Up in St. Cloud, MN this past summer, I ventured out to the nearby town of St. Joseph to check out a microbrewery that one of the guys from my local account was telling me about. He said the place had been open for awhile and had moved to a larger building a couple years ago, but he told me that it never occurred to him to let me know about it. "It's a great place," he said enthusiastically. "And their beers are pretty good." It was a short 10 minute drive from my account to Bad Habit Brewing Company in St. Joseph.
Aaron Rieland got his first home brewing kit not long after he turned 21 years old. Rieland and some friends decided to brew some beer and they went around and gathered up bottles to put the beer in. After topping off and capping the bottles, Rieland put them in a basement closet to ferment. However, the gas build-up during the fermenting process literally blew up each one of the bottles making quite the mess in his home. Learning his lesson on fermenting on the first batch, he tried a second batch. The beers didn't quite turn out to taste as good as Rieland thought they should have. He ended up pouring out that batch. Discouraged, Rieland put away his home-brewing kit and basically forgot about it.
11 years later while Aaron was cleaning out his garage, he stumbled upon the beer-making kit and it rekindled his interest in home-brewing. Now in his early 30's, he was better educated in the beer-making process and some of his early beers turned out to be pretty darn good. Along with his buddy, Eric Geier, they started to brew beers together in Rieland's garage. They did it so much that Rieland's family called his renewed hobby his "bad habit".
Of course like many home-brewers who eventually mastered the art, Rieland thought he had something good in his recipes. He began to kick around the idea of opening his own brewery. He started to look into costs and operating expenses, then Rieland began to look for a building in St. Cloud. It looked like something favorable for his brewery was available, but the deal eventually fell through.
Pictured right - Aaron Rieland with his wife Karen. Contributed photo courtesy The Newsleaders.com
Somewhat crestfallen, Rieland started to look around at spaces in St. Joseph, just a 10 minute drive from his home in Avon, MN. A small space was found in a building along E. Minnesota St. in downtown St. Joseph. The lease was signed in May of 2015 and with the help of friends and family, Rieland transformed the building into a microbrewery in less than six months. By the summer of 2015, Rieland and Geier started to brew their first beers. And on Halloween Day in 2015, Bad Habit Brewing Company opened to a standing room only crowd. Lines formed out the door waiting to get into the first brewery in St. Joseph in over 100 years.
Bad Habit Brewing became a destination brewery for many beer enthusiasts. But the space was too small and there were times people just walked away from Bad Habit Brewing because there wasn't any room to sit or stand. Rieland came to the realization that he would have to find a bigger building if he was going to keep up with the demands of his customers. Just around the corner on College Ave., Rieland found his new space.
The St. Joseph City Hall had been housed in what originally was a bank for a number of years. With a growing community, the city had outgrown the space they had been in since 2000 and they eventually built a new and larger facility which they moved into in 2017. In the summer of 2018, Rieland made a deal to take over the building. The space would allow him to more than double his capacity inside the brewery to 140 patrons. And the large beer garden at the new location would accommodate 200 people - a ten-fold increase over the size of the beer patio at the original Bad Habit location.
Not long after he took over the building, they completely gutted the inside and started from scratch. Bad Habit had seven 5-barrel systems at their original location and the new location had the space to add an additional 5-barrel system and two 10-barrel systems increasing their capacity from about 700 barrels annually to over 1000 barrels a year. The original bank vault was still in the building, so they fashioned it into a large walk-in cooler. They put modern metal fabrication on the outside of the building to give it a more modern look.
Bad Habit closed their original location in late April of 2019 to move equipment from the old location to the new location. The new and larger Bad Habit Brewing Company opened in early May of that year and the beer garden opened soon thereafter.
One of the great things about Bad Habit Brewing is that they also inherited a parking lot. And I used that parking lot when I found the place at 25 College Ave. N in St. Joseph. (see map) Bad Habit is a taproom only and the evening I visited a food truck was set up in what was the old drive-up window lane for the bank - ODB's Meat and Greet, a barbecue food truck run by a former lady professional wrestler. (Had I not discovered a New Orleans-inspired restaurant across the street from Bad Habit Brewing, I probably would have given it a shot.)
The interior of Bad Habit was sort of a modern industrial design. Exposed trusses and ventilation were above the high-top tables in the bar area. Natural lighting from skylights, large windows and a garage door that opened onto the patio helped give the tap room a vibrant feeling.
The outdoor patio/beer garden featured a concrete patio with patio tables with bright red umbrellas. In fact, I sort of picked up that the main color scheme with Bad Habit Brewing was red with the red picnic tables in the beer garden, the red Adirondack chairs circling a fire pit on the patio, the red corn hole boards in the grass of the beer garden, and the red accents in the tap room. Strings of Edison lights criss-crossed the patio and a number of gas lamp heaters were situated off to the side to be used when the weather turns cooler.
I went up to the bar and took a look at some of the beers they had to offer. The beers were listed on planks attached to the wall in the tap room. They had a dozen beers on tap that day including a chocolate stout, a light ale, a cherry ale, a lemon radler, and an apricot wheat beer. Two beers that intrigued me were the Samba Mamba, a seasonal hazy IPA with an A.B.V. of 7.4%; and one of their regular beers, the Habitual American pale ale with an A.B.V. of 5.7%. The bartender let me try a sample of both beers and while I've been partial to hazy IPA's as of late, I have to say that the Habitual APA literally stomped on the flavor of the Samba Mamba. It was a great beer, nice and smooth on the front end with nice hoppy finish on the back end. I ended up having a couple of beers there before heading over across the street for dinner at Krewe. (Look for an upcoming Road Tips entry on Krewe in the coming weeks.)
I was very impressed with Bad Habit Brewing Company. The taproom and beer garden/patio was top-notch, as was the wonderful Habitual American pale ale that I enjoyed while I was there. There have been a number of brewery/tap rooms that I've encountered over the years, but Bad Habit Brewing Company was one of the more memorable. Places like Bad Habit make me jealous for the people of St. Cloud/St. Joseph who don't have far to go to enjoy a good beer in a great atmosphere.
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