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Business & Tech

Minnetonka Brewery Readies for Launch

Jon Messier and Eric Biermann see Lucid Brewing as a gateway to craft beers for the area suburbs.

In the brewing world, not all beers are created equal. On one end of the spectrum you have the popular commercial beers (Budweiser, Coors, Miller), which are typically mild, relatively inexpensive and available everywhere. On the other end are craft beers. Often richly favored, stronger, more expensive, harder to find and sometimes highly specialized.

But while local brewers Eric Biermann and Jon Messier love that it's possible to brew a creme brûlée porter, they realize that its appeal is limited.

“When we were starting out we talked about some of the craziest beers we could think of,” Messier said, but then they got to thinking, “Well, that’s great, but who’s going to buy it?”

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Lucid Brewing pours the concept of accessibility into their flagship brew, Lucid Air, which they say will be simple, subtle, crisp and easy to drink.

“People who would drink a Miller, Bud or Coors Lights could realistically sit and drink this," said Bierman.

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“It’s our gateway beer,” added Messier.

It's not just intended to be a gateway to their more complex, flavor-packed beers they've got in the works, like Lucid Camo, a full-flavored strong brew, or Lucid Duce, a complex, seasonal red ale. Messier and Bierman hope that Lucid Air will be a gateway into the world of craft beers in general.

As serious as Twin Cities takes beer craftsmanship, the region is surprisingly under-served in terms of market share. A good market share for craft beers, Messier and Biermann say, is ten percent. Cities like Portland, OR are as high as thirty percent. In Minnesota, despite successful craft breweries like Summit, Surly and Schell's, their market share hasn't even hit two percent.

“There’s lots of room,” Messier said. “Bar owners and managers realize the gain from putting in craft beer [and] local beer. A lot of the places that we’re talking to are expanding their tap lines. So we’re not kicking off Surly to get on tap. We’re filling in where other breweries may have deficiencies, like if you can’t get a beer from Alaska five days a week, well, we’re right down the street.”

And for Minnetonka bars, "right down the street" takes on a much more literal meaning.

“The Minnetonka crowd is ripe for a brewery. The whole area. They’ve kind of got the cold shoulder from the people in Minneapolis and St. Paul," said Messier. "Why isn’t there more craft beer in this region? Strategically, it was a great place to start a brewery.”

Biermann agrees. In the summer months, he asks, where do people go for the weekends? The lake areas. And more and more, they're seeing local bars add more taps, rather than only stock the best-selling beers.

Construction and licensing for Lucid Brewery should be finished soon, but they aren't planning any big grand opening events or brewery tours just yet.

“Our game plan was just to work with the city to be able to produce beer, and we didn’t want anything to hold that up," Biermann said. "And so once we get through that process, then we’ll work with them to figure out what we can do to do tours."

But celebrating beer with their neighbors in Minnetonka is definitely in the works. Messier and Biermann are interested in participating in local events and tours, and expect to see smaller, more intimate product launches in local pubs.

“We’re working our way through the city to get clearance to have people in here. Right now we’re just a production facility," said Messier. "The next step after that would be having events outside where we get some of those big wooden tables and do a big Oktoberfest. It’ll be awesome.”

Within the next six months Lucid Brewing hopes to grow, at least into the other side of their building. Ideally, they'd like to add another brewer to the team, as well as some sales and marketing personnel. But they plan to be cautious.

“The worst thing we could do as a brewery," Messier said, "would be to launch a product and not be able to support it, or not produce it in a quality fashion, so we’ll crawl before we walk. That’s for sure.”

Lucid Brewing expects to be in production by late October.

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