Welcome back to The Flyover, your daily digest of important, overlooked, and/or interesting Minnesota news stories.
95 IBU Theses? Lutherans Plan Den of Hoppy Depravity.
With Wild Mind Ales hitting the market, deep south Minneapolis may soon be down a much-needed brewery. But when god closes a taproom, he... instructs one of his many houses of worship to open one of their own? That's (more or less) what we can glean from Nick Halter's nice scoop this week at Axios: Leaders of the massive Mount Olivet Lutheran Church are getting into the brewery/coffee shop business.
Plans are preliminary at the moment, but the church has already enlisted an architecture firm to explore tearing town the ol' 1700 Chapel across 50th Street and building a brand-new brewery/coffeehouse there. Senior pastor David Lose, himself a home brewer, assures Axios that Martin Luther was also a beer guy. "It's deep in the Lutheran tradition," he promises.
The holy beer hall would be owned and run by a nonprofit tasked with hiring a brewmaster and also a, uh, beanmaster. Profits would be reinvested in the community, Lose says.
To clear way for the two-level new construction, the church must first be granted approval from Historic Preservation Commission to tear down the 87-year-old chapel, which they had initially hoped to preserve (some of the limestone might be repurposed). The boozy new operation is contingent on rezoning.
Construction could begin as early as 2026, but only if neighbors like the idea. (It's being pitched as a booth-less concept to encourage socializing, with a patio overlooking Lynhurst Park.) "What we've said across the board is, if the community doesn't love it or doesn't want it, I don't want to do it," Lose says, noting the meetings so far have been encouraging. Praise be.
U of M Group Fights Trump's Propaganda Campaign Inside National Parks
Really sucks to write sentences like the one above! But that's hellworld for ya, baby, and we're living it.
Enterprising Minnesota Reformer intern Izzy Wagener has a hellish dispatch today, writing that University of Minnesota librarians, historians, and data experts have launched a campaign called Save Our Signs. The idea? To push back against President Trump's initiative to rewrite our nation's history via removing "objectionable" National Park Service signage. Ya know, stuff that mentions slavery, Jim Crow, the genocide of Indigenous people, the Civil Rights Movement, environmentalism, and/or global warming.
Save Our Signs cofounder Molly Blake describes the U.S. National Parks System as “the nation’s largest outdoor history classroom." Her group has already archived 1,000+ crowd-sourced images of endangered signage at parks and historic sites.
“One thing that I think is especially important is that this information is very deliberately accessible to everyone, and it’s taxpayer funded,” Blake tells the Reformer. “That made me feel very strongly that this should be preserved somewhere so that people can see it.”
Earlier this year Trump issued an executive order that directed Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum to target any signs that “inappropriately disparage Americans,” adding that all messaging should “focus on the greatness of the achievements and progress of the American people.” The threat is very real, with the New York Times reporting that many many displays are already under review. All “inappropriate” material will be removed by September 17.
Let's Keep Litigating the Messy Minneapolis DFL Endorsing Convention!
Just yesterday, the Minnesota Reformer gave retired journalist David Brauer a soapbox from which he argued that, despite the chaos that led to state Sen. Omar Fateh's eventual win as the endorsed mayoral candidate: "The [Minneapolis DFL] endorsement process has catalyzed real choices in November, which, after all, is supposed to be the point of democracy.”
And today, the Reformer published a counterpoint from online political pundit Will Stancil. In it, Stancil dives deep into wonky delegate arithmetic before stating, "I walked in Saturday hoping for no mayoral endorsement, so the city’s voters could decide in November—but I was happy to accept any normal result. But nothing that day felt normal." Instead, he argues, the convention tends to devolve into "high-stakes gamesmanship for insiders," concluding that "maybe the DFL should abolish it altogether."
Even though their opinion pieces have been lumped together, Brauer and Stancil are engaging in two different arguments. Brauer's thesis is that the endorsement matters, because it helps frame warring intraparty ideologies and stoke "crackling energy." (Yeah, kinda the point.) Stancil argues that the "trainwreck" logistics "breed illegitimacy." (Sure, the electronic voting should function.) But, unlike Brauer, Stancil doesn't reveal his personal candidate preferences, which makes ya wonder for what—or whom—he's actually arguing.
The Real Uptown Is the Lessons We Learned Along the Way
Debating the borders of Uptown is the birthright of every Minneapolitan, and today Stribbers Jeff Hargarten and Zoë Jackson poured some gas on that deathless fire with this sprawling exploration of, "Where's Uptown?" The historical archives get mined. Friends of Racket David Brauer, Mike Norton, and Bill Lindeke get quoted. And, in a stroke of innovative audience engagement, dorks like you and me get to draw our own proposed boundaries—it's like that NYT movies of the century list builder, but for pedantically provincial city dwellers.
