In 1996, two friends, Mike McElwain and Jerome Ebel, bought an old brick building on Highway 10 in Junction City, Wisconsin. The building, built around 1920, was originally a Model-A Ford dealership. Subsequently, the building housed a barbershop, followed by a liquidator of second-hand goods, before being vacated in 1988. Mike and Jerome purchased the building in 1996, and spent the next two years thoroughly cleaning and restoring it. When the facility was ready for its first beer production, the friends put together the funds to purchase some used dairy equipment. This equipment was retrofitted to ultimately become the brewery’s first brew house. Months later, Central Waters Brewery came to be.