to talk over, big enough that you’re not elbow-to-elbow with strangers, and the staff doesn’t have an attitude about anything. You can bring your parents. You can bring people who don’t care about craft beer. The patio out front gets sun in the late afternoon and is genuinely pleasant in summer.
The mall location cuts both ways. Parking is never a problem, which in Milwaukee is not nothing. And if you’re already out in Greendale — at a game at the nearby soccer complex, or doing something on the south side — it’s an easy, reliable stop. It doesn’t require a special trip from the east side, but I’ve made that trip more than once.
Explorium is open daily, usually from around eleven in the morning through nine or ten at night depending on the day. They take reservations for larger groups, which matters on Friday nights when the fish fry crowd fills the place up fast. If you’re going then, either call ahead or get there before six.
The whole thing shouldn’t work as well as it does. But it does, and that’s worth saying plainly.
