It’s the season to get together with friends and family over a pint. But is now really a good time to open a new brewery?
The Twin Cities beer scene saw a string of taproom closings coming out of the pandemic. Longtime favorites such as Eastlake, Able Seedhouse, 612 Brew, Clutch and Lakes & Legends all shut their doors 2022-2023. Stories began fermenting that Minnesota’s great craft beer boom of the 2010s was going flat.
Oh, what fun it is to tell a different story.
New breweries have been emerging all over town over the past year or two, from Burnsville to Brooklyn Park. And that’s not the only good news.
Many of these newcomers are making excellent beer, too, with a wider or more unique array of offerings than standard taprooms of the past decade. It’s what their operators knew they had to do in order to survive and stand out in a still fairly crowded field.
“I knew what I was getting into,” said Jeffrey Crane, who opened Burnsville’s Trove Brewing Co. late last year after two decades of working for other breweries. “I knew it was going to involve a lot of work and I needed a lot of experience to make it.”
“We were just so passionate about what we would have to offer,” said Denise Roberts, co-owner of Rail Werks Brewing Depot in Columbia Heights. “We had to believe our love for it would lead to our success.”
Opened in June, Rail Werks embraced the growing demand for seltzers and fruity beers, as did some of these other newcomers. Many are also offering THC-infused beverages and nonalcoholic beers, which are popular with younger consumers for whom alcohol consumption is trending downward.