Junkyard Brewing Company

Junkyard Brewing Company is a new "nanobrewery" and Taproom in Moorhead, Minnesota. We incorporated in 2012 and finally got our beer manufacturer's license from MN in the spring of 2013. Our Taproom is now open Monday through Saturday night. Eventually we'll get back to selling "growlers" to-go, but we don't have enough beer presently.

A nanobrewery is like a microbrewery, but smaller. Many people in the industry call any brewery with a brewkettle around 3 barrels (93 gallons), or smaller, a nanobrewery. Our stainless steel brewkettle holds about 50 gallons and was custom made. By us.

Junkyard Brewing Company was conceived while I brewed my own beer in college. I still remember the first batch; it was a five-gallon recipe with eight pounds of dark malt extract powder and eight ounces of chinook hops for the boil with a packet of dry yeast to ferment it. I "bottled" this first batch in pint-sized canning jars and judged when the natural carbonation had taken place by the "plink, plink" noises of the lids buckling upward under pressure. Friends suggested names for my first brew, and a couple stand out in my mind: "Junk's Trunk" and "Junkyard" beer. It was  nicknames like these that helped guide me toward choosing the name "Junkyard" for our brewing company when the time came to  attach a name to my idea.

Junkyard is the perfect name for our company because it expresses, in a word, who we are; we're unique, we're local, and we've got character.

Junkyards are places to find cool stuff. Stuff with character. In a market that continues to offer more and more choices, our beers will always be unique and full of character.

Junkyards are local places. In a word, unique. They are the complete opposite of chain companies. Likewise, you won't find a brewery quite like us anywhere else. We're individual and local.

A sort of Junkyard mentality also guided the creation and building of our company; My brother Dan and I didn't have much money to spend getting the brewery started, so we made up the difference through hard work and creativity. With that attitude, Junkyard Brewing Co. was founded in 2012  by a couple of young guys recently out of college, with very little money in their pockets, and no outside investment.