Breweries opening in Minnesota 2015/2016

Man. These kickstarter videos are sometimes just bad. I hope nothing but the best for them, but 10ks video is bad. Bauhaus just ruined it for everyone.

 

Agreed.

It makes you wonder why they don't just take really conservative opening estimates.

 

The Dundas plan is Meetinghouse Brewery. There's no Kickstarter, but they are doing something akin to that.

 

Huh. Free beer for life for $1,000. I have a brother who lives in Dundas, but he rarely drinks beer and when he does it's always flavorless over produced American macro beer. I forget which one.

 

Oh wow, yeah, that's really bad.

 

I think Solid is a good way to put it. Nothing knocked my socks off though and at $6 a pint I'll probably pass in the future. Particularly when they price their growlers so high as well. I was just down in Tampa and my buddy got a Gallon Growler of Cigar City Maduro Brown for $18 including the glass. Yes a Gallon....(they don't do 1/2 gallon growlers there for some reason).

Here we end up paying $20-25 for the new kids on the blocks 1/2 gallon products. Must be a beer starved town for that kind of pricing to work but I'm sure they know what they are doing. I just won't go out of my way for solid beer at above average prices.

 

I was just in St Pete/Tampa. I guess 64oz growlers are not allowed. They can do 1 galls on and 32oz. I wish we could do 32oz growlers here, they are the perfect size.

 

What I liked were those 32 ounce crowlers....Like a big fosters can but they fill them and put the lid in right there and then you can just toss them. Per ounce not the greatest deal but not bad really at $7 and they are perfect when on vacation.

 

I brought back four of them lol. Sociable Cider bought one those machines and is now filling 750ml cans to go.

 

Maybe a trend for the Minnesota's future?

 

@StarRanger, you checked out Kilstone yet? Curious to hear thoughts before we head back to the FM area soon here.

 

Hopefully we can go even further and do 32oz growlers. This is a good start and maybe even good enough.

 

I stopped by there on the first night they were open last week and they had 3 beers on tap, a Golden, Pale Ale and an Irish Red. All were early batches and were going to be tweaked when brewed again. They were all clean though with no defects or off flavors and they were planning on having a stout on tap soon.
I think it is still too early to judge them so I will be back to try them when I can.

 

I despise the concept of Crowlers. We have a perfectly good system of reusable bottles, though it could certainly be tweaked to make it easier to return them to any brewery. However, a disposable/recyclable alternative with a toxic chemical lining is a horrific idea.

I will never buy one of these things. I'm just glad I didn't really care for Social Ciderwerks product in the first place.

 

Here's a selection from an older "Pro" puff piece:
"Today’s aluminum cans feature a water-based polymer lining that eliminates any metallic contamination. That is, the beer never comes in contact with the aluminum."

And a "Con" from just last fall:
"Yet that polymer lining in every beer can is made with BPA. Why would people who threw away their Nalgene bottles because of BPA willingly get the same stuff from their beer?"

Ball Corp. --a large can producer (which may become larger, c.f. their bid for REXAM) address linings here:
http://www.ball.com/innovation-lightweighting/

The last paragraph on the page addresses Bisphenol A. The ultimate takeaway being:
"While alternative coatings are in various stages of development, challenges still remain with respect to matching the current performance capabilities of epoxy-based can coatings, regulatory approvals, supply capacity and distribution issues."

You may outlive all of us, Séamus , but the Crowler is also probably here for the duration -- at least in the Craft Beer sense.

 

I probably won't out live you all, but the BPA isn't my primary concern anyway. Even if aluminum was inert and there was no need for the toxic lining I'd still oppose the use of Crowlers. As I said, we have a perfectly good system of returntable/reusable bottles. A minor inconvenience because they're heavy when full, but I haul the things around on my bike without a problem. That's what saddle bags are for.

I guess all I can do is let individual breweries know my opinion. I've already done that with Sociable Ciderwerks.

 

Even the people who worry about BPA worry about it mainly in the context of infants and fetuses, at least under realistically minute levels of ingestion. It almost definitely should fall well behind the likes of alcohol, empty calories, and even the possible hormonal effects of hops on the list of sources of health concerns to an adult male imbibing from a crowler of graff.

Back on topic: 56 Brewing has announced a delay in its opening (unprecedented!) to May 1. As stated previously, it will not have a taproom but will sell growlers at its brewery.

 

What utter nonsense. BPA doesn't magically disappear after ingestion. It's a toxin that remains in the environment and there's increasing evidence that it affects us all.

But, as I keep saying I consider the BPA a secondary concern. Replacing a reusable resource with a disposable/recyclable one is a bad idea on its face. Just as it was when (years ago) we replaced reusable beer bottles with disposable/recyclable glass and cans.

It's a bad idea on its face, but I'm clearly in the minority so I'll shut up now.

 

As someone who has children, I thought I should at educate myself in at least a cursory manner about BPA a few years back. Turns out the science regarding BPA comes down on the side of "We will watch this stuff, but for what we know now, it's not going to cause you to grow gills". The FDA has said there is enough of a safety level to protect us from this chemical right now. Could this turn into the next DDT? I suppose. But for the moment, it's alarmist to say that there's "increasing evidence that it affects us all". I mean, so does oxygen, right?

The research is going in the opposite direction, that you'd have to mainline a lot of BPA to do any discernible harm. Not only that, there are about 1,373 chemicals I'd be a damn sight more worried about!

 

Times change enough that some ideas come back for a repeat performance. Glass growlers are near enough in their basic function to returnable cases that it's not surprising that some would prefer them to one-way packages. When visiting taprooms and true microbreweries they are the dominant take-away format, so you're not so much in the minority -- at least not amongst older beer hobbyists. "Crowlers" are still pretty new, and have a long way to go before they reach anything approaching parity in this segment of the marketplace.

My old man bought returnable in the Seventies so they were a familiar sight in the garage. In college I was in the habit of buying returnables and re-using them for homebrewing enough that it was weird when they went away.