Michael Agnew

Vine Park Brewing, Existing in the Overlap

For those looking to start a new brewery there are many hurdles along the way. There’s finding a space, procuring a brewery, and of course securing adequate financing to fund the expensive start-up process. Aside from these relatively straightforward issues, however, there is the Kafka-esque, bureaucratic labyrinth of licensing. Involving federal, state, and municipal jurisdictions, each with their own sets of priorities, the licensing process can be quite complex. I recently got an interesting insight into this process while interviewing Daniel Justesen and Andy Grage, owners of Vine Park Brewing Co. in St. Paul, Minnesota, for an upcoming brewery profile.

Vine Park Brewing is a brew-on-premise business located just a couple miles from the heart of downtown St. Paul. In the brew-on-premise business customers select from one of fifty recipes and brew a twelve-gallon batch of beer at one of Vine Park’s six kettles. Two weeks later, once the beer has completed fermentation, they return to bottle the beer they brewed. What makes Vine Park unique, and makes for complex licensing issues, is that they also operate as a production microbrewery. On their three-barrel system, they brew a wide variety of beers that are sold in growlers for off-premise consumption. With an annual output of “ninety-nine barrels of beer”, Vine Park is the smallest microbrewery in the country that is not connected to a brewpub.

“We have a semi-unique licensing.” says Vine Park co-owner Daniel Justesen. “You remember your old geometry classes where they would take the circles and put them up there and there’d be these little overlap regions? We exist in those little overlap regions.” The laws are written to apply to each circle, be it brew-on-premise, microbrewery, or brewpub. When a single entity exists in more than one circle, it raises questions. “Sometimes it isn’t anything other than confusion. No one ever thought about it before. So now we have to think about it in those kinds of terms.”

When they started the three year process to license the microbrewery they believed the federal application was going to be the hard part. “It was hard in the sense that there was a giant stack of paperwork that has to be filled out. But the federal people were extremely helpful in finding solutions. I think it goes back to the fact that they’re there to raise tax money. If they can get you up and going, you can start paying some tax money. It changes their motivation.” The microbrewery part of the business exists with a federal microbrewery license, but they have to maintain strict separation between the microbrewery and the brew-on-premise. As both exist in the same space, this wasn’t easy. The solution was to separate them in time. “We’re a microbrewery part of the day and a brew-on-premise during the other part of the day. And each of those has separate rules about what you can do and what you can’t do. So all the things that microbreweries can theoretically do with customers, like give samples, we can’t do, because the instant a customer comes in we’re no longer a microbrewery. When that door opens and a customer walks in we flip and become a brew-on-premise.”

The next step was to secure a state license. According to Justesen, “The state is regulated under the department of public safety. So their mandate is to stop people from doing anything that might harm people. They look at everything from the perspective of, ‘Even though the law says whatever, I don’t want to go out on a limb and say that this is okay to do.’” The state process was smoothed somewhat because Surly Brewing Company had managed a couple of years before to get the laws changed to allow microbreweries to sell growlers from the brewery.

With federal and state licenses in hand, next came the municipal authorities. “We went to the city and they were enthusiastic about us being here. But they said, ‘You can’t do that.’” It seems the city of St. Paul was unaware of the change to the state law allowing growler sales. “So we had to send the city attorney the statute that showed it. Then they said, ‘Okay. But we never created that license. In the state law the licensing authority is the city. So we have to create a new city ordinance to create a new type of license.’” They supplied their City Councilman with appropriate language for the ordinance, and he shepherded it through the system. When they attended the final vote they were instructed not to say anything unless someone asked a question. “Nobody asked any questions.” says Justesen. “We had actually brought growlers as a show and tell. It wasn’t until after the vote was completed that somebody said, ‘By the way, what is a growler?’”

Having changed the ordinance to allow for the city growler license, they reapplied. This time they were told that they didn’t have the proper zoning. According to zoning officials they could sell their beer where they were located, but they couldn’t make it there. While it was legal for their brew-on-premise customers to brew beer, the microbrewery needed to be located in an industrial zone. Justesen continues, “So I went digging around in the zoning statutes and found that many years ago when Vine Park first opened, they put a sub-clause in the zoning that said if you’re a malt beverage producer you can be in a B2 zone as long as you are also a brew-on-premise. But you can’t sell any beer on premise. Well, back when they passed that law twelve years ago there was no such thing as a growler, so by on-premise they meant serving. We had to go back in and change the zoning code to read that it was just no on-premise sales. Off premise is okay. So there is a clause that’s out there, if someone else wants to open up a microbrewery and not be in an industrial zone, as long as they also make it into a brew-on-premise they can do that.”

It took Vine Park three years from when they started the process before they were actually able to brew a batch of beer and sell it. “It was never that anybody was trying to stop us,” says Justesen. “There were just so many levels that were involved and figuring out how to make it all work.” They seem to have made it work. The brew-on-premise business continues to thrive and they are adding tanks to increase their microbrewery capacity.

Here’s to existing in the overlap.

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