Lake Monster Brewing is pouring its last pints under current ownership this weekend, with a $5-a-pint send-off planned for its final day of service on Sunday, Aug. 30. The St. Paul taproom, tucked inside the historic Vandalia Tower complex, has been sold to new owners who plan to take the brewery into its next chapter.
Co-founder and brewmaster Matt Lange said new ownership is already in place, and that details about what comes next will be shared by the incoming team next week, according to Bring Me The News. Lake Monster was co-founded in 2013 by Lange, Jeremy Maynor and Matt Zanetti, and the brewery has described itself as a profitable business even as it heads toward a temporary closure. The taproom will close for a private event on Saturday, Aug. 29, before reopening one last time under its founders for that Sunday send-off.
The move is a sale, not a shutdown driven by financial trouble. The founders said they decided the time was right to bring in fresh perspectives and energy, per the same account, even as they hand off the brewery itself to new ownership.
What Stays With the Founders
Not everything at the Vandalia Tower site is changing hands. King Coil Spirits, the craft distillery, cocktail room and pizzeria that Lake Monster's founders launched across the courtyard in September 2023, is not part of the sale and will remain with the current ownership team. The distillery's name is an homage to the building's past as the King Koil mattress factory, according to Craft Spirits Magazine, which notes the 1918 structure at 550 Vandalia St. has been rehabilitated into a creative business hub listed on the National Register of Historic Places within St. Paul's Creative Enterprise Zone.
King Coil has also shaped what visitors eat next door. In December 2024, the distillery partnered with chef Josh Hedquist's OG ZaZa to run its food program, bringing Roman-style sheet-pan pizzas made with a multi-day fermentation process to both King Coil and the adjacent Lake Monster taproom, as reported by Minnesota Monthly.
Nearly Eleven Years in the Same Building
Lake Monster's taproom has occupied its 3,000-square-foot space in Vandalia Tower since December 2015, after the brewing company itself was founded in 2013, per Heavy Table. That run of nearly 11 years at the same location places Lake Monster among the Twin Cities' longer-tenured taproom operators, and the brewery has kept its quality up along the way — its Depth Charge Juicy IPA took second place in the Specialty Beers category at the 2025 Minnesota Brewers Cup Competition, a contest that judged nearly 450 beers from more than 90 breweries, according to American Craft Beer.
Hoodline previously ranked Lake Monster tops in St. Paul among local breweries based on Yelp user ratings back in 2020, underscoring how established the taproom's reputation had become well before this ownership change.
A Wider Shakeup in Minnesota Craft Beer
Lake Monster's sale lands amid what the state's craft beer sector is calling a difficult period of evolution and adaptation. When the taproom opened in late 2015, Minnesota had roughly 30 craft breweries; that number surged past 200 by the end of the decade before the market entered a recent stretch of saturation and contraction, brewery leadership noted. Much of that earlier growth traces back to Minnesota's 2011 taproom law, often called the Surly Bill, which let microbreweries sell beer directly to consumers on-site and became an essential revenue model for the industry, according to the University of Minnesota Extension.
Similar ownership transitions have become common across the Twin Cities. Northeast Minneapolis's Bauhaus Brew Labs closed in June 2026 after a decade in business, only to be purchased by ABV Technology and reopened the following August, per Craft Spirits Magazine's sister outlet Beer Connoisseur. Dangerous Man Brewing followed a rougher path, closing its original Northeast Minneapolis taproom in 2023, pausing operations altogether in 2025, then taking over and reopening in the former HeadFlyer Brewing space this past June, as detailed by MPR News, which points to declining overall craft beer consumption as a driver of these shifts.
Whether Lake Monster's name and core beer lineup survive the handoff to new owners remains an open question. The founders have said only that the incoming team will share its plans next week, leaving St. Paul beer fans to find out alongside everyone else whether Sunday's $5 pints mark the end of an era or just an intermission.
-4.webp?w=160&h=400&fit=crop&crop=edges)
