Ed Janus

Ed Janus is a writer, independent audio journalist and oral historian. He has lived in Madison, Wisconsin for over 40 years where he is well known for having brought baseball and world-renowned beers to that city.

Janus was born in Washington, D.C. in 1945 and was graduated from Lake Forest College in 1968 with honors for his thesis on the dramaturgy of political demonstrations. He worked for a year as a community organizer with The West Side Organization and the Southern Christian Leadership Council in Chicago in 1966-67, where he was deeply influenced by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

Eschewing an academic career, Janus became a city bus driver in Evanston, Illinois (“the second best job I ever had”) and later a dairy farmer (“the best job I ever had”) in Soldiers Grove, Wisconsin where he and his partners milked 30 cows and plowed, planted and harvested 250 acres. As he writes in his book, Creating Dairyland :

Janus was a member of the Phoenix Fellowship, a group whose members were well known in Madison as the creators of the Ovens of Brittany and Bakers Rooms, restaurants that changed the landscape of food in Madison.

In the early 1980s Janus led a group that brought professional, small town baseball back to Madison after an absence of 40 years. Madison Muskies Baseball became more than a game; it became a summertime outlet for community-based zaniness. So popular were the games and the zaniness, that CBS Nightly News, CNN and National Public Radio reported on them.

While he served as the general manager of the Muskies, Janus was working on developing a small, local brewery. At the time (1983–84) there was a mere handful of new local breweries in the U.S. Janus and his partners decided to create authentic German beers such as might have been brewed in Wisconsin early in the century. They also wanted a brewery that paid homage to craftsmanship, individual taste and small-scale enterprise.

Since micro-breweries were an unknown business at the time, investors did not know what to make of the idea. Janus and his partners decided that rather than raising money privately, they would go right to the beer drinking, brewery-loving people of Wisconsin. In a series of humorous radio and print advertisements and public meetings around Wisconsin, Janus and his partners were able to raise more than $1.5 million from state residents in a most unusual stock offering – an IPO connected only to a business plan, not an ongoing business. For his efforts, or chutzpah, Janus was nominated by the state securities commissioner for an Arthur Young Wisconsin Entrepreneur of the Year award. (He received an honorable mention.)

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