The Twin Cities’ Beer Scene Is Showing the Rest of the Industry How to Fight Back

When I reach Drew Hurst, he’s running late to work. “I’m taking the call from my car right now because there’s an I.C.E. stop on my road on my way in, which, y’know, I pulled over to film,” the president and COO of Bauhaus Brew Labs in Northeast Minneapolis explains. “Traffic got stopped for a long time. It’s uncomfortable how normal that feels at this point.”

Perhaps you have heard that the Twin Cities are under deadly siege by federal agents from Immigration and Customs Enforcement, Customs and Border Protection, and the Department of Homeland Security at the racist, fascist behest of President Donald Trump and his gruesome cabal. You have seen crisp 4K footage of masked thugs with the full force of the United States’ government gun down legal observers Renee Good and Alex Pretti in the frigid streets of Minneapolis then deny them medical care as they bled to death in Minnesota’s frigid streets. Like you, Hurst has seen it. He and hundreds of thousands of others in the cities are living it. But somebody still has to run the brewery.

It makes for uncanny moments. “We’re all kind of dealing with the surrealism” of the situation, he tells Hop Take. “We all watch Alex Pretti get killed by a federal officer on Saturday morning, and then we’re all back packaging beer Monday morning and trying to figure out how to talk about it.”

These are not ideal conditions in which to run a craft brewery. The mortal fear, the bilious rage, the despair of watching Congressional Republicans equivocate about cold-blooded killings on Fox News while Congressional Democrats paw around for solutions to the terror that don’t include abolishing I.C.E. (How about more bodycams? Perhaps more training? What about impeaching D.H.S. Secretary Kristi Noem — would that be enough?) Hurst and his staff feel it. Their customers feel it. None of it helps the business during what is traditionally the slowest month of the year thanks to the crushing Minnesota winter and the prevalence of Dry January.

You can see it in the firm’s sales figures. Taproom sales are down 40 percent compared to January 2025. “It’s a wildly unsustainable thing,” says Hurst. “None of us signed up to have to live through a federal occupation and figure out how to run a business at the same time.” Not that it was easy before the onslaught: Bauhaus wrapped this month last year down around 30 percent from January 2024. Craft brewers have been struggling to find their way for years in the face of shifting demand, new competition, and rising costs. In Minneapolis and Saint Paul, they’re doing all that with the MAGA jackboots on their necks.

Let it be known they’re also doing it with smiles on their faces and love in their hearts. The Twin Cities beer scene is answering the call of its neighbors, customers, and workers with logistical prowess, cheerful determination, and icy moral clarity. Brewers, bar owners, and union organizers in the cities’ trade are putting business on hold to distribute food, raise money, host activist trainings, and more. They are setting the benchmark for how to actually care for their “community,” rather than just invoke it as a hospitality marketing buzzword, and as they do they’re also writing the playbook for their colleagues around the country whose homes may face federal attacks soon enough. Their message is clear: start studying up, and start speaking out.

“Start thinking about what your plan is right now,” says Anders Bloomquist, a labor organizer with UNITE HERE 17, the powerful hospitality union’s fighting local in the Land of 10,000 Lakes. Bloomquist has focused on organizing the craft beverage industry in town for years, and before becoming a union staffer had previously worked production at Fair State Brewing Cooperative. “What are you going to do when — not if, but when — I.C.E. shows up to your brewery? What’s the plan for when [federal agents] show up undercover in your taproom? Are you going to allow that to happen, or are you going to make it clear that they’re not welcome?” Much like the brewers Hop Take spoke with just a few years ago who’d received death threats and bullet holes for hosting drag events, Bloomquist emphasized the importance of deliberate contingency planning for brewery owners and workers alike in the face of a roving federal threat. “What are you going to do when people start calling out sick or calling out because [their commutes] feel unsafe?” he asks. “This is what’s been happening here, and some version of all of that is going to happen in other parts of the country before all is said and done.”

Some brewers may prefer to keep their heads down, especially with the market for craft beer in such a sorry state. But having lived and worked through George Floyd’s murder and spasms of civil unrest that emanated from the Twin Cities in 2020, Juno Choi is not one of them. “Now is not the time to fall silent and be complicit,” says the founder of Arbeiter Brewing Company in South Minneapolis. Choi is speaking to me by phone from the taproom, just a hundred feet or so from Minneapolis Police Department’s Third Precinct — the one that burned during the uprising following Floyd’s death by cop. “That focused our attention on who we are and how we give back to our community in order to help rebuild the neighborhood,” Choi tells me. “It’s kind of similar to what we’re doing right now with everything that’s going on with I.C.E.”

What Arbeiter is doing right now, like Bauhaus and many other breweries throughout the city, is operating on what you might call the MSP Mullet Model: taproom and brewhouse up front, community organizing depot out the back. The brewery has used its space to host fundraisers for organizations like the Immigrant Law Center of Minnesota, stocked a neighborhood foodbank, and served as a clearinghouse to get donated Visa gift cards directly into the hands of South Minneapolis families whose breadwinners cannot leave their homes for fear of abduction or worse by Trump’s thugs. “We’re also gathering gas cards for those individuals who are having to drive food and deliveries to these families that are too afraid to leave their houses,” Choi, a second-generation immigrant himself, tells Hop Take.

Business as usual, it ain’t, but Arbeiter is hanging on. No thanks to off-premise distribution, which has tanked as Twin Cities restaurants — major immigrant employers in a metropolis where one in seven small businesses is owned by one, per the American Immigration Council — have been forced to close for lack of available staff and customers alike. “That’s coupled with the fact that we’ve lost a lot of our food vendors,” who cannot safely make it to the brewery, Choi says, leaving the taproom without a key draw in the always-tough winter months. Last year, Arbeiter sold 80 percent of its volume over its own bar, which should leave it less exposed to the knock-on effects of Trump’s campaign of violence. But Choi has been too busy to look too closely. The taproom’s sales trended up for the full year last year, which is no mean feat considering the Brewers Association is projecting the overall segment’s volume down over five percent for 2025. Arbeiter’s founder attributes the success in part to “wearing our political viewpoints and our emotions on our sleeve.” Still, no matter your values, it’s hard to keep sales up when regulars fear for their lives. “This year, [January] is still probably going to be down from what it was last year,” Choi says.

“It’s economic terrorism,” says Wes Burdine, the owner of Black Hart of Saint Paul, a queer soccer bar just four miles and a Mississippi River crossing east from Arbeiter. That’s on top of the actual terrorism, he clarifies. The bar, which inhabits the location of the city’s oldest gay bar and proudly bears a “F[*]CK TRUMP” scarf over its front window, has seen sales dip around 15 percent compared to last year. “Because of I.C.E., lots of people are afraid to leave their house, or they’re distracted, they’re out patrolling [for I.C.E.] and then not coming drinking,” Burdine tells me.

Black Hart shut down for the Twin Cities’ mass strike last Friday, and he was proud they did. “It was important to send a message that, yes, we’re sacrificing a day [of sales], but we’re already all sacrificing,” he says. Still, it was a scary decision: though the bar’s revenues have grown 200 percent since he opened in 2017, payroll comes every two weeks, and it’s Burdine’s responsibility to make it. “I really want this place to continue,” he says. “I’m not a business person […] hopefully I’ll have retirement someday.”

Burdine figures maybe 30 percent of his regulars were Republicans before Trump’s masked raiders descended on the Twin Cities, and acknowledges that it’s easier for him to stake out a progressive position than it might be in, say, Green Bay, Wis., which tends to run red. But he counsels against listening to the “small, whiny set of people” on the right who bray angrily at businesses that speak out against I.C.E.

If it’s “picking sides,” he says, it’s between customers who “want to be here and enjoy company, and another group who wants to put those people in jail.” Burdine has made his choice. “Those aren’t ‘equal sides.’”

Back in Northeast Minneapolis, Kabel Lefto, a production worker and community outreach manager at Insight Brewing & Taproom, agrees. Like many breweries, Insight took to Instagram to make its stance on the federal occupation clear with a video captioned “ICE OUT MSP.” “It doesn’t matter where your business is, what your business is,” he tells me. “If you make a post that is as decisive as this, you’re going to get pushback.” The negative comments have been heavily outweighed by positive ones, and despite some review-bombing on Facebook and Google by out-of-state chuds, it’s full steam ahead at Insight, where Lefto and his coworkers are running — you guessed it — a food bank of their own. “My days right now are usually an eight-hour day in production, and then when I get off, I grab a beer and start taking donations, sorting things, getting on emails and whatnot,” he tells me, sounding entirely too chipper about it.

Through its WithInsight program, and based entirely on the volunteered labor of its workers, the brewery has been pulling double-duty as a grocery dispatch hub, sending willing staffers on delivery runs to housebound neighbors. The self-distribution cap for Minnesota’s craft breweries is 25,000 barrels, but nobody said anything about donated food.

What these businesses, and the Twin Cities beer scene with them, will look like when Trump’s unconstitutional assault eventually subsides remains to be seen. The beer trade has put plenty of folks over the barrel lately, even when they’re not operating at the barrel of a gun. At Bauhaus, Hurst takes the long view. “Historically, places like bars and restaurants are where you come to be with your community, find fellowship and support, be mad together, and celebrate together” he says. “At a very deep part of my psyche, I do believe that is important in both normal and deeply abnormal times. That’s the thing we can provide most immediately.”

Craft brewers across the country can do likewise. When their times come, I hope they do.

🤯 Hop-ocalypse Now

The hemp-derived tetrahydrocannabidiol (THC) business is in a fight for its life, and roughly two months into its Congressionally imposed/Trump-signed death sentence, it’s already found some allies in city, state, and federal governments. Whether its acolytes win a full stay of execution remains to be seen, but Brendan Whitworth, the chief executive officer of Anheuser-Busch InBev’s subsidiary in North America, seems annoyed they’re even trying. “Are we actually still talking about that?” he asked Beer Business Daily founder Harry Schuhmacher incredulously during an interview on stage at the outlet’s Beer, Wine & Spirits Summit in San Diego earlier this month, per Brewbound’s report. “I thought that thing was done.” Bit of a mask-off moment from the former chairman of the Beer Institute, which lined up to shank the THC drinks business in Congress this past fall.

📈 Ups…

After shortening the 2026 Craft Brewers Conference schedule, the Brewers Association announced plans to move the Great American Beer Festival to a smaller, outdoor venue for this year… Anheuser-Busch InBev will once again be the Super Bowl’s top advertiser in terms of run-time and (presumably) dollars spent this year… Non-alcoholic brand BERO netted a Series A investment from a private-equity firm, but not one of the bad ones, alright?!…

📉 …and downs

Wine-based riot puncher BeatBox announced plans to lay off 158 (!!!) workers in Texas in advance of its half-a-billion-dollar acquisition by Anheuser-Busch InBev… BrewDog USA shut down two more locations in its home state of Ohio earlier this month… Man, these Super Bowl ads from Bud Light and Budweiser are utterly juiceless, huh?…

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