Meet the faces behind Lincoln-born Midwest Barrel Co.

There are many possibilities as to when the seeds of Midwest Barrel Co. were planted. – with offices in Lincoln and Louisville, Kentucky.

It might have been a decade ago when, as a graduate student at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, Loseke bought a broken electric washing machine at a garage sale for $20, fixed it up and decided he didn't need it.

So he sold it online for $150, which fueled both his entrepreneurial side and his thrill-seeking mentality.

Up until that point, his career had been fairly straightforward. He says he planned to become a college professor.

But his best friend since grade school and roommate through high school and college—the man who has since become CFO of Midwest Barrel—always remembers that business side.

“He was always coming up with his next business idea when we were together,” Josh Hoefler said.

This was just a side hustle that took off and got too big to stay on the side.

It started with dozens of auctions, garage sales and flea markets. Loseke bought what he thought he could fix up and resell. Lawnmowers, he says, were his specialty.

The 2006 Norris High School graduate just happened upon the barrel business, which at the time wasn't really a thing. But he immediately saw two things that every entrepreneur craves: supply and demand.

After buying his first batch of barrels—a modest 25 of them from a winery in Napa—he struggled to resell them.

“They were selling, but not very quickly,” he said. “And then someone told me that craft breweries barrel-aged their beer. I had no idea it was such a thing.”

It turned out to be a game changer. He investigated the matter and then loaded one of the barrels into the back of his Chevy pickup. He went around Lincoln, from brewery to brewery, asking the brewers to smell the inside of the barrel.

“They thought I was crazy,” she says.

But somehow it worked. Local breweries — places like Blue Blood and Zipline — started buying them up, aging their beers in them to bring out the oak and Chardonnay notes.

Loseke did this for a few years, slowly building what he hesitated to call a business.

Actually, he didn't know what to call it.

“It got to the point where he said, 'This is either a hobby that's gotten too big or a business that's gotten too small,'” said Jessica Loseke, Ben's wife, who is now CEO of Midwest Barrel. “”It's one or the other.”

They chose the second. They had a small business on their hands. They also had the good fortune of a perfectly timed purchase that put them on the ground floor of a venture that was about to take off.

Soon after, he committed himself fully to the business by buying a truckload—270 of them in all at a cost of $25,000—of barrels, everything from Ports to rosés to Cabernets, and crammed them into six storage units on South Street.

“Today, it's so surprising to me that people took me seriously,” says Ben Loseke. “They bought barrels from this random guy who was selling them out of a storage unit.”

Eventually, Midwest Barrel abandoned the storage units and moved into office space large enough to store thousands of barrels.

When Jim Ballard wanted to experiment with aging his James Arthur Vineyards wines in spirits barrels, he knew who to call.

Loseke's father, Tim, was a contract grape grower for Raymond Winery, and the two have known each other for years.

“I buy all my barrels from him,” Ballard said. “You walk into his warehouse, this huge place, and there's this incredible smell because there are all these used barrels. He has grown this business in a very short period of time.

“This is a very good hobby.”

It's not a hobby anymore, remember?

Ben Loseke is quick to give most of the credit for this to Jessica, who eventually joins the company, but not without reservations from her husband.

In 2017, Jessica had a good job in HR. She had just given birth to their second child and had the idea of ​​working at the barrel company.

Ben Loseke wasn't sure the company could survive, so he was reluctant to ask his wife to give up her salary.

“I was like, 'No way. It's not a real business,” he said. “It was too dangerous for us to do that. He had a good job, why would he leave it?'

Eventually, he just did. She quit her job and showed up for a job at Midwest Barrel.

He also hired Hoefler, who said Ben Loseke was reluctant to do so “because he didn't want to lose his best friend” if the business failed.

“He makes all the big decisions,” Ben Loseke said. “He's the visionary of the company and has big, bold goals for the company and wants to push us to new levels.”

And in January, Midwest Barrel, with more than 1,000 American and foreign customers, made its biggest move by moving a huge part of the company — and the Loseke family — to Louisville, Kentucky, so they could be closer to the bourbon barrels and the stills.

“Had we not made this decision, it certainly would have significantly limited our growth potential,” said Jessica Loseke, pointing to two key factors: shipping and barrel availability.

Midwest Barrel now stocks a significant portion of its barrels overseas. In the past, barrels were purchased from distillers in Kentucky and shipped back to Lincoln, where they were re-shipped to containers and transported to the East Coast for delivery to other continents.

Opening a facility in Louisville allowed them to save time – and shipping costs – on a pointless trip back to Lincoln.

“Now we're able to buy them and ship them 30 miles away and get a container from a quarter of a mile away with their shipping hub,” he said. “Operationally, that's been a big focus for us.”

Consider that a barrel is almost 3 feet tall and weighs about 120 pounds. The cost to ship one is about $185. It's more economical to ship more than one on pallets, Ben Loseke said, but it's never been cheap.

Another change in the industry was the availability of barrels. With greater demand came the rarity of the product and the reluctance of distillers to part with their used barrels, which are suddenly considered a commodity.

The Kentucky headquarters is key because, “the bourbon industry is still a handshake type, where they like to do business with the same people and have relationships with people they can trust,” Jessica Loseke said.

“Being closer to the source and developing relationships here in Kentucky was really key for us.”

The Kentucky warehouse currently has 10,000 barrels in stock, he said.

Don't get the wrong idea. Midwest Barrel started in Lincoln and will continue to have a presence in Lincoln, say both Ben and Jessica Loseke.

“Will it look different from what it was? Absolutely,” said Jessica Loseke. “It's not going to be the same.”

But when three of the original hires — Hoefler, art director Gina Nathan and Ethan Schulenberg, director of business development — are based in Lincoln and plan to stay here, it's fair to assume the company will never abandon its roots in Nebraska.

“We will continue to have an office in Lincoln,” said Ben Loseke. “This is where we started the business. This is where our families are.”