There’s finally hope for new life at the former home of St. Paul’s Hamm’s Brewery

Ninety years ago, a whole world orbited around the Hamm’s Brewery on St. Paul’s East Side. A sprawling complex of industrial brick buildings, Hamm’s was once one of the largest breweries in the country, employing hundreds of workers around the clock making lager beer for generations. 

That was then. The decline of the brewery is a familiar story of consolidation, competition and changing tastes. The brewery has been sitting largely empty since 1997, with existing businesses like Saint Paul Brewing and 11 Wells Spirits Co. using only a small fraction of the sprawling complex.  

Now it looks to be turning round. After decades of historic purgatory, local developer JB Vang is going to bring housing into the bulk of the site. With a combination of new construction and rehab of the existing building, almost 200 new homes are set for construction. A recent historic designation means that most of the financing is in place. If all goes well, construction could break ground by 2028.

A brewery and a bear

At its peak, the Hamm’s Brewery had become the fifth-largest brewery in the U.S., easily the largest beer operation in the Twin Cities. As late as the 1950s, in part thanks to its famous cartoon bear, the label had the potential to become one of the few macro-brewers that might survive a fiercely competitive era. During this time, lager quality had reached national parity, and competition revolved around marketing and distribution, which ruthlessly eroded profits for smaller companies. 

Related: From the land of sky-blue waters, a history of Hamm’s beer

Unfortunately, a bad investment in Baltimore largely doomed its expansion plans. By the 1960s, Hamm’s was in debt and for sale, and quickly got bought by competitors and some questionable operations. Despite lingering for decades, the brewery would never be the same scale or quality. During its final years, thanks to a weird anti-trust agreement, it was producing Stroh’s Beer (a Michigan label) while Hamm’s itself was brewed in Wisconsin.

Since then the buildings have sat mostly empty. The craft brewer and distillery that have operated inside part of the facility for the last 15 years both rely on the haunted beauty of the old brewery ruins for atmosphere. But there’s no ignoring the fact that the bulk of the building, lodged into the city’s famous Swede Hollow, is in various stages of entropy, attracting graffiti, pigeons and urban explorers willing to hop fences. 

“The Hamm’s building has been playing a significant role in the East Side for a very long time,” said Kou Vang, the head of JB Vang companies. “I moved up here in 1996, and I believe that when I moved here everyone was talking about redeveloping Hamm’s already. I’ve been up here for 39 years, and we’re still talking about it.”

Vang’s plan involves a mix of funding streams and housing types, including 111 new-build apartments and 86 apartments in the old brewery complex. The results will be what he calls “artistic in nature.” 

“Its a little bit quirky, but it’s nice,” Vang said. “Because of the floor plate that is a little bit off, certain areas have taller ceilings than others. It takes a lot of engineering.”

This rehabbed brewery will mirror the reuse of other big landmark industrial sites like Minneapolis’ Pillsbury A Mill and the Schmidt’s Brewery complex on West 7th Street, both of which used historic tax credits to convert into artist lofts. In this case, though, there won’t be an aesthetic gatekeeper involved. The apartments, set to draw on low-income housing tax credits, will be income-restricted at various levels.

As Vang describes, the complex occupies a lynchpin site for the city’s East Side. Sitting on Minnehaha Avenue, just down from an intersection with key streets like Arcade and East 7th, it literally links the rest of the neighborhood to Railroad Island, an otherwise cut-off section of the city. 

It also serves as a connection down into Swede Hollow, which once offered the greatest illustration of the city’s 19th century stratified class structure. In the old ravine, off the grid and the sanitation system, literal shacks were occupied by the city’s newest immigrants. In the shadow of the bustling brewery, they survived on scraps and gardens. Meanwhile, overlooking the whole scene atop the bluff sat the Hamm family mansion, housing brewery scion Theodore, who owned the enterprise during its profitable years.

Tax credits will help fund project

The brewery is all that’s left of that old landscape. Both the mansion and the Swede Hollow homes have burned, the former by neglect and the second by the moralistic insistence of the city. Today the hollow is a park, and the new redevelopment includes plans to connect the businesses and homes to the recreational trail that runs through the old hollow. 

The historical designation seems rather obvious for a building of this magnitude and importance, and it will allow Vang to use special tax credits for rehabbing old properties.

Related: Exploring Swede Hollow, once a neighborhood carved out of the wild

“Historical tax credits are a big part of the capital stack,” Vang said. “Knowing that we have them, now we can go ahead and this summer finish up all of our funding. Hopefully we’ll have final approval allocations by the end of ’26 or early ’27.”

The only wrinkle so far has been a dispute over the use of the existing surface parking lot for the new apartment building. Earlier this year, Rob Clapp, the owner of St. Paul Brewing, went all-in on trying to save the parking lot, rebranding the lot as a “shared parking amenity” with a public pressure campaign. 

Compared to the idea of new housing, saving a parking lot is a lost cause in my view. My hope is that the existing businesses, which have a lot of strengths, can be successful enough to overcome Minnesotans’ unfortunate aversion to walking a bit farther to their destinations.

Meanwhile it’s exciting to imagine the Hamm’s Brewery becoming a neighborhood lynchpin again, bringing people together like a magnet. There’s still a lot of economic uncertainty, and Vang warns that even small changes to interest rates could send him back to the drawing board. But if everything goes well from here, he’s looking at groundbreaking in 2028. It seems like a long time from now, but after 30 years of an empty building, it’s soon enough for me.

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