Brewery Supports St. Joseph Police Through Beer Sales [VIDEO]

ST. JOSEPH -- Buy a cold one to support the St. Joseph Police Department.

Bad Does Good, a new program put on by Bad Habit Brewing in St. Joseph is supporting the St. Joseph Police Department through its beer sales.  Owner Aaron Rieland says they will be taking a percentage of their sales and putting it towards buying defensive training mats for the department.

"So what we're going to do is take a certain amount of the sales and buy them something that they need."

St. Joseph Police Chief Joel Klein says they're in need of the mats because they will soon have the space to train.

"Our current building just did not have space to be able to use rooms to have training, now that we have the space."

The new government center will be completed next month and Klein says they will be using the multi-purpose room for training and if that is unavailable they also could use a portion of the newly built garage.

Chief Klein says the department is gracious for any donation and by no means does a donation get someone special privileges.

"It's not a bribe, saying 'okay we'll give you this as long as this happens', I don't work that way."

The department is looking to get 10-12 mats. In order to raise enough money to buy the mats, the brewery collaborated with John Ludwig, a home brewer, to develop Luds Robost Porter, to sell specifically for the initiative.

"I gave him (Rieland)  my recipe and then he took the recipe and adapted it from five gallons to 165 gallons."

Ten kegs of the porter were brewed. Rieland says roughly $120 of sales per keg will go towards the mats. He says they are about half way towards their goal to buy the mats and once the porter is gone the initiative will be end.