Photo by Carlos GonzalezEven though Surly Brewing Co., like Vita.mn, is celebrating just its fifth anniversary this year, it's hard to recall the local beer scene before its hops-fueled ascendency. That's probably because there really wasn't much of one.

Sure, Summit Extra Pale Ale was a point of pride for Twin Cities beer lovers, and carting a case of Grain Belt to the cabin was intrinsically Minnesotan, but a burgeoning market of craft beer aficionados had yet to be tapped (pun shamelessly intended).

Surly didn't just enter the market in 2006. President/founder Omar Ansari and brewmaster Todd Haug practically created it, getting a new generation hooked on hops with Furious -- the gateway drug of choice for many a local beer nerd -- and spellbinding them with Bender, their sensuously oaky take on American brown ales. Don't even get us started on their sought-after seasonal Darkness.

Not only did Ansari and Haug kick the door down for the recent rash of local startup breweries, but the duo has racked up national accolades and even managed to change Minnesota's pertinacious liquor laws, ruffling a few industry feathers and paving the way for a new $20 million "destination brewery" where they can sell pints of their style-defying brews on site. (They're still winnowing the list of possible locations.)

We pulled the leaders of Surly Nation (27,000 Facebook "likes" grants you statehood) away from their suds-head servitude to talk all things local beer, how to stay Surly and, well, more about beer.

Q: When you started Surly five years ago, what were your expectations?

Ansari: Nothing like they are now. I think honestly, it was me and Todd working here, so it was, "Let's brew beer and hopefully people will drink it." There really wasn't a whole lot of planning involved [laughs].

Ansari: I want to fucking bury them [joking]. No, you know man, I think it's a sign of a healthy beer culture. My wife and I came up with the name Surly when we flew out to Portland, Oregon, to go basically on a beer vacation. [We] went into the hotel restaurant and they had four tap handles and they were all local beers. It was like, "This is crazy. Is this some special beer restaurant? Why would they have four local beers?" I had never heard of any of them. It's just the way it is in a lot of other cities.

I think that's what's going to happen here. There's a reason that one of the [local] breweries is named Fulton, one of them is named Harriet and one of them is named Lift Bridge for Stillwater. I think there are going to be a lot of different neighborhood breweries coming up and I think that's a good thing. I just think it's the market maturing.

Q: Are we still a ways off from the Twin Cities' craft-beer boom peaking?

Ansari: I would say it's booming right now. Usually you don't know when the peak is till after.

Haug: I think we'll see some plateaus, but I don't think it's going back. We almost feel like there's still gaping holes in the market that are some of the most popular, best-selling styles in the country and nobody here has actually gone after those. Five years ago, it was like, "All right, we need to pick two." That was the one advantage we had. Some of the new breweries, you see they're starting to settle into some of the things that they want to do, which I think is the natural course of things.

Haug: We don't care about the style thing. It should be about how the beer tastes, not what people think it should taste like.

Q: Who's doing beer better these days: Americans or Germans?

Both [in unison]: Americans.

Haug: I feel bad for the scene over there; it's really in the crapper. There's still really good beer made there, it's just not at the production level that it was, and they're certainly less likely to be adventurous and get around some of their antiquated brewing laws to brew an IPA or brew something different.

Q: Speaking of antiquated beer laws, is Minnesota's "three-tier" liquor regulation system -- which separates manufacturers, wholesalers and retailers -- outdated?

Haug: The general public sees the three-tier system as being restrictive to producers, but what they don't see is how necessary [the system] is to get [small] producers' product distributed. But the part I have a problem with is how [the distribution business] is protected. I could be way off base, but what other industry has completely protected distribution? I understand it's alcohol and it's regulated, it's this protected industry that is a good-ol'-boys kind of thing.

Ansari: [After Prohibition,] the issue was breweries controlling distribution -- basically breweries owning bars -- and that's not legal. If there was no three-tier system, Miller and Bud would own everything.

Q: Surly has such a fervent fan base. How do you keep that enthusiasm and excitement going?

Haug: Good question. That's a big fear of mine -- when we're not cool anymore. It happens to everybody. It will happen to you!

Ansari: If we can keep doing it the way we think the beer needs to be, then I would hope that folks are going to keep being fans of the brewery, because the beer is really where it's at. It still has that integrity and it doesn't change. Hopefully, that's enough.

Q: What have been the most memorable moments in Surly history?

Ansari: I remember I was up north with my kid. My wife was working and she called me that morning and we realized it was our anniversary. We forgot, but she forgot, too, so it's all right. She's reading me this spread on Beer Advocate [the beer geek's online bible] and she says, "They named the best American brewery in the magazine." I'm like, "Oh, that'd be cool if we were in the top 50." She works her way down and we realize that Surly was the No. 1 brewery on the list. We were both just shocked. We had no idea, no inkling that it was going to happen, and we'd literally been brewing a year and a half. I was just floored. I remember that night, just me on the dock, drinking beer, listening to music, dancing on the dock. It was completely out of the blue. That's when I was like, "Oh, my god, we might actually make it."

Haug: Obviously the awards and that kind of stuff is great, but I just got an e-mail yesterday from a guy who works at McCann's [Food and Brew Pub] in St. Cloud just thanking me. Our anniversary beer, Five, completely blew his mind and inspired him to be creative with his home brew. Just little stuff like that where you actually hear from people on a personal level about how the beer has, not changed their life -- that sounds dramatic -- but changed their life.

Another guy I'm friends with that I ran into the other day, whose buddy just passed away, he came to every Darkness Day with that guy and he buried his friend with a bottle of Darkness. The fact that we're in people's lives to that level is scary, at one point, that we're that big a deal to people. But it also makes working as hard as we do worth it.