Who We Are

We grew up on our family’s fifth-generation farm in Champaign County. Like a lot of small farms, ours was struggling: a few hundred acres no longer earned enough to support a family.

We loved the farm, but our parents encouraged us to build careers somewhere else. The University of Illinois was right down the road, so that is where we went after high school.

Navy ROTC scholarships paid for our degrees, Darin in Computer Science and Matt in Technical Systems Management. We developed a taste for beer in college, but starting a brewery was still many years away.

After graduating we both went on active duty to pay back those scholarships. Darin served as a nuclear submarine officer in the Navy and Matt as a combat engineer officer in the Marine Corps. Over a combined twenty years in the service we sampled beers all over the world, including a long stretch stationed in San Diego.

Matt reconnected with a German friend from high school, which is how he met the friend’s sister, Caroline. The two of them moved to the United States in 2009. Darin met Gail while stationed in Italy, and the two of them spent their free time traveling around Europe. When Darin was reassigned to California, Gail wanted to come along, but the Navy was not a place to settle down and start a family.

Whenever we were home on leave we helped out on the farm, and we kept alive an idea we had been talking about for years: growing our own brewing grain.

Matt worked at a brewery in San Marcos in exchange for beer and meals, then started homebrewing after getting a starter kit for his 27th birthday. The first batches were rough. Rather than give up, we decided to learn brewing properly. Matt trained at Brauhaus Faust in Miltenberg, Germany, and went on to earn his brewmaster certification at the Doemens Akademie. Darin completed the UC Davis Master Brewers Program and passed the international brewing certification exam.

The first beer brewed with Riggs-grown barley was a small batch, but it meant a great deal to us. (Darin once brewed in lederhosen on Halloween in the hope that the outfit would help the beer. The results were inconclusive.)

Darin joined Anheuser-Busch, and Matt helped launch the Hopfenhacker brewery in Munich. In 2015 we secured a loan from Busey Bank and came home to Illinois. Riggs Beer Company opened in June 2016 at the former T.K. Wendel’s on the southeast edge of Urbana.

Today we brew German and American styles with large amounts of grain grown on our family farm, and we distribute throughout Illinois. The brewery sits on 20 acres with a taproom, a beergarden, and fields of wheat and clover. Caroline runs the taproom and the office. Darin and Gail are raising their daughters, Anna, Lilly and Paige, the sixth generation on the farmstead our family bought in 1874.

On our farm, we grow beer.