Do not fear
peak craft beer or brewery saturation. From Bryn Mawr Brewing (now Utepils) near Theodore Wirth Park to Sidhe Brewing (by women, for women!) on St. Paul’s East Side, craft breweries are still opening at a rapid clip here in MSP.
Most newcomers play it straight. Not
Wild Mind Artisan Ales. South Minneapolis’s newest brewery is thoroughly and completely breaking the craft beer mold. It’s set for an early summer open in a low-slung warehouse near Minneapolis’s southern frontier, just west of the I-35W/Crosstown interchange.
How can any new MSP brewery — particularly one that might as well have an Edina address — possibly hope to stand out in our suds-soaked neck of the woods? By bringing to the North an entirely new style of beer: wild coolship ales.
Wild coolship ales utilize a centuries-old fermenting vessel known as a coolship — a long, shallow contraption built to expose fermenting beer (wort) to whatever wild yeast strains blow in on the wind.
According to an exhaustive piece in
Minneapolis-St. Paul Magazine, founder and head brewer Mat Waddell plans to keep each coolship ale batch in the signature vessel for about a day: long enough to catch enough microbial funk, but not so long that the beer turns or becomes dangerous to unsuspecting drinkers.
“It’s a funhouse style of beer,” Waddell told the magazine. “You end up strictly with whatever is in the air — whatever it picks up is whatever it picks up.”
The batch then spends the balance of its fermentation in oak or metal barrels. According to a
press release from Jeremy Zoss, a local craft beer expert who’s handling publicity for Wild Mind, about 75 percent of Wild Mind’s brews will be barrel-aged — an unusually high percentage. Waddell plans to source wine barrels from as far away as France, plus chardonnay oak from Napa and bourbon barrels from Kentucky.
Due to the coolship’s limited volume and the time-intensive nature of the barrel-aging process, Wild Mind’s first beers won’t be “coolshippers.” They
will use wild yeast, though — all of it harvested in-state. No commercial yeast strains allowed: another rarity for an MSP craft brewery. According to Zoss’ release, “[t]hese strains were harvested from St. Paul and northern Minnesota from multiple wild fruit bushes, trees and wildflowers.”
Wild Mind’s early styles look to include bright farmhouse saisons, fruit-tinged sours, imperial stouts redolent with coffee and chocolate notes, and nearly everything in between.
If the whole wild yeast thing doesn’t appeal to you, or if you’re just not a big beer drinker, don’t worry: Waddell clearly aims to turn Wild Mind into the Windom neighborhood’s next hot hangout, complete with a 2,000-square-foot courtyard, lawn bowling, an outdoor movie projection wall (here we come, summer!) — and, of course, plenty of space for
food trucks.