Some time ago, I had a friend in the Twin Cities send me a list of the hottest burger joints in the Twin Cities. I was sort of surprised to see a place listed - Surly Brewing Company - as I didn't know that they had a restaurant attached to their brewery. It turns out that they built a new facility in 2014 and moved there late in the year. In addition to the brewery, they have two restaurants and a reception hall. For lunch one day on a recent trip to the Twin Cities, I decided to go check out the Surly Beer Hall.
The roots of Surly Brewing Co. go all the way back to India where Naseem Ansari was born into a Muslim family in 1932, the youngest of 8 children. When parts of India were partitioned in 1947, the Ansari family was forced to move to Pakistan. It was there that Naseem Ansari first started to study engineering. He came to the United States in 1956 to resume his engineering studies, ending up at Ohio State University with little money in his pocket.
On a trip to Chicago in 1958, Naseem Ansari met a German girl who was spending time in the United States trying to improve her English. The two fell in love and eventually married. Even though people felt that a marriage between a Pakistani engineer and a fair-skinned German girl wouldn't last, Naseem - who eventually took the American name Nick - and Dorit Ansari were married for over 55 years. From this union, the Ansari's had two children - Omar and Rebecca.
They eventually made it to the Twin Cities where Nick Ansari worked for a friend in an abrasives manufacturing business. He eventually bought the business from his friend and at its height in the early 70's Ansari Abrasives had as many as 80 employees.
However, the manufacturers that used abrasives started to go away and business began to slow down. Nick suffered a debilitating heart attack in 1976, and coupled with a slow recovery from that, the abrasives plant that he owned was forced into bankruptcy. With the help of Dorit, Nick Ansari recovered both physically and financially evolving into a national distributor of abrasives products. In addition to his distribution company, Nick Ansari also was involved in real estate and mining concerns.
The Ansari's son, Omar, had graduated from Macalester College in St. Paul with a degree in Economics and came to work in the family's abrasives distribution business located in suburban Brooklyn Center. While he would eventually take over the reins to the family business, the younger Ansari had other interests - good beer.
Omar Ansari had tasted homemade brews before and wasn't really impressed with much of what he had tasted. Then in 1994, he was given a home-brewing kit complete with all the ingredients to make beer at home. Living in an apartment at the time, Omar made his first beer - an Irish Red Ale - with the beer fermenting for weeks in a towel-draped bucket in the corner of his apartment. When he thought it was ready to drink, he gave it a try. It turned out to be even worse some of the other bad home-brews that he'd sampled in the past.
Dejected, Omar put away the brew kit for a number of years. But his fascination of the growing craft beer craze over the years piqued his interest to give home-brewing another try. His second batch of beer still wasn't that good, but it was remarkably better than his first stab at home-brewing a few years before. He began to immerse himself in the culture of craft beer - studying up on brewing techniques, visiting craft breweries around the nation, and continuing to hone his skills at brewing beer at home.
Pictured right - Omar Ansari (Photo courtesy Minnesota Public Radio)
Now married to his wife Becca, Omar continued to brew beer at home. In 2002, the Ansari's welcomed their first son in 2002 and made the announcement to friends and family by brewing an Extra Pale Ale, bottling it, put a label with the baby's picture on the bottle and sent it out. Not only was the delivery of the announcement a hit to his friends and family, but many commented that his beer was also pretty damned good.
As more manufacturers working with abrasives pulled out of the U.S. for cheaper labor overseas, business at the abrasives distribution business began to falter. Omar saw no long term hope for sustaining the business and he wondered what he was going to with the rest of his life. Then he thought, "Hey, maybe I could start my own brewery."
Omar Ansari sat down one day and began to make a pro and con list of opening a brewery. The more beer he drank while coming up with the list, the more pros than cons were appearing on the paper. He sat down with his wife and went over the list. Becca Ansari could see more and more that Omar's passion wasn't in the family business, but in brewing beer. It wasn't long before she told her husband, "Let's do it."
Next, Omar Ansari had to convince his father to get out of the abrasives business and into brewing beer. It didn't take Nick Ansari long to realize that his son was on to something. With a handshake and his father's blessing, the Ansari family was suddenly out of the abrasives business and planning on building a brewery.
First, Omar Ansari needed to learn about all the aspects of brewing beers. He took classes through the American Brewers Guild and eventually took an apprenticeship at the New Holland brewery in Holland, MI. Then fate intervened...
In the Spring of 2004, Omar was attending a craft brewers conference in San Diego and he met a fellow Minnesotan brewer, Todd Haug, a heavy metal musician-turned-brewer. Haug was the brewmaster at the Rock Bottom Brewery location in Minneapolis and a seasoned brewer. It turned out after a few moments of conversation that Ansari and Haug had gone to the same junior high school in Golden Valley, MN. The two hit it off and Haug invited Ansari to come in to see his brewing operation. It worked out good for both - Ansari learned more from Haug, and Haug got some free help from Ansari.
Pictured left - Todd Haug and Omar Ansari. Photo courtesy Minneapolis Star-Tribune.
Ansari had told Haug about his plans to eventually open a brewery in his family's former business and tried to enlist the brewer into joining him in his venture. Haug was skeptical and declined Ansari's initial overtures. However, a few months later - and plenty of prodding from Ansari - Haug left Rock Bottom to join Omar Ansari in his venture.
It took the two over a year to transform the former abrasives factory/distribution facility into a brewery. They cut concrete to put in water pipes and drainage (accidentally cutting into a water main in the meantime), bought and installed brewing equipment in the building - Haug showed a hidden talent in welding, it turned out - and then started to ramp up to brewing their first beer. They decided to call the brewery Surly, as in how a person gets when they can't find a good beer to drink. At the end of December in 2005, Haug and Ansari brewed their first beer - Furious, an overly hoppy IPA that was very bitter on the tongue, but had a nice finish.
As much as Haug and Ansari liked their beer, others did not. Ansari spent a month traveling to bars around the Twin Cities to try to get them to buy a keg of Furious. Most of the bartenders would spit out the hopped-up beer at first taste. But beer connoisseurs around the Twin Cities liked the taste of the beer and by February of 2006, the first kegs of Surly Furious were rolling into bars. The beer connected with its fans and suddenly the tour of the Surly brewery was one of the hottest tickets in town. As the brewery hosted events and parties, their popularity grew tremendously. (As an aside, I first tried Surly Furious in the summer of 2008. It was unlike any beer I'd tasted before. I wasn't immediately certain that I liked it at first, but it sort of grew on me and I found myself picking up four packs of 16 ounce cans to bring home with me on trips to the Twin Cities.)
As one of the most rapidly growing breweries in the United States, by 2011 Surly was putting out over 15,000 barrels of beer annually. Ansari and Haug brought in more brewing equipment to meet the demand, but it was evident that the building in Brooklyn Park was bursting at the seams. In order to keep up with demand - output had nearly doubled in two years from 2011 to 2013 - Ansari knew that they were going to have to relocate.
Buildings the size they needed weren't readily available in the Twin Cities area, and if they were, the cost was out of line with what they were willing to pay. One day, a Surly employee - Jim Mott - came to Ansari and Haug with a story about a brewery he visited in Austria that served beer that was brewed on the premises. From there, Ansari envisioned a destination brewery complete with a beer hall that served food. The only problem was that Minnesota's liquor laws - which dated back to the end of Prohibition - prohibited the sale and consumption on property where beer is brewed and is distributed to bars and stores.
In early 2011, Surly Brewing started a social media push to bring into light the archaic laws on the books in the state of Minnesota. They announced a plan to move to a location that would allow them to have a brewpub at the site, but they needed help with changing the law. Within a few short weeks a bi-partisan omnibus bill was presented to legislators to overhaul the old liquor laws. It was immediately passed and signed into law by Minnesota Governor Mark Dayton in May of 2011.
Now that they had the law on their side - and output was up to nearly 30,000 barrels annually - Ansari went looking for a site where they could build a brewery/brewpub from scratch. In 2013, he purchased an 8.3 acre parcel of land in Minneapolis' Prospect Park neighborhood near the University of Minnesota. After securing a $2 million dollar environmental grant from the local county government to help clean up the property from over a hundred years of industrial pollution, Surly broke ground on the new facility in late October of 2013.
The new facility offered an initial output of 100,000 barrels of Surly beer annually with space to grow. It featured a large beer hall, an upscale restaurant with outdoor dining in the Summertime, and meeting/reception spaces that could handle anywhere from 20 to 175 people. The new Surly brewery cost over $30 million dollars to build and opened to the public just before Christmas in 2014. Unfortunately, Naseem "Nick" Ansari died less than month after the doors of the new facility opened from complications due to heart disease at the age of 82. Omar Ansari calls Surly a "second generation" business because of what his parents built with their business and what he eventually turned it into.
Surly brews 7 year round varieties of beers, a dozen seasonal beers, and over two dozen of what they call "occasional beers". Surly beers - in cans only - are distributed in Minnesota, Iowa, Wisconsin and in the Chicago area. In April of this year, they announced they would start distributing their beer in Nebraska, North Dakota, and South Dakota.
It was just past noon on a week day when I pulled into the parking lot at Surly. The large parking lot was about a 1/3 full with more cars parking on the street in front of the building. I wondered if I was going to have trouble getting a seat in the beer hall. It turned out that I didn't have to worry about that. The place was huge. Long communal tables stretched across half the room, while four-seater tables were interspersed throughout the rest of the space. Large windows on the east side of the hall allowed patrons to look in on the glistening fermenting tanks in the brewery. And large windows on the west side of the hall allowed for an abundance of natural light to come into the room.
Upstairs from the beer hall was where the event rooms and the Brewers Table restaurant - a food and beer paired restaurant that is only open from 5 to 10 p.m. Wednesday and Thursday, and 5 to 11 p.m. on Friday and Saturday nights. The large reception area known as Scheid Hall is next to the restaurant. The reception hall is named in honor of Minnesota state senator Linda Scheid who was one of the backers of the "Taproom Bill" that allowed Omar Ansari achieve his dream of turning Surly into a destination brewery. (Tragically, Scheid passed away from cancer less than three weeks after the bill was signed into law.) The Brewers Table restaurant features four-course meals paired with beers, or ala carte offerings. I checked out the menu that was posted outside the door of the restaurant and it looked pretty eclectic.
Jorge Guzman (pictured right - photo courtesy MPLS.-St. Paul Magazine), a native of St. Louis and who went to college and played football at Drake University in Des Moines, is the executive chef of the Surly kitchens. Guzman graduated with a degree in advertising, but he found that food was his passion. He spent two years at the Culinary Institute of America in Hyde Park, NY garnering an associates degree in culinary arts. From there, Guzman went to Chicago to work at a couple of restaurants before ending up as the chef at one of my favorite restaurants at the time, the now-shuttered Tejas in Edina, MN. After a short stint as the Executive Chef for the University of Minnesota and at the Corner Table restaurant, he became the Executive Chef for Solera, a Spanish restaurant in downtown Minneapolis. After three and a half years at Solera, Guzman was named the Executive Chef for Surly's destination brewery in August of 2014. (Solera didn't last much longer - it closed toward the end of 2014.)
The clientele eating lunch at the Surly Beer Hall was an interesting mix of urban hipsters and professional-looking men and women. I took a seat at the bar and was given a food and beer menu by the bartender who waited on me, a laid-back guy by the name of Drew. I ordered up the Surly Overrated, a West Coast pale ale - an excellent beer, to say the least.
The food menu for the beer hall is what I would call a step or two above what you would find at most brewpubs. It wasn't all that extensive, but it featured entrees such as smoked pork chilaquiles, pepita (pumpkin seed) crusted catfish, and - as a nod to Jorge Guzman's background in Spanish cuisine - they feature a Merguez lamb sausage platter. Sandwiches include a pork banh mi and a fried chicken breast sandwich. And they also had barbecued brisket, pulled pork and spare ribs on the menu - something that caught my attention.
I thought about getting either the brisket or the pork barbecue (they wouldn't let you combine the two, which I think is a mistake), but I ended up going with the Surly Burger. It featured two flat-grilled burger patties topped with American cheese sitting on a bed of chopped lettuce, a tomato slice, sliced onions and tasty dill pickles that may have been made in-house. There was also a spread of what Surly calls their "fancy sauce" that tasted sort of like a 1000 Island/ketchup sauce with a bit of a kick. A side of fries - a large side, at that - came with the burger.
When I picked up the burger, I could feel the bun didn't have much of a spongy-quality to the outer side. Sort of like it was an old bun. But the first bite told me different. The bun was crispy on the outer shell, but soft inside. It was a good bun to go along with what turned out to be a very good burger. I was reading somewhere that the Surly Burger is what it is because Omar Ansari, Todd Haug and Jorge Guzman decreed that a good cheeseburger must have American cheese on it, as well as shredded lettuce as it holds up better than lettuce leaves. I was not unhappy that I got the burger.
In the condiment caddy in front of me, they offered two different barbecue sauces. They had a milder, sweet and smoky sauce, and a similar sauce that had a bit of a bite on the back end of the tongue. I tried them both to dip some of my fries into. I may have eaten - maybe - a quarter of the fries that I had on my plate. They were crisp on the outside with some sort of seasoning, but flaky on the inside. I was so full from my burger that I pushed the plate away and asked Drew to take it away immediately so I wouldn't eat any more. He said, "Yeah, we do give you a lot fries."
My wife and I recently went up to the Twin Cities for a weekend getaway after our anniversary and I was telling her about the Surly Beer Hall. She suggested we go there for lunch that particular day. We got there just as they were opening on a beautiful Saturday and a handful of people had queued up outside the front door.
The beer garden was open and outdoor seating was available on the deck overlooking the beer garden. We took a seat on one of the community picnic tables on the deck and both of us got a beer. Cindy tried the Xtra-Citra pale ale, a seasonal beer that had a slight citrus-y taste on top of the hoppy pale ale taste. I had ordered the Overrated APA again and she decided that she like that better than the Xtra-Citra. The Xtra-Citra reminded me of a more hoppy version of my favorite beer, the Kona Big Wave Golden Ale.
I had already decided upon getting barbecue on this visit and while Cindy considered getting the Bahn Mi sandwich for a moment, she decided at the last moment to get barbecue, as well. Since we couldn't get a pork and brisket combo, we decided to get one of each and share. She got the brisket with a side of the grilled Brussels sprouts and I went with the pulled pork with the baked beans. King's Hawaiian buns, house-made pickles and onion slices came with the barbecue platter.
The brisket was moist and tender and had a very good flavor to it. The thick cuts of beef could easily be cut with a fork. The pork was not quite as moist, but still had a good taste. The barbecue sauces made the pulled pork more palatable. However, the baked beans were simply outstanding. It featured three or four different types of beans mixed in with pulled pork and an herbed-sweet tomato sauce. I usually like to mix some barbecue sauce in with baked beans, but these didn't need any help at all. It was more like a chili than baked beans. I could have seen myself just eating a bowl of the baked beans as a lunch item.
It was sort of funny because on my previous visit to the Surly Beer Hall, a guy next to me had gotten the pulled pork barbecue with the Brussels sprouts as a side. When he was asked by someone in management at Surly Brewing how he liked the Brussels sprouts, he gave them a thumbs down. "Too salty," the guy next to me told the guy. I didn't want to tell Cindy that after she ordered them, but she soon found out why the guy gave them the "thumbs-down". The Brussels sprouts had toasted sesame seeds and cilantro mixed in with a very salty Thai sauce. It was too salty for Cindy's taste buds and she usually likes a little salt on some of her foods.
When she was asked by the waitress how she liked the Brussels sprouts, Cindy told her that they were too salty. The waitress said that they used to put a fish sauce on the Brussels sprouts, but that made them salty, as well. Cindy said, "I can't imagine them being more salty than these." The waitress said she'd relay the info back to the kitchen.
The Surly Beer Hall was a great find. It's definitely a destination and not on the beaten path. The burger I had was very good and the barbecue on my return visit was very good, as well. It was tough to beat the baked beans they had at the Surly Beer Hall. Their menu appeared to be a step above your regular bar/brewpub quality of food. I've been a fan of Surly beer for a number of years and I really enjoyed the Overrated West Coast pale ale that I tried on both of my visits. And both times I visited, the service was friendly and efficient. My wife and I loved the atmosphere of the beer hall and beer garden, and we wished we could have spent more time there. But I have a sneaking suspicion that the Surly Beer Hall will be a required stop on subsequent visits to the Twin Cities.
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