In 2010, U.S. craft beer was hurtling fast toward the mainstream. Dogfish Head founder Sam Calagione had a reality show on the Discovery Channel, New York Magazine was writing about saison, and the Brewers Association was shifting its outreach into high gear with new advocacy campaigns. But as it gained popularity, craft beer remained a mostly white, mostly male business. In Chicago, a small brewery was a decade ahead of its time in trying to change that.
Years before trade organizations and companies launched scholarships, collab beers, and programs to promote racial and ethnic diversity, 5 Rabbit Cerverceria was an award-winning, Latinx-owned brewery that grew to national prominence. Its existence inspired other entrepreneurs across the country, and its popularity proved drinkers were ready to support an unabashedly Latinx small business that put its identity front and center. One beer reviewer put it succinctly: “I enjoy 5 Rabbit because it combines Hispanic culture with beer.” Enthusiasm for 5 Rabbit and what it stood for propelled its growth, with production rapidly increasing throughout the mid-2010s.
But 14 years after the dream of 5 Rabbit was born, its beers are just a memory. It moved out of its Bedford Park taproom in 2020, selling much of the brewing equipment. It stopped distributing beer in its home city in fall 2022. A taproom slated to open in Chicago has yet to materialize, despite being selected for COVID relief grant funding from the city. Its owners haven’t given an update to the media since 2020. Founder Andres Araya and his wife and business partner, Mila Ramirez, responded to a few emails for this story, but declined an interview. Ramirez maintains that she is spearheading future plans for 5 Rabbit, but did not provide concrete details. In an email, Araya sounds wistful about the brewery.
“5 Rabbit did have a lot of promise,” he wrote. “But we unfortunately did not have the smoothest sailing in our early days, and we could never quite recover from that.”
A Google search for the brewery yields a still-active website. The next result reads: “People also ask: What happened to 5 Rabbit Cerveceria?”
5 Rabbit was a pioneer of both beer flavor and heritage, two pillars that help propel breweries today. It created paleta-inspired beers, spiked its “Oaxacan-style” amber ale with ancho chiles, and anticipated the dessert stout trend with a whiskey barrel-aged imperial porter with Costa Rican coffee and dulce de leche. It communicated with its social media followers in Spanish.
(While 5 Rabbit was the first U.S. brewery that was led by Latin American owners and fully inspired by their heritage, other companies preceded 5 Rabbit with owners of Latin American descent. This includes San Antonio's Blue Star Brewing Company, founded in 1996 by Joey and Magdalena Villarreal, and Freetail Brewing Company, co-founded in 2008 by Scott Metzger.)
As 5 Rabbit proudly wore the mantle of the first U.S.-based, Latin American-inspired brewery, it embraced a city thirsty for beers—and brewery owners—that broke the mold. The beer industry opened its arms to 5 Rabbit in return. Venerated beer author Randy Mosher signed on as an early partner in the brewery. Distributors came knocking. Spanish-language, local, and national publications covered its debut. Co-founder Andres Araya was invited to speak at events. The brewery would go on to hire acclaimed Goose Island brewer John J. Hall, expand distribution to other Midwest states, take center stage in a documentary film, and brew an anti-Trump beer that The New Yorker dubbed “a drink of the resistance.”
5 Rabbit was bold, influential, and groundbreaking at a time well before American craft beer began earnest work to embrace a range of new and diverse drinkers.
In 2011, the Brewers Association estimated 5 Rabbit’s production was 400 barrels, typical of a locally-focused brewery. Just four years later, that had climbed to 8,000 barrels. It’s a growth rate not unheard of during the 2011-2014 timeframe, but still in rarified air. In 2015, Good Beer Hunting described 5 Rabbit as “delivering some of the most creative, and ambitious beer in the Midwest.” Fast forward to May 2022, and the Chicago Department of Planning and Development selected 5 Rabbit for a $250,000 Community Development Grant, earmarked for construction of a taproom. This taproom project, to be built in the historically Latinx neighborhood of Pilsen, had been announced back in 2018 and is yet to materialize.
Despite a warm welcome from the industry, drinkers, and the city it called home, 5 Rabbit didn’t have an easy ride—not in its early years, not in its later years.
Snags began almost from day one. In 2010, Araya founded 5 Rabbit with Isaac Showaki, who would go on to open Octopi Brewing, one of the country’s most important contract breweries and co-packing facilities. (Showaki left 5 Rabbit following a contentious split in 2013; he declined to comment for this story.) Showaki and Araya had met around 2006 when the two worked together at consulting firm Bain Capital in Mexico City. They’d grown up in Mexico and Costa Rica, respectively, and had consulted on a brewery project together. Araya applied his engineering training as a production manager for a large brewery, managing schedules and raw materials. It seemed natural to translate that to the burgeoning U.S. craft beer market. But Mosher says their experience might not have been as applicable as they thought—in 2014, Araya told Good Beer Hunting his experience at the time “doesn’t translate at all” to what was happening in U.S. craft beer in the 2010s.
“These guys’ frame of reference was macro beer in Latin America,” Mosher says. He recalls production volume and distribution sales being the company’s early priority. “They said ‘Boom, we want to come in and scale this puppy.’ It’s harder than you think. … That’s mistake number one honestly, is starting too big.”
5 Rabbit didn’t have a brewery of its own until 2012. In the meantime, it contract brewed almost anywhere it could, Mosher says, and cycled between four different facilities across three states in the early years. Most of the early production happened at Minhas Craft Brewery in Monroe, Wisconsin, a 300,000-square-foot plant that produces beer and spirits for dozens of brands. Quality and consistency were poor, and the beer had a mixed reputation in the market.
“We didn’t have one batch coming out of there that was perfect,” Mosher says.
Still, Chicago seemed eager to support the brewery. At least two distributors, Louis Glunz Inc. and Chicago Beverage Systems (CBS), wanted to sign 5 Rabbit. Because Glunz had more craft brands in its portfolio, the founders chose it over CBS. In hindsight, Mosher now wonders whether CBS—a Reyes distributor aligned with Mexican imported brands like Modelo and Pacifico—might have secured larger, less-craft-focused accounts for 5 Rabbit and allowed it to grow to its hoped-for production volumes.
Via email, Araya seemed to acknowledge that focusing so much on distribution was a mistake. He says Ramirez saw this early on. Though distribution sales were the brewery’s primary goal, she viewed them as “soulless” and felt they “completely missed the point of what 5 Rabbit was supposed to be.” Araya says the later course-correction to a taproom model was her idea.
“We always felt it was sad that 5 Rabbit couldn’t enjoy the success in the taproom (connecting with people) because the distribution part of the business was so difficult to manage and so much a drain on our time and resources,” he wrote.
By the time the taproom closed, Mosher says it was responsible for 70% of the brewery’s revenue. This compounded challenges—he characterizes 5 Rabbit as “chronically underfunded” from the start, financed by “promissory notes rather than real investor contributions.” Mosher says he himself was never asked to invest money to earn an initial 10% equity stake, instead doing design, branding, and recipe development work for the brewery in exchange.
“The company was so short on cash, always in the red, and could never get positive cash flow to get bank loans,” he says.
Though Mosher acted as creative director and often the public face of the brewery—it still appears on his personal website and in his email signature—he says he wasn’t privy to the daily business machinations of 5 Rabbit. He preferred to handle the creative work, leaving the financial side to Araya and others. His impression was that it was “a bunch of tangled financial stuff.” In 2013, that spilled into public view.
Disagreements and lawsuits aren't uncommon in the world of startups, whether happening behind the scenes at tech giants, apparel companies, or in the world of beer. But what happened at 5 Rabbit snowballed.
In 2013, with its own brewing facility in place, increasing demand for its beer, and differing beliefs on how to steer the company, Araya and Showaki’s relationship reached a breaking point. It triggered a forced buyout, in which Araya says he was forced to pay “way too high” a price to buy Showaki out of his equity. While Showaki declined to comment for this story, he explained to Good Beer Hunting as part of a story about Octopi that the disagreement with Araya arose “because Andres used company funds for personal use, and he sold shares of the company without my knowledge or approval. That’s the reason why I decided to invoke the clause in the contract and left 5 Rabbit.”
The partners’ feud became public when Araya sued Showaki for defamation in the Circuit Court of Cook County, alleging Showaki had accused him of stealing money from the brewery and having an affair with a former employee. Records show the case was withdrawn in fall 2013. The same year, Showaki sued Araya’s lawyer and cousin, Timo Rehbock, for legal malpractice. The suit alleged Rehbock helped Araya artificially dilute Showaki’s equity in the company. The lawsuit was resolved out of court, though it’s not clear whether parties reached a settlement or merely agreed to drop the case. Araya said in 2014 that during this period, it felt like 80% of his headspace every day was occupied by legal woes.
Though the lawsuits made headlines, it didn’t appear to hamper public perception of 5 Rabbit. The brewery continued to add retail accounts, and by this point was selling its beer in at least 15 Chipotle locations around Chicago. The disputes did seem to have financial consequences, though. Mosher says that Araya bought Showaki out of his half of the business, which left the brewery further cash-strapped.
“We’d paid this guy off, so there was another bunch of money we had to come up with somehow and the company never quite got over it,” he says. “We never had money to hire anybody. We just never had money to invest in the brewery in ways we really needed to.”
The legal disputes didn’t end with Showaki. The following year, a group of the brewery’s investors sued Araya, Mosher, the brewery, and other parties. Similar to what Showaki claimed, they alleged the business manipulated its value to provide them lower financial returns; the mechanisms by which Araya and others are alleged to have done so are complex and include a short-term merger, a Delaware-based holding company, and the misclassification of equity as debt. Like Showaki’s case against Rehbock, the dispute was resolved out of court. Mosher says that currently, 5 Rabbit has “four or five” silent partners, including relatives of Araya and people he got to know while living in Mexico City.
Relationships continued to strain and legal woes mounted over the years. It wasn’t only business partners who 5 Rabbit left disgruntled. St. Ignatius College Prep, a private Catholic school in Chicago, says the brewery did not uphold its end of a contract brewing agreement made as part of the school’s sesquicentennial in 2019. Liz Garibay, a St. Ignatius College Prep alumna and the executive director of Chicago’s Beer Culture Center, says she introduced school leadership to 5 Rabbit so they could collaborate on two beers to celebrate the school’s anniversary. Garibay, who is Latina, says she chose 5 Rabbit because it was Latinx- and woman-owned. Because the school had a history of educating immigrants in Chicago, and felt that the partnership would be a way of “celebrating the immigrant story.”
Receipts provided to Good Beer Hunting and confirmed by St. Ignatius show the school paid 5 Rabbit $58,080 in 2019 to brew and package beer. Garibay says the school planned to serve 165 kegs of this beer at various events, and that the brewery’s profits from any beer sold in the market would be donated back to the school. Garibay says four years later, the school has not received any profits from retail sales, nor was the beer delivered as specified for the anniversary event. When she attempted to contact Araya and Ramirez for information in the following months, she says they evaded her. On several instances, she alleges Ramirez sent her and the school “angry” and “aggressive” emails that failed to resolve the problem. Garibay says she feels betrayed by the brewery, and hurt that people she considered her friends would behave unethically.
“I felt like I had been taken advantage of and I certainly saw that they took advantage of the school. Although I knew St. Ignatius did not blame me for 5 Rabbit’s unethical practices, I was concerned for my professional reputation within the Ignatius community,” Garibay says.
Ramirez disputes this characterization of events, and says that the business partnership was a “no-win” situation for all involved. She says the effort was a financial loss for the brewery due to “costs that we incurred” related to storage and destruction of some beer. She didn’t quantify the total investment from the brewery. “At the end of the day, the ones who lost quite a bit of money over this deal, was us,” Ramirez wrote in an email.
No lawsuit was ever filed, but a school spokesperson wrote in a statement that the brewery “never made good on financial promises it made to Saint Ignatius College Prep for the school’s Sesquicentennial celebration.”
Two years later, the brewery was still facing accusations from business associates. In 2021, the brewery’s former sales director, Matt Modica, sued Araya and the brewery for breach of contract. (Modica did not respond to requests to answer questions related to the lawsuit.) As with past cases, it was resolved out of court the following year.
Despite financial disputes, the brewery’s star continued to rise. Drinkers understood the connection between 5 Rabbit’s beers and its mission of celebrating Latinx culture.
“To have a local outfit focus on the richness of Latin culture through ingredients, placement, and storytelling was a pivotal moment and ahead of its time,” says Nik White, co-founder of the long-running website Chicago Beer Geeks. He recalls thinking that his 5 Rabbit-branded snifter was something of a good luck charm, and he’d bring it to every beer festival. “The spotlight was on complex profiles, seduction, and memorable experiences. … This was as unique a brewery as there had ever been in Chicago.”
Its profile continued to grow in its hometown. Then, in 2015, 5 Rabbit released the beer that would vault it to the national stage: Chinga Tu Pelo (“Fuck Your Hair”), a response to the anti-immigrant policies and rhetoric of then-candidate Donald Trump.
Prior to the rise of Trump as a presidential nominee, 5 Rabbit was brewing a house beer for Trump Tower in Chicago. Once Trump referred to Mexican immigrants as criminals and rapists in June 2015, the brewery severed the relationship and renamed the blonde ale Chinga Tu Pelo. The provocative stance, made personal by its owners Latinx heritage, earned it placements: Retailers scooped up the entire first batch within two hours. Years later, a documentary about the beer screened at the Gene Siskel Film Center and was nominated for multiple regional Emmys. The brewery sold Chinga Tu Pelo stickers for $5.
As the 2020 presidential election drew nearer, the brewery expanded the beer’s mission, turning it into a tool for Latinx voter recruitment. Through an awareness campaign called Chingonas Vote, the brewery encouraged Latina women to show up to the polls. Media coverage was laudatory. Esquire wrote: “5 Rabbit’s whole thing—be it this voting initiative, or a cry for environmental justice or immigration reform—has been showing up where people are. For every person who takes a moment from eating and drinking to inspect one of 5 Rabbit’s cans or read up on the mission, its co-owners believe a mind can be changed.” Beyond a Facebook post, there’s not much information about events Chingonas Vote held or voters it registered. In an interview with Huffington Post, Ramirez says she and two other women “stand at the brewery on weekends and we ask people: ‘Have you voted?’” and offer to help them register. With Trump again the presumptive Republican nominee for President in 2024, the stage would seem set for a return of Chinga Tu Pelo.
The beer was a watershed moment for 5 Rabbit, and not just because of the size of the spotlight. It also marked Ramirez’s emergence as the face of the brewery. Via email, Araya wrote that a few years ago, the brewery decided to focus on its taproom with Ramirez at the helm and him in the “backseat.” Ramirez confirms this. Araya’s LinkedIn profile has his role as founder and managing partner of 5 Rabbit ending in December 2019; he currently lists his employment on LinkedIn as an associate partner with consulting firm McKinsey & Company.
“I took over what used to be 5 Rabbit Cerveceria and have been working on a new concept for some time,” Ramirez wrote in an email, without providing further details.
“Mila was the one who created and managed the taproom at the brewery,” Araya wrote separately. “And it was not until she got involved that we got some proper traction and clarity on who we were. We started doing a lot more of what we wanted to do and connect with the community in the way that we wanted to connect.”
By 2012, the brewery’s taproom in the Bedford Park neighborhood, not far from Midway Airport, gave 5 Rabbit a physical space to gather the craft beer and Latinx communities. A former taproom manager for the brewery says that around 2017, on any given night, half the patrons in the taproom were Latinx, including many families, and that the space was welcoming, convivial, and often busy. This is a notable outlier among craft breweries, which on the whole still struggle to connect with non-white audiences.
At the time, Hispanic-identifying craft beer drinkers underindexed by about -36% against national averages, according to the Brewers Association. Years before diversity, equity, and inclusivity efforts became a norm for many breweries, 5 Rabbit was ahead of the overall industry in terms of its ability to authentically draw people who’d been historically ignored by craft beer.
David Favela could see this from all the way in California. As the founder and CEO of Border X Brewing in San Diego, Favela traveled to Chicago in 2015 for a conference and reached out to Araya via email, hoping to schedule a collaboration brew day or to visit 5 Rabbit. He says that as a fellow Latino in beer, he admired that 5 Rabbit leaned into its heritage and made it a core part of the business’ identity. (The two didn’t end up meeting in person, but did speak repeatedly via phone.)
“When we reached out to them, we saw someone on the same journey as we’re on,” Favela says. “They’re a culturally aware Latino craft brewery proudly representing themselves in the industry. … If anything, it was a validation of the approach and that we should keep going.”
As the decade progressed, the taproom continued to be a gathering place, hosting Latinx musicians and nights of loteria, a Mexican card game. But once again, even as the public embraced 5 Rabbit, there was internal conflict.
The former Bedford Park taproom manager—who asked not to be identified because they fear harassment from Ramirez—says Ramirez created a miserable working environment. They say Ramirez ran the taproom with less involvement from Araya, and that her style was to belittle and undermine employees while not providing clear guidance. This former taproom manager says Ramirez never gave them a budget, financial targets, or performance metrics to hit, but was constantly critical of their decisions and work ethic. After 10 months, this employee left for another job in the industry, at which point they say Ramirez sent angry text messages full of ad hominem attacks.
“She would make that place hell for people who work there,” they say.
The brewery closed its Bedford Park taproom in fall 2020, citing a need to “reinvent itself in the midst of the public health crisis.” A taproom location in Pilsen had been announced two years prior, so it seemed that there might only be a short gap between the brewery’s old and new homes. Almost four years later, the taproom still hasn’t opened.
Will it ever? The answer is unclear. A representative from the Chicago Department of Planning and Development says the $250,000 grant that the brewery was eligible for is reimbursement-based; the brewery would need to provide receipts of eligible expenses in order to receive its money. To date, the department says no money has been disbursed, and the Mural Park development that was supposed to house the taproom has been mired in its own financial troubles. As of July 2023, Michael McLean Jr., managing partner of Mural Park developer Condor Partners, said the project was still waiting on city permitting. He did not respond to subsequent requests for information.
Mosher’s understanding is that money earmarked for the taproom, which belongs to the business, the developer, and the city, is in escrow. Mosher says 5 Rabbit has been waiting for 18 months for the city to approve plans so construction can start. In an email, Ramirez says she wants control over how and when to release more information about the brewery’s plans.
“I have been trying hard to concentrate on developing this concept, keep it positive and I really have no desire to rehash the past 10 years,” Ramirez wrote. “The origins and story of 5 Rabbit are amazing … but my focus right now is its future. I also want to be the first one to share everything (when the time is right) with the people who love 5 Rabbit and who have supported us for a long time by posting on our social media. I want it to come from me.”
Mosher adds that Ramirez contacted him about design work for a new taproom as recently as late 2023, and says he believes the money in escrow is partially from the sale of the Bedford Park brewing equipment. He says some brewing equipment that wasn’t sold in 2020 is still in storage.
Despite its uncertain future, its legacy lives on. In the years since 5 Rabbit closed, other Latinx-owned breweries have stepped forward as industry leaders. Chicago is home to Casa Humilde Cerveceria, owned by Mexican-American brothers Javier and Jose Lopez, which opened its second location in suburban Forest Park in February. It’s also the location of Cruz Blanca, a Mexican-inspired brewpub led by CEO Manny Valdes that takes its name from a Mexico City brewery founded in 1869.
In California, SoCal Cerveceros has created a homebrewing community and training pipeline for people of color. Many have gone on to brew professionally. Colorado’s Atrevida Beer Co. received praise from President Joe Biden in 2022 when its co-owner, Rich Fierro, subdued the gunman at the Club Q shooting. Fierro and his wife have put their family’s immigration history at the forefront of the brewery, using the motto “Diversity: It’s on tap!” From California to New York, Latinx brewery owners are walking a path that 5 Rabbit helped pave. In doing so, they’re creating more runway for beer makers and drinkers who share their identity.
“I remember becoming aware of places like [5 Rabbit] that are clearly designed to attract people like me, because I suddenly realize all these other places were never designed with me in mind,” says Favela, of Border X. “They thought of me. … I’m the target demographic. Wow, I’ve never been the target demographic.”
Garibay also describes feeling represented as a Latina in beer when she first encountered 5 Rabbit.
“Latinos now had a place in the mainstream beer industry and what made it even more important was that 5 Rabbit wasn’t afraid to use culturally specific ingredients to highlight our heritage,” she says. “They represented us as a community and, in a way, they were our voice in beer—which is why I wanted so badly for them to succeed because if they did, that meant all of us Latinos did too.”
Mosher agrees 5 Rabbit was a pioneer. It fought for a prominent place for Latinx people and flavors in U.S. craft beer, and that dream is being realized. He worries, though, that one of the breweries that opened this door won’t be around to see more breweries walk through it.
“I hope [Araya and Ramirez] get their feet on the ground and start something small and do it in a way that leads to them being able to be successful. I think there’s still an opportunity. That other people are jumping in and doing this says there is,” Mosher says. “It would be a shame for us to pave the way and then fade into nothingness.”
Disclosure: A decade ago, Good Beer Hunting founder Michael Kiser executed portfolio strategy for the owners of 5 Rabbit Cerveceria on a freelance basis.
Words by Kate Bernot