A Fun Look at Boom Island’s History

Jim Barnard

Did you know that the original founders of Boom Island Brewing, Kevin and Qiuxia Welch, couldn’t obtain a loan from any bank in the city to open a brewery? They got the same question everywhere they went: “What makes you think a brewery will be successful?” That was 15-16 years ago now. They had to sell their belongings and borrow small amounts of money from friends to get Boom Island started.

The earliest days of Boom Island Brewing Company called a 700 square foot space home on N. Washington Ave in North Minneapolis. Complete with home made fermenters. We brewed in closets, literally. After acquiring our first clients, for nearly two years we delivered kegs and cases in a Corolla. Picture a Corolla with a keg in the backseat strapped in with the safety belt!

One of the first brewery maps I ever saw after we opened the taproom in 2014 had a picture of central Minnesota with 5 breweries on it. Five dots on the map. I’ve lost track of how many are open now. (I looked it up, there are 171.)

We started as Belgian-specific brewery. There was a short time in our North
Minneapolis location years ago that we didn’t have an IPA on our beer list. Although it was kind of fun to see people’s jaws drop when they found out that information, we did eventually come around and started offering IPAs again.

For many years in the North Minneapolis location we had a yearly event called “Boom Days,” in honor of Belgium National Day every July. Bands, food trucks, vendors etc. We couldn’t afford to rent a proper stage for the bands so we were forced to improvise. For years we stacked pallets and nailed large squares of plywood to the surface. It never, ever came out square so we had use shims and whatever else we could think of to level
it off.

In one year all of the pallets we had collected for weeks before the event were stolen. We had to scour NE Minneapolis to find enough pallets to create our stage and were forced to stay on site until 3 am the night before opening day to throw together a passable stage. Those were the days!