An early look at liquor sales under ICE occupation

A question we’ve been forced to grapple with over the course of the past year is: what is this doing to the booze business? (We being people who think about drinking in America as a way to understand America; this being the deadly mayhem of the second Trump administration.) In my reporting over the past 12 months, I’ve tried to answer that question from a variety of angles, looking at the supply chain, export demand, right-wing pander brands, and more to get a handle on how the sector is handling the real-time failure of the American experiment. Today, I want to look a little more closely at how off-premise liquor sales fare when thousands of federal agents lay siege to an American city. Or, cities: Minneapolis and Saint Paul.

As I reported last week in my column at VinePair, much of the Twin Cities’ beer scene has thrown itself into the popular resistance against the Trump administration’s chaotic, lethal occupation there, serving as hubs for fundraising, mutual aid, and organizing. Intuitively, breweries and bars there are taking a beating business-wise. “Because of ICE, lots of people are afraid to leave their house, or they’re distracted, they’re out patrolling [for ICE] and then not coming drinking,” Wes Burdine, the owner of The Black Hart of Saint Paul, a popular queer soccer bar. He ballparked his January losses at around 15% year-over-year. The president and chief operating officer of Bauhaus Brew Labs, Drew Hurst, told me the ~10,000-barrel brewery in Northeast Minneapolis was running about 40% behind last year’s taproom sales figures. Immigrant-owned firms in MSP, many in the hospitality sector, are reporting revenues down closer to 80-100%.

We’ll get a fuller picture on what Trump’s shock troops have done to the Twin Cities’ bev-alc market as more reporting comes out, and the big market-research firms gather and collate more scan data. But to get a jump on it, I asked a source with keys to the Nielsen-tracked kingdom for a snapshot of off-premise liquor sales in the Land of 10,000 Lakes since a federal gunman killed Renee Good in cold blood on January 7th.

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