Summit Brewing Company

Summit Brewing Company opened in Saint Paul in 1986 and is the reason a large part of Minnesota's craft-beer culture exists; Extra Pale Ale has been a fixture of the state's bars for four decades. The brewery sits on Montreal Circle in the West Seventh - Fort Road district, on the bluff above the Mississippi, and its taproom — the Ratskeller — operates Wednesday through Sunday with a view into the brewhouse. What puts a full-strength brewery on this site is that Summit is one of a very small number of Minnesota producers who brew their own non-alcoholic beer rather than stocking someone else's cans.

The line is called Nialas, launched on 2 September 2022. Explore Minnesota's guide to non-alcoholic drinking in the state records that the name comes from the Irish for nothing and was chosen in tribute to Summit's Irish head brewer. The Nialas non-alcoholic IPA is a hop-forward beer built to read as an IPA rather than as a dealcoholised approximation, with toast and English-biscuit malt character underneath aromas of apricot, tangerine and mixed berries. The Nialas non-alcoholic Irish-style dark is the more unusual of the two: a stout-shaped beer carrying espresso, chocolate and caramel against a spicy hop finish, in a category where almost every producer defaults to a pale lager. Both come in under 0.5% ABV and are sold in six-packs of twelve-ounce cans across Summit's distribution territory, which covers most of the Upper Midwest. One caveat worth stating plainly before a trip: Summit does not publish a live tap list for the Ratskeller, so while the Nialas beers are made on this site, this entry cannot confirm which of them are pouring in the taproom on any given day — call ahead if a non-alcoholic pour is the reason you are going. For context on how unusual this is locally: the great majority of Minnesota taprooms that offer a non-alcoholic beer are pouring somebody else's can, usually from a national producer. Summit is one of the few brewing the category itself, at scale, from its own Saint Paul brewhouse — which is also why the Nialas beers are among the easiest non-alcoholic options to find on a liquor-store shelf anywhere in the Upper Midwest.