Fancy beer fanciers will have a reason to rejoice come summertime.
That's when lifelong friends Jon Erickson and Josh Hebzynski hope to open the Angry Inch Brewery, a craft beer taproom in downtown Lakeville. They'll take over the old Ace Hardware building at 20841 Holyoke Av., which has been largely vacant for the past four years.
The plan right now is to offer nine beers. Six will be on tap year-round: their flagship, award-winning Daddy's Honey Pot; a heavy gravity French saison; Angry Inch pale ale; Easy Amber; an Irish red; and Four Horsemen, an IPA. A seventh, like Solar Eclipse, a Belgian white pale ale, will rotate every six months; an eighth will change every two months, and a ninth will be "whatever Josh and I are experimenting with," Erickson said last week.
The taproom won't serve food, but guests can bring in their own or walk next door and get takeout from Motley Crews Heavy Metal Grill, a food-truck business opening its first sedentary spot in the other half of the 6,400-square-foot building. Each business will have its own outdoor patio.
Both businesses have signed leases with Metro Equity Management; now the Angry Inch is working on licenses.
The Angry Inch Brewery will be the first craft beer taproom in Lakeville, thanks to an ordinance change by the city in January. It joins the Badger Hill taproom in Shakopee, which opened in January, as the only two exclusively beer taprooms in Scott and Dakota counties.
Erickson and Hebzynski considered locations in Eagan and Burnsville. Then, last August, they co-sponsored a golf tournament, took over one of the holes and served three beers. There, they ran into a fellow from Metro Equity Management, who sampled and loved their beer and told them about the old hardware building.
"We both learned never to cross something off our list without thinking about it really hard," Erickson said. "My dad lives in Lakeville. We love the city, love the people and thought, 'Hey, we could make it work down here.' "
