Junkyard Brewing Company is a "nanobrewery" and Taproom in Moorhead, Minnesota. We incorporated in 2012 and got our beer manufacturer's license from MN in the spring of 2013. Our Taproom is currently open every night of the week, and we offer periodic 750ml "crowler" can releases, and Growler fills every Sunday. We are not really distributing any kegs right now, because our taproom is consuming all the beer we can make.
People have come to know us for our focus on brewing experimental styles, and for constantly rotating our beer offerings at the taproom and for off-sale.
The Beginning
Junkyard Brewing Company was conceived while I brewed my own beer in college. I still remember the first batch; it was a five-gallon recipe with eight pounds of dark malt extract powder and eight ounces of chinook hops for the boil with a packet of dry yeast to ferment it. I "bottled" this first batch in pint-sized canning jars and judged when the natural carbonation had taken place by the "plink, plink" noises of the lids buckling upward under pressure. Friends suggested names for my first brew, and a couple stand out in my mind: "Junk's Trunk" and "Junkyard" beer. It was nicknames like these that helped guide me toward choosing the name "Junkyard" for the brewing company when the time came to attach a name to my idea.
Junkyard is the perfect name for this company because it expresses, in a word, who we are; we're unique, we're local, and we've got character.
Junkyards are places to find cool stuff. Stuff with character. In a market that continues to offer more and more choices, our beers will always be unique and full of character.
Junkyards are local places. In a word, unique. They are the complete opposite of chain companies. Likewise, you won't find a brewery quite like us anywhere else. We're individual and local.
A sort of Junkyard mentality also guided the creation and building of our company; My brother Dan and I didn't have much money to spend getting the brewery started, so we made up the difference through hard work and creativity. With that attitude, Junkyard Brewing Co. was founded in 2012 by a couple of young guys recently out of college, with very little money in their pockets, and no outside investment.
When I first started planning the brewery, my goal was a moderately sized microbrewery with varying degrees of interest from potential investors. I visited other Minnesota microbreweries and made detailed business plans and financial models, but things never took physical shape until Dan got involved and we decided to try making a go of it on our own with a nanobrewery setup.
We designed and built a 50 gallon, stainless steel, all-grain brewing system with a custom jacketed brewkettle heated by a couple of 200,000 BTU propane burners. But we needed a place to put it. Then I started talking to Ron at the Country Cannery homebrew store in Moorhead about founding a nanobrewery. (I showed him pictures of the 50 gallon system Dan and I had built). We walked out into the adjacent shop area, and after some pacing-off, pointing, and hypothetical layout ideas, the original location was starting to become a reality.
After that came a lot of paperwork, research, and building, all of which was tedious and interesting only to somebody planning a nanobrewery. To sum it up, a lot of scrounging, deal-making, and hard work went into the creation of Junkyard Brewing Company.
The dream finally became a cold, foamy reality as the last of the licensing and permitting was wrapped up in the spring and summer of 2013. And our first kegs went on tap in local establishments in August of 2013.
After approximately one year of operations at the original brewery, we finally secured a lease at a bigger warehouse space in the summer of 2014. Throughout the summer, Dan and I alternately brewed at the original brewery and constructed the new taproom and brewery. The new taproom opened in September of 2014, but even after upgrading to a new 3 barrel brewing system, we're still struggling to brew enough beer to keep up with our taproom. Currently, we have a project underway to have a 10 barrel brewing system installed by January 2017.
Going forward, we'll continue to focus on brewing experimental styles, constantly rotating our beer offerings, and we'll stay true to our Do-It-Yourself style of brewing and business.
If you are ever in town, we hope you go visit Junkyard Brewing CO. and have a Beer enjoy some live music and food trucks.
Source At: Junkyard Brewing Company - BEER
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