Fire closes Portage Brewing Co.

On the night of Jan. 5, Portage Brewing Co. in Walker, Minn. was busy with customers. Among them was a group of volunteer firefighters. One was celebrating a birthday, and everyone from the crew was there, even the fire marshal.

They were back the next morning, under less celebratory circumstances. The brewery was on fire and they were tasked with putting it out.

Unfortunately, that early morning fire on Jan. 6 destroyed the building — a former hospital — housing the year-and-a-half-old brewery.

Around $100,000 worth of equipment was lost, along with 1,500 gallons of beer that had to be dumped, said co-owner Jeff Vondenkamp. "It was — I was — a mess," said Vondenkamp, who founded Portage with his parents and two other partners.

The cause of the fire is unknown, and there were no injuries.

Familiar to cabin-goers near Leech Lake, about three hours north of the Twin Cities, Portage Brewing Co. was in the middle of increasing production by 50 percent.

"We started very small, and were just getting ready to expand into wholesale," Vondenkamp said.

His father had been talking to the Realtor who sold him his cabin about a property in the area, and they began bandying about the idea to turn it into a brewery. Vondenkamp was in Nepal when he got a call from his dad about moving up to northern Minnesota and going into business together.

In its short life, the brewery "has become a centering piece of the community," Vondenkamp said.

Now the community is responding in kind.

A GoFundMe page (gofundme.com/rebuild-portage) is raising money to help the proprietors rebuild.

Craft breweries that Portage has collaborated on beers with in the past, including Minnesota's Modist and Bent Paddle, are working on remaking some of those beers to sell statewide and raise awareness of Portage's plight. Other breweries are reaching out to offer help by hosting events, even cleaning kegs.

The brewing industry in Minnesota is a "very tight-knit community," Greer said. "Everybody seems to always be there helping each other out when you need it. And this kind of thing doesn't happen very often, so we just want to help out."

Vondenkamp is humbled by the support.

"It's just crazy, with all the bad that's gone down, what's coming from it," Vondenkamp said. "It's nice to see people stepping forward and just being there for us."

The owners are meeting with architects and contractors to figure out next steps. Vondenkamp said he expects Portage to be back up and running within a year.

If there's a silver lining to losing their building, it's this: