It might’ve tasted like salt water.
My recollection is hazy. Hopkins, Minnesota, May 2016 feels like a different epoch; the Pale Ale in my glass, a phantom in my memory. Everything was so new, which is usually the case when baptisms take place.
I’d only been in Minnesota 18 months, and I’d somehow found myself, a Massachusetts transplant, covering the state’s burgeoning beer scene. But it wasn’t until I went to LTD Brewing Co. to write about Sunday Sales Pale Ale that I realized they were building a ship in a bottle.
No, I don’t remember the flavor. At the time I wrote it, it was “a refreshing spring ale,” which sounds right. But the beer was a picket sign, more than anything. LTD was stoking mutiny, as breweries around the state mounted a campaign, for the third year in a row, to legalize Sunday liquor store sales. Drinking with me was Andrew Schmitt—Schmitty—the forthright founder of Minnesota Beer Activists.
“Why are people in Minnesota clutching on to these antiquated laws?” Schmitty asked me, rhetorically. “Are you trying to be backwards?"
Five years later, yes I am. I’m poring through my hard drive trying to piece together this day. I’ve spent the last two years studying Minnesota’s path to modernization, interviewing more lawyers and senators than I ever thought necessary. 57 pages of notes, over 30,000 words processed down into a spiraling feature that barely begins to capture the fight of shipbuilders like LTD.
I look back on Schmitty, beaming with energy. He’s elsewhere now, cultivating community hop gardens. Minnesota Beer Activists is dormant, having won its push for Sunday sales years ago. The paper where I told their story is gone, effaced from the internet. LTD is still in Hokins, but a wave has crested over all of this.
And I wonder what else it will take.
