My wife and I started the first night of our mid-summer vacation in the city of Rochester, MN, about halfway from our home up to our eventual vacation spot in Spicer, MN. We stayed near the downtown area and we went into a sleepy brewpub located near the Mayo Clinic to check the place out for their beers and food. It turned out that while the beer was good, the food menu was sort of basic - burgers, sandwiches, appetizers, that sort of thing. I asked my wife if she wanted to stay there for dinner and she said, "I saw that there was another brewpub in Rochester. Let's go check that out." It wasn't long before we pulled into the parking lot of Forager Brewery north and west of the downtown area and went in to see what it was all about.
Austin Jevne grew up in Madison, WI, but migrated to the Twin Cities in 2004 to work at a local food co-operative. He met some people who were into home brewing in the Twin Cities and it wasn't long before he got hooked on brewing his own beers. People who sampled his beers said that he could probably market his home brews, they were that good.
Starting on a new career path, Jevne felt that he had to gain some practical experience in a microbrewery. He moved to River Falls, WI to work on the packaging line at Rush River Brewing Co., eventually moving up to overseeing quality control at the brewery. While at Rush River, Jevne picked the minds of the brewers about all kinds of things - brewing recipes, how to go from small scale home brewing to commercial brewing, and what are the obstacles of opening your own microbrewery.
By 2008, Jevne felt he was able to strike out on his own and he moved back to the Twin Cities to develop a microbrewery with two other partners. When they couldn't get the financing needed to start their project - banks were tightening their belts following the recession - Jevne moved on to his next project.
Pictured at right - Austin Jevne. Photo courtesy WisMinBeer.com
He ended up going to work for Nosh, a highly regarded Mediterranean restaurant in Lake City, MN. Working with owner Greg Jaworski, Jevne tried to start a microbrewery for the restaurant. When things started to go south in the planning phase, a disheartened Jevne threw in the towel and went to Rochester to live with his girlfriend and to work at a local pub called The Thirsty Belgian.
But it was a part-time job that he took with the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources during his time in Lake City that turned Jevne's thinking of brewing in a different direction. As a creel clerk inspecting anglers along streams and creeks in southeastern Minnesota, Jevne found that there were a number of bushes and trees that yielded berries, nuts and other edible plants in the wild. After moving to Rochester, he began to forage for some of these ingredients that he could put into his homemade beers as an experiment.
During his time at The Thirsty Belgian, the owner introduced him to Annie Henderson, a local real estate appraiser; and her husband, Sean Allen, who also developed properties around the Rochester area. Henderson and Allen had been thinking of starting a brewpub in Rochester and were sort of looking for brewers. Jevne was telling Henderson and Allen about his experimental beers flavored with locally grown nuts and fruits. Sampling some of his beers, the couple was more than intrigued about the possibility of opening their brewpub with Jevne's beer recipes featuring foraged ingredients.
Henderson and Allen called Jevne over to their house one evening for a meeting. The couple and Jevne hit it off rather well and decided to go all in with a new brewpub concept in Rochester. Henderson found a 5,000 square foot building and in true forager fashion, the group outfitted the building with repurposed barn board walls, old fashioned light fixtures, windows from a former auditorium in Rochester, and even an antique stove that used to belong to Mayo Clinic co-founder Charles Mayo and his wife, Edith. Even the brewing tanks were repurposed from a dairy in Wisconsin. With the brewery and kitchen in place, Forager Brewery opened in July of 2015.
We found Forager Brewery in a small section of industrial buildings off 11th Ave NW, between Civic Center Dr. and 7th St. NW. (see map) It was sort of a curious location as it was sort of tucked back and not easily seen from the main streets in the area. A large windmill fan was attached to the building's facade. Growing up on a farm with a windmill, I've always had a soft spot in my heart for Aermotor windmills. Seeing the windmill fan blades on the side of the building gave me a good feeling about the place even before we went in.
Upon entering Forager, we found a small coffee shop with a small gift shop off to the side. A small room in the back area of the coffee shop served as a seating area for both the coffee shop and for an incubator restaurant in which Forager allows local budding restaurateurs to use on occasion for events held in the space. Known as the Kutzky Market, the small gift shop sells goods made by local artists and home jewelers. This space also featured a number of oak barrels that were once used to store honey or maple syrup. Austin Jevne uses these for barrel-aged beers that he is developing. Artwork and phots from a local cooperative gallery - Gallery 24 - were on display - not only in the old Kutzky Market, but throughout the brewery.
Heading toward the main brewery area, there was a homey little library/den area complete with comfy chairs and a sofa, book cases, and a table that could be used for playing board games. The highlight for me was the 50's-era television set - complete with rabbit ears - and an antique globe sitting on a stand. I wondered if the television worked and I forgot to ask someone if it did.
In the main brewery bar and dining area, we found a number of community-style tables along with a wooden counter running about half-way across the room with reclaimed wood benches. Old-style metal chairs were used at the tables, but more modern low-backed high chairs were at the bar.
There was a small lounge area off walled-off by half-walls from the main dining area where the center piece was a fireplace surrounded by chairs that looked like they dated back to the 1940's. Artwork, antique bowls, and two tables that featured hundreds of pennies in mosaic patterns under glass tops were also in the small lounge.
We ended up seated at the bar, much to my surprise as my wife usually doesn't like to sit at bars. We figured we had probably eat there, no matter what type of food they had as it was getting rather late on a Sunday night for us to figure out where else to go for dinner in Rochester. We were greeted by Jeremy, one of the bartenders that evening, who gave us both a food menu and a beer menu of what they had on tap. (Forager Brewery also offers a full bar for cocktails and has a small wine selection, as well.)
For the beers developed by Austin Jevne, Forager featured fruited sours, a couple three Belgian-style, saison's, a very hoppy beer called the Grim Weeper, as well as couple three guest taps including one from the Toppling Goliath brewery down the road in Decorah, IA. I ended up getting the Regal Hops Double IPA - a beer that was a step down in hoppy-ness from the Grim Weeper. My wife wanted to try the Tight Lips, an interesting IPA that was brewed with barley, wheat and oats along with Australian hops. To help cut down on the bitterness of the hops, added to the beer was an essence of pine sap, passion fruit (also known a lilikoi in Hawaii - and we're all about lilikoi when we go to Hawaii), and even gummy bears! It was an IPA that she liked a lot. I had a drink and I thought it was interesting, but I liked my hazy Regal Hops very much.
After we sat down, we discovered there was a garden area off to the side of the main dining area. We had seen people walking in and out of a couple of double doors, but didn't really know what was going on. I got up to go to the restroom and took a quick look out the doors. It featured a long courtyard that had a rusted tin roof gazebo, an long wooden arbor over a handful of tables, decorative plants, as well as baskets and containers of herbs used in Forager's kitchen. A small stage area for outdoor music was on one end, and a number of tall tables to stand at were interspersed throughout the yard area. It was a nice night and had we known this was out there, we probably would have sat out there.
The food at Forager Brewery is all locally-sourced and seasonal, and made from scratch in the kitchen. The menu wasn't as basic as the other brewpub we had gone to before, but it was not long on variations. They featured wood-fired pizzas on the menu at Forager, as well as a handful of entrees such as pad thai and a cast-iron mac and cheese dish. They had three different types of burgers, and they also had a Cubano sandwich. They had a short list of sharable appetizers including a charcuterie platter, wood-fired mushrooms and small pork tacos. Forager also had vegan variations of many of the items on the short menu.
I really didn't want a burger as I had one earlier in the day for lunch. My wife wasn't too whippy on the short list of entrees they had. We really didn't know what to get for dinner that night until my wife suggested getting one of their wood-fired pizzas. We ordered up a regular margherita pizza, but I wanted to put some Italian sausage on it. My wife thought that some pickled jalapeños would also taste good on it. Jeremy had told us that their pizzas were 12 inches in diameter, but it looked smaller than that. The crust was crispy, yet chewable with a great wood-fired taste. The Italian sausage was crumbled toward the middle of the pizza and there were liberal slices of a somewhat spicy pickled jalapeño mixed in with the sun-dried tomatoes and fresh basil. It was a good pizza - not the best we ever had, but it definitely served its purpose in getting us something in our stomachs to go along with the very good beers that we had.
We figured that Forager Brewery was probably more beer-centric than food-centric after our visit. While they do have some interesting food items on the menu, there just wasn't a lot of them. We thought the margherita pizza with some added sausage and pickled jalapeños was fine, but it wasn't great. But the beers we had - the Regal Hops double IPA for me and the Tight Lips IPA that was made with gummy bears, passion fruit and a touch of pine sap for my wife - were both very good. And you couldn't beat the ambiance or the decor in the place. It was a very laid back atmosphere at Forager Brewery and we were certainly happy that we stopped by.
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