When it comes to the beer business, there likely hasn’t been a more interesting time for Insight Brewing.
Whether it’s adjusting to life after the COVID-19 pandemic, or adding THC into their business model, there isn’t a whole lot that seems to catch Eric Schmidt, one of Insight Brewing’s co-founders and owners, off-guard.
“The business looks a lot different than it did 2016 and 2017, the heyday,” Schmidt said. “But all-in-all, we’re feeling pretty good with the direction we’re headed into coming out of COVID.”
The THC Business
One of the biggest changes for Schmidt and the team at Insight Brewing in 2023 has been the addition of THC, which Schmidt says has taken some of the market share away from beer.
“Also spirits in general nationwide are on the rise and more people are drinking non-alcohol stuff,” he said. “I think beer is feeling the pressure, but this THC thing has been a boom and very good to us.”
At the time, Minnesota’s move to legalize the sale of hemp-derived THC in 2022 was the state’s biggest step towards legalizing cannabis. Minnesota lawmakers returned to St. Paul in early 2023 where they legalized recreational cannabis for adults 21 and older.
The earlier legalization of THC opened a door for Minnesota brewers like Insight.
“The reason it’s been so good for a lot of breweries in Minnesota and Minneapolis, we’re already set-up for it. We know how to make beverages, we know how to deal with regulations, package it, blend, and create flavors. We’re already kind of set-up for it.”
Schmidt says Insight Brewing wasn’t the first out of the gate when it came to offering different THC products, but that quickly changed in March and April.
Insight now offers 12-packs and variety packs of their THC drinks.
“These are things that have been successful for us in beer and we thought there weren’t a lot of people doing that just yet,” Schmidt said. “We took some of our competitive advantages with some of our equipment and said, ‘why don’t we just do this with some THC?’ and I think we might be among the only ones that are doing a 12-pack and a variety pack.”
Bringing Back the Beer
Insight Brewing is celebrating its ninth anniversary in November with their “9th Trip Around The Sun” event on Saturday, November 11th from 1 until 10 p.m. at their taproom.
The celebration includes music, food trucks, and the return of Sunken City, which is one of Insight Brewing's original beers.
“Sunken City was one of the five beers had when we opened with on November 21, 2014. It was a little bit of a slow starter, but people started to figure out that it had a beefy alcohol content in the upper sevens, it drinks very easily, and there’s a little bit of sweetness. Minnesotans love sweet. It’s a common thing, even in beers.”
The wine-beer hybrid started to pick-up steam a year into business. Sunken City won bronze at the World Beer Cup and then silver at the Great American Beer Festival.
“Those are two big beer festival that if you can get some hardware it’s a pretty good indication that you have something,” Schmidt said. “We had something judges like, It doesn’t always translate to customers liking it, but we had both.”
Unfortunately Sunken City presented a production problem to the Insight Brewing team that led to the beer being pulled from the brewery’s lineup.
As Schmidt explains, diastaticus is a yeast that is a very slow fermenter that can ferment at colder temperatures. As they were figuring it out, cans were starting to pressurize and build-up some CO2.
They discovered the issue was getting into other beers.
“We put the brakes on that immediately,” Schmidt said. “I wouldn’t say we had a full on infection, but we were starting to see signs of maybe cross contamination. We pulled that immediately and solved the problem.
At that point, we didn’t know what we could do.”
Insight Brewing found the answer when they hired Head Brewer Sean Carnahan in early 2021. Carnahan offered an idea to potentially bring back the beer that hundreds of people messaged Schmidt about after it was taken off the tap line and store shelves.
That opportunity to bring Sunken City back came earlier this year as they discussed celebrating the company’s ninth anniversary.
“It’d been years, we heard all these comments, we thought this anniversary party would be great time to bring it back.”
The beer will be kegged this week and served starting Saturday at the brewery. It will then hit store shelves next week.
“Sunken City was never our best seller but it had the most vocal group of people that wanted to bring it back,” Schmidt said. “Saisons are typically not the best sellers. They fact there were so many people this wild about this style of beer is what really surprised me.”
Now, it’s a matter of whether or not Sunken City is the beer people remember.
“You hope to God that people taste it again and it’s what they remember. It can be very hard to keep that memory of that taste. You just don’t know.”
Along with Sunken City, Insight Brewing is offering its 2023 Barrell Aged Gravity Well beers during their anniversary celebration on Saturday.
Those beers include the Original Barrel Aged (aged 15 months in Elijah Craig barrels), Belgian Dark Chocolate and Sea Salt (aged 15 months in Heaven Hill barrels), and the Angry Bull Blend Coffee from Up Coffee Roasters.
