Bob CollinsThey’re pretty excited for Monday to come over in Wisconsin.
Starting then, they get to drink beer from Minnesota, one more brick in the wall collapsing between the two states.
Chris Drosner, who writes as the Beer Baron at Madison.com, says Surly’s new brewery in Minneapolis is fueling the expansion into the State of Beer.
As is so often the case when new out-of-state beer shows up in the cooler, a new brewery is the driving force behind Surly’s expansion into Wisconsin. Surly’s new facility is a $30 million, 60,000-barrel-a-year beer factory in Minneapolis that opened in December to supplement the original brewery in suburban Brooklyn Center.
But Wisconsin had to wait a bit. After a Surly pullout in 2010 to meet demand back home, Chicago had its supply restored first in 2013. And this March, Surly turned the taps on to Iowa.
Lest you feel slighted that trucks loaded with Surly beer were rolling to Iowa — Iowa! — and through Wisconsin to Chicago before we got ours, know that if you sell beer here, you have to be ready to sell a lot of beer. The smaller markets made sense as production at the new brewery scaled up, Ansari said.
“Wisconsin’s probably one of the best markets for us because so many people know who we are,” Ansari said, citing the annual Great Taste of the Midwest festival in Madison and the frequent back-and-forth between residents of western Wisconsin and Minnesota. “We finally have enough beer. … We had to be building up because we knew we wouldn’t be able to tackle Wisconsin right off the bat.”
“Yep, it’s just beer,” Drosner writes. “But it’s some very fine beer, deserving of a place in Wisconsin’s beer coolers — or any other market.”
Related: Surly Brewing finally makes its way to Milwaukee beer scene (Milwaukee Journal Sentinel)
