Molding an Instinct — Junkyard Brewing Company in Moorhead, Minnesota

238 miles up I-94, I am reading the landscape. 

The fog is slung low, a spectral breath rising from the road’s shoulder. Overhead, the moon is incandescent, hanging stubbornly into the morning. The hills in the distance are so blue I mistake them for lakeshore.

This is my first sojourn to Moorhead, the largest city in northwestern Minnesota, set on the banks of the Red River across from Fargo, North Dakota. The inland sea that rested over Moorhead drained a geological age ago, leaving behind a fertile sprawl of hills, lakes, and farmland. 

When I arrive at Junkyard Brewing Co., my 32oz Dunkin coffee and the tank of my Prius emptied from the ride, co-founder and president Aaron Juhnke meets me and photographer Lucy Hawthorne with Nordic lamb meatloaf sandwiches. These are gifts from BernBaum’s, his favorite deli from across the river. They make meatloaf “as good as anybody’s grandma,” he says, “or better.”

The food isn’t just for us: Juhnke is treating the brew staff to a pre-shift meal. It’s 10 a.m. on a Saturday, and as we wait for the others to arrive, Juhnke isn’t quite ready to talk about beer or the vagaries of brewing it with your family in a far-flung town.

Instead we talk about the dog in Junkyard Brewing Company’s logo. Hawthorne wonders if it’s a German shorthaired pointer, noting the baton of a tail. Maybe a vizsla, I guess. We’re both wrong. It’s a Weimaraner, a family dog named Darla who passed away in early 2021, immortalized here in black paint above the taps. 

After Darla passed, Juhnke got a liver roan GSP puppy and named it Milo. Milo is 10 months old now, and he’s just learning how to point. Juhnke is fresh off a pheasant hunt with Milo and his older dog Eva, and he talks in excited whips about how Milo already knows to stand downwind to catch a scent and flush the birds out from behind.

“They’re born with the instinct,” he says, “but you gotta mold it.”

POINTING THE WAY

Before we can get too far into the methods of training hunting breeds, brewers, apprentices, and servers start appearing, unstacking metal stools and digging into the spread. Soon, their voices are clanging across the room, raving about the pasta salad. Juhnke’s wife Michelle shows up beaming. With her is their 12-year-old daughter, Madeline. The dogs came, too, she tells me; they’re kenneled in the office next door.

If you met Juhnke in 2012, when he incorporated Junkyard with his brother Dan, you wouldn’t recognize him now. There was an audacity about him then, his hair hanging down to his shoulders in careless waves. He’d fallen in love with beer in college. After drinking two 22oz bottles of Guinness at a rugby team party, he thought to himself, “I gotta figure out a way to get this kind of thing more often.” He couldn’t find a good local alternative, so he decided to start brewing his own.

“We definitely weren’t the instigator of a lot of these hype beer trends, but we’re doing it here, in Fargo-Moorhead. That’s really fun for us, as well as it is, in my mind, a good business strategy, because the brewing industry changes so rapidly.”

“My grandfather had told us multiple times about learning to homebrew when he was in high school with his brother,” Juhnke says. “I thought, ‘If Gramps could learn to homebrew in high school, I should be able to figure this out, because he did not have the internet.’”

Since opening eight years ago, Junkyard has released nearly 600 different SKUs, each more indulgent than the last. The brewers mash Almond Joys into syrupy Stouts, churn Slurpee-thick Sours, and hop IPAs into turbo-charged pulp. They rove from trend to trend, eschewing flagships and any semblance of a seasonal release calendar. For each new beer, a new ridiculous label, hand-drawn by Juhnke. The best get blown up into decals and plastered on the taproom walls. For Jelly the Nut, an Imperial Stout made with peanut butter and jelly, he reimagined Jabba the Hutt as a purple behemoth, his tail wrapped around a peanut styled to look like Salacious B. Crumb.

The beers that don’t make it to the wall have a tendency to appear and then evaporate with little more than an Untappd entry to remember them by. Junkyard was among the first breweries in the country to embrace Milkshake IPAs, but its coveted Shake-o-Matic series hasn’t been seen in months.

“We definitely weren’t the instigator of a lot of these hype beer trends, but we’re doing it here, in Fargo-Moorhead,” Juhnke says. “That’s really fun for us, as well as it is, in my mind, a good business strategy, because the brewing industry changes so rapidly.”

Junkyard’s nothing-is-sacred approach has created a fantasy factory for Minnesota beer drinkers. But there is a recklessness to fantasy. It’s easy to score points with Untappd users when you’re serving more purée than Berliner and jamming candy bars into your Stout recipe. Just ask 450 North and other breweries that’ve become notorious for exploding cans—sheer excess isn’t often a strategy for long-term success. (Junkyard stabilizes its beers with sulfites, a lesson Juhnke gleaned from the wine industry.) Somewhere, that anything-goes hedonism needs to be met with practicality. That’s the audacity of Juhnke’s current situation. 

Today, Juhnke is kempt and taciturn. He doesn’t wear a wedding band. Instead, he has a giant claddagh tattooed across the broadside of the last three fingers of his left hand, the heart turned inward. It’s a gesture befitting of his relationship with Michelle, whom he married at 18. He knows he has a responsibility to her, Madeline, and everyone who showed up this morning to eat meatloaf sandwiches and sweet orange rolls. And even if he gets a kick out of releasing beers like Cheem Creese Cake, a neon pink Sour Ale made with raspberries and cheesecake, he has to be the guy making sure there’s someone on the other side of that bar asking for it.

“Obviously, people want us to make mixed-culture Sours and non-adjunct or barrel-aged Stouts and West Coast IPAs, but those people are in the vast minority of our customers,” Juhnke says. “And at the end of the day, the customer is your boss.”

ROOTS ON THE FRONTIER

When Junkyard opened in 2013, the Juhnke brothers were the youngest brewery owners in Minnesota. Juhnke was 25 at the time, and Dan was 22. The state had only legalized brewery taprooms two years prior, and there hadn’t been a brewery in Moorhead since The Moorhead Brewing Company—also founded by a pair of brothers—burned down in 1901.

Juhnke was used to brewing on a college budget, and that’s how he taught his brother to brew. Even before Dan was of legal drinking age, they were crowdsourcing brews in Fargo-Moorhead: Friends would kick in money for ingredients, and in return, they’d get a share of the final batch. When the 2011 taproom law precipitated a local brewery boom, Juhnke started toying with the idea of opening his own place.

“It had kind of progressed to the point where I was making 15 gallons at a time, three different five-gallon batches simultaneously,” he says. “There’s a lot of craft beer lovers in Fargo-Moorhead that had no brewery within hundreds of miles, so I thought this would be a pretty good opportunity for business. And it seemed pretty straightforward: Just make beer and sell beer.”

It was not so simple, of course.

“Aaron was having trouble finding investors,” Dan remembers. Dan was graduating college at the time, and though he had some job offers, he hopped on board. He and Juhnke each kicked in $3,000 of the money they’d made contracting to turn the former Country Cannery homebrew store into a nanobrewery. “We put that together and started thinking about how we could do this on a shoestring budget.”

Everything in the brewery was built with a scrapper’s mindset—take what you have and use it to forge the unpredictable. The two started on a 1.5-barrel brewery that they hand-assembled. They bought two 55-gallon stainless steel food-grade drums on eBay and converted them to a mash tun and brew kettle. When they needed temperature control, Dan figured out a way to install metal coils in the plastic fermenters. They kept their construction jobs to keep from going into debt.

Six months in, they moved into their current location on 1st Ave., a former beekeeper’s warehouse with paint splatter on the floor from the apiary boxes. Juhnke and his brother built out the whole taproom, from the reclaimed lumber bar top to the plywood grist mill. In the early days, it resembled a mechanic’s garage more than a tavern, but it improved over time. Eventually, they scrimped enough to afford a Stout Tanks 3-BBL system and some real steel fermenters.

Junkyard became known as a house of experimentation. It opened with a Cream Ale and Baltic Porter on tap, which Juhnke considered “pretty edgy styles for the time.” From there, its forays grew more kaleidoscopic, and the brewery became known for beers like Peanut Butter Bandit, one of the first peanut butter adjunct beers in Minnesota, and Free Candy, a playful “North Moorhead-style” Belgian Quadruple that tastes more like bananas foster than beer. 

“In those early days, what Dan and I liked to brew was really experimental, and that also happened to be what started to resonate with people,” Juhnke says. “Over the years, a new style would come up that we were like, ‘I don’t know if we’re personally interested in this,’ but that was the business strategy we’d chosen to pursue. So, we would go after those things and dive into them and experiment with them.”

‘THE CROWLER KINGS’

For years, the majority of Junkyard’s beer was sold through its taproom, but in 2017, the founders decided to add a 10-BBL system to their brewhouse. When the winter weather slowed taproom traffic down, they started sending their beer up I-94 into North Dakota and down that exiguous road to the Twin Cities. Their vessel of choice was the 750ml crowler, a cumbersome, barrel-shaped can distinct to Minnesota because of the state’s draconian package restrictions. But Junkyard embraced the massive format and the creativity it necessitated.

Though the names and styles were often a collaboration, it was Juhnke who would take whatever silly-ass pop cultural pun they came up with—like Christian Bale Session IPA—and turn it into a can-sized billboard showing, in this case, a hop-faced Batman smacking Robin for questioning the beer’s name. Madeline even drew a few, including Midnight Spider and Peanut Butter Bandit.

“They’re this small little brewery from Fargo-Moorhead, and they’re down here competing with all the big city breweries. Their timing was perfect. They had great packaging. They had all these hype beers. They caught lightning in a bottle.”

Selling single crowlers also allowed Junkyard to release scads of new product. In a single liquor store delivery, they could drop off 10 to 15 different beers, with each successive batch moving into new, ever-more-absurd territory. Junkyard was selling IPAs dry-hopped with emergent hop varieties and flamboyant over-fruited Sours before current Twin Cities market leaders BlackStack Brewing and Drekker Brewing Company, and it was packaging them with flashy, mordant art. To hear Bill Nosan, buyer and manager for Minneapolis liquor store France 44, tell it, they were “the crowler kings.”

“There was a stretch there where they were about the hottest thing that we were selling,” Nosan says. “We would have people lined up in the store, waiting for us to sticker all the crowlers with UPCs and enter them in the system. They were gone almost instantly.”

Junkyard had unintentionally ignited a small frenzy. It started publishing its weekly distro schedule and live-tweeting the delivery route, promising rare treats from the frontier. Van chasers followed along like it was the key to a treasure map.

“They’re this small little brewery from Fargo-Moorhead, and they’re down here competing with all the big city breweries,” Nosan says. “Their timing was perfect. They had great packaging. They had all these hype beers. They caught lightning in a bottle.”

Junkyard maintained a focus on its taproom, which it expanded to nearly double its original size in 2018, but once the metro distribution started, there was no going back. Now, you can find Junkyard all over Minnesota and North Dakota, and the brewery has also joined Tavour, where it currently has 70 beers available, including the once hyper-limited Double Barrel Aged King Size Imperial Stout. Nosan says his brother routinely finds Junkyard beers for sale at liquor stores in Arizona.

For a while, things were rosy. In a few short years, the Juhnkes went from a couple brothers sharing a dream to owners of one of the most sought-after breweries in a burgeoning beer state. But the suddenness of that growth began to warp their relationship.

“Aaron and I started to have separation of ideologies,” Dan says. “I just didn’t see a reason why we needed to constantly be expanding and adding more tanks. With my personality, it’s a recipe for disaster.”

BROTHERS ASUNDER

After brunch, we travel through the taproom, past a foeder piled with cardboard boxes, up through a door spray-painted with Darla’s stately silhouette. The door opens, and the room expands.

Junkyard’s brew floor is bathed in ultra-clean fluorescent lighting, all tile and trench drains. Big-bellied stainless steel fermenters line the wall from the entrance all the way to the loading dock, each one hung with a clipboard bearing a laminated “Star Wars” or “Lord of the Rings” meme. Way in the back, beneath a rack of ingredients, sits a hulking four-spout canning line that looks like it was welded from scrap metal. 

It more or less was. Dan fabricated it himself, and nearly 10,000 crowlers came off it before the rig was decommissioned in October and stashed away in the corner.

In its stead is a brand new Wild Goose Filling canning line that spits out 50 cans a minute, labels and all. It’s an immaculate piece of equipment, but Juhnke’s a little pissed off with it— maybe because he’s not related to the guy who built it, or maybe because they had some calibration issues and he ended up with a half-pallet of low-fill cans. Likely both. However finicky, the machine represents more than one evolution for Junkyard.

“When we started [Junkyard], people were talking about how you shouldn’t start a business with family. And I kept thinking to myself, ‘You know what, it’s pretty much a bad idea to start a business with anybody.’”

The canning line does crowlers, but more importantly, it will allow Junkyard to be in four-packs of 16oz cans for the first time, broadening its appeal among drinkers from Bismarck to Duluth. But it’s also a step away from the brotherhood that Junkyard was founded on.

After a couple years of struggling to convince Juhnke and Michelle to keep Junkyard small—and after 50 straight days of subzero temperatures in Moorhead—Dan decided he’d had enough. In 2019, he asked to be bought out of his ownership stake in Junkyard. He pondered opening up shop in Detroit Lakes or Brainerd, but ultimately the cold chased him off. He relocated his family to Asheville, North Carolina, where, after a year of COVID delays, he opened New Origin Brewing Co.

“When we started [Junkyard], people were talking about how you shouldn’t start a business with family,” Dan says. “And I kept thinking to myself, ‘You know what, it’s pretty much a bad idea to start a business with anybody.’”

All of New Origin’s beer is sold on-premise, out of its 1,500-square-foot taproom, in cans that came off a line that Dan also built. There’s no plan for distribution, and no plan to grow bigger than 7-BBL.

Dan was advocating for Junkyard to adopt 16oz cans for years before he left. That original crowler line represents one of the many compromises he made to keep the business relationship with his brother going well. Instead of challenging his brother, he fabricated the line, and the crowlers sold well enough to get them to the point where they could transition to a custom canning line from a major manufacturer. 

“You get to the points where your visions no longer align,” Michelle says. “We’re still small in our eyes, but to him, it’s not small.”

“He wanted to be able to do his own thing and not have to be part of a team in terms of decision-making,” Juhnke adds. “He and I were pretty well-aligned on a lot of things, but there were also things that we had strong disagreements about. The way that the business ownership worked out, I think he felt like he was getting overruled. Now, he’s in a position where he can totally call the shots.”

New Origin still bears a bit of that Junkyard ethos. One of its latest releases is a Double Stout made with local coffee and wafer cookies, something that would fit in seamlessly on the tap list in Moorhead. But Dan’s using the new spot as an opportunity to live out his other compromised dreams. He talks excitedly about finally brewing an Idaho 7-hopped IPA called Potato, a lark that his brother had previously shot down. He’s always wanted to name a beer Pastel Possum, and now that he’s in the South, there’s never been a better time to make that self-described “dumb idea” come to life.

“I wanted to slow things down and take a break,” Dan says. “That’s what I planned for New Origin, to be on-premise only and be more of a relaxed, fun, lifestyle business.”

But there’s no bad blood between the Juhnkes. Right before New Origin opened in August, Aaron flew down to celebrate with his prodigal brother. The two were right back to their Junkyard ways, salvaging some itauba lumber to make picnic tables for the taproom.

“Me leaving helped our relationship,” Dan says. “I just wanted to go back to being brothers instead of business partners.”

DEFINE ‘FAMILY’

On the brew floor, Dustin DeTar and “Big” Mike Ruebke are dumping foil bags of cryo hops into the whirlpool, chattering excitedly while one stands at the top of the ladder and the other holds it in place. Juhnke is sampling the next batch of Remixing Hits IPA off the brite tank, and they pause their task a moment to take in his reaction.

The Citra and Mosaic are coming through beautifully, but all agree it could use a little more carbonation. Remixing Hits is the first beer released since DeTar started as assistant brewer and cellar assistant three weeks prior, and it’s absolutely singing to him. DeTar’s been coming to Junkyard since the brewery opened in its current location in 2014. An active member of Moorhead’s local homebrew club, he claims to have tried every beer it’s had on tap since, and so he’s fiercely attuned to what a Junkyard beer should taste like. 

“[Junkyard] offered styles and different beers that you couldn’t find anywhere else around here,” DeTar says. “At the time, Fargo had a brewery that offered some really good beers, but nothing like the different kinds of Stouts and IPAs that you wouldn’t find elsewhere.”

I ask Ruebke how he got his nickname. By my estimation, he’s about 5’8”, though he could stand over 6 feet if he combed his long, hay-colored hair straight upwards. “This guy who used to work here gave it to me,” he says. “One day he was like, ‘Hey, BIG Mike!’ And it stuck.” 

That’s Big Mike. He started serving in the taproom four years ago, and he’s since woven himself inexorably into the brewery’s culture, his ebullient personality complementing Juhnke’s downtempo presence. During the COVID shutdown in 2019, he canned 2,400 crowlers in a single day. “Words can’t describe my love for this company,” he posted on Facebook just after that legendary shift.

“I would consider us family, honestly, everyone that works here,” Ruebke says. “We’re so tight, and we all have each other’s backs.” DeTar jumps in. “I’ve been here for three weeks, and I feel closer to all these guys than I did for the company I was with for three years.”

Ruebke and DeTar’s words would sound hollow in most other breweries, and such sentiments might set off warning bells in this age of ever-dissolving work/life balance. Toxic gratitude has been ingrained in the American beer industry since its salad days, and ownership has long used familial language to guilt workers into doing unpaid labor. But that’s exactly what Junkyard’s growth is built to avoid. As Juhnke and Michelle put it, they’re building up so that they can make their small-town fantasy factory into a business that supports its employees.

“We want to be able to pay people well and support everyone here,” Michelle says, “Give people benefits, full-time instead of hourly pay; you know, give people careers.” 

DeTar and Ruebke are two of the roughly 50 employees who make up Junkyard’s staff, including DeTar’s fiancée, Rebecca Hoobler. Juhnke says Junkyard will begin offering employees health insurance, vision and dental plans, accident and life insurance, as well as a 401K contribution starting in January 2022. Families depend on Junkyard, and Juhnke has a duty to each one of them—even if he had to compromise his own family relationships to make it happen.

NEW DOGS, OLD TRICKS

The first beer I ever loved from Junkyard was Ice Auger Lager, a hyper-crisp Bohemian Pilsner. Juhnke enjoys a classic style, but he just can’t commit to brewing to exacting, traditional standards. In this case, he used a base of British Maris Otter malt rather than Czech malt.

“It’s kind of like making an Asian dish with fettuccine noodles,” Juhnke told me when it was released. “Why wouldn’t the noodles cross over? You just don’t think of it.”

The beer may not rival Junkyard’s other releases in its degree of whimsy, but it encapsulates something of Junkyard’s spirit. The beer world is shifting all the time, and you need the wherewithal to weld ideas together and make it work.

Looking at the beer menu, that evolution is ongoing, even out here in the cradle of the Red River. Today, there’s a Kölsch and an Imperial Brown Ale mixed in with the chocolate chip cookie Stout and the Mountain Dew Hard Seltzer. Juhnke’s read is that meat-and-potato styles are coming back in a big way. He’s got an Altbier on tap called Laser Focus that Ruebke practically idolizes.

“All those [styles] are making a resurgence,” Juhnke says. And when they do, Junkyard will be ready to inject some well-tuned absurdity to the market. Partly that’s out of a desire to play, and partly it’s sheer practicality. “If you put all your eggs into one basket in the beer industry,” Juhnke says, “eventually that basket is gonna fall apart.”

Words by Jerard FagerbergPhotos by Lucy Hawthorne