Walk into CrowBar on a Friday night and the first thing you notice isn't the whiskey. It's the birdcages. Antique ones, hung in a hallway that used to lead to a blacksmith's forge, next to a confessional booth with a rotary phone where regulars leave notes on the wall. The bar opened in December 2025 inside a building on the old Hamm's Brewery campus that was, depending on which record you trust, built sometime between 1911 and 1919 as a machine and millwright shop. For nearly three decades it sat empty. Now it smells like caramel from eight-year-old whiskey barrels stacked in the loft above.
That's the detail most drive-by coverage of "new East Side bar opens" misses. The old Hamm's complex on Minnehaha Avenue isn't being revived by an outside developer with a rendering and a ribbon-cutting date. It's being brought back one building at a time by the same handful of local operators, several of whom are related to each other, choosing to work inside 130-year-old ruins instead of tearing them down. The affordable housing plan that's supposed to fill in the rest of the 23-acre site is still years from breaking ground. The bar and brewery scene, on the other hand, is already open, already full on weekends, and already worth building a Saturday around.
The Building That Never Really Stopped
Start with Saint Paul Brewing, because it's the anchor that made the rest possible. The brewpub occupies three of the original Hamm's buildings, including what used to be the horse stables and carpentry shop, now a patio hidden behind a limestone brick wall from the late 1800s. The site has picked up a reputation locally for having one of the more unusual patios in the Twin Cities, part beer garden, part overgrown ruin, string lights strung between what's left of the old stable structure.
The history here isn't decoration. The concrete steps where William Hamm Jr., grandson of brewery founder Theodore Hamm, was held after his 1933 kidnapping and ransom are still standing on the property. Weekly Historic Brewery Tours at 688 Minnehaha Avenue East walk visitors through that story alongside the Prohibition years and the brewery's rise into one of the largest beer operations in the country before Stroh's shut it down in 1997. If you've lived on the East Side for a while, you've probably heard some version of the kidnapping story secondhand. The tour is the version with receipts.
The New Neighbors Betting on the Same Ruins
What's changed in the last year is next door. Volière Spirits and its tasting room, CrowBar, opened in the former blacksmith and machine shop just across the shared parking lot from Saint Paul Brewing. The distillery is on track to be Minnesota's first all-women-owned whiskey operation, and it's doing something almost no new distillery can pull off: opening with a full stock of aged whiskey instead of the usual gin-and-vodka-only lineup most startups are stuck with while their barrels mature. That's because Volière isn't starting from zero. The building was previously home to 11 Wells Spirits for over a decade, and Volière's lead distiller, Seth Reid, worked at 11 Wells in its early years before coming back to the same space under new ownership.
The ownership itself is a quieter kind of continuity. CrowBar and Volière are run by ReGina Clapp and Liza Sterletske. ReGina is married to Rob Clapp, who owns Saint Paul Brewing next door. So the "new" business on the block isn't a stranger moving in. It's the same family's next chapter, built inside a different ruin fifty feet away.
Sterletske has talked about the site's earlier history too, back when the Hamm's complex was a company town of sorts with its own zip code and the surrounding hollow, now Swede Hollow Park, was full of immigrant workers living in tents while they got established. "It's pretty amazing to me to look at the immigrants that came here to work at the Hamm's complex," she's said of the connection. That framing matters if you're trying to understand why these operators keep choosing exposed brick and old vat openings over a clean remodel. The decay is the point.
What's Actually Open Right Now
If you're deciding how to spend a fall weekend on the East Side, here's the current state of the complex:
- Saint Paul Brewing — full brewpub menu, wood-fired pizza, and the patio inside the old horse stables. Open daily.
- CrowBar and Volière Spirits — cocktail lounge and tasting room in the former blacksmith shop, first-come first-served, 21+, dog-friendly on the patio only.
- Historic Brewery Tours — weekly walkthroughs covering the kidnapping, Prohibition, and the brewery's national rise, departing from 688 Minnehaha Avenue East.
- Twin Cities Oktoberfest at Saint Paul Brewing — the Hamm's founders were German immigrants, so the brewery leans into it every September with a Fest Bier, a Marzen-style Oktoberfest, and the annual stein-hold competition. This year's runs September 26.
Pair any of that with a walk through Swede Hollow Park or a stretch of the Bruce Vento Trail, both of which border the complex, and you've got a full afternoon without leaving a few square blocks of the East Side.
The Slow Half of the Story
Here's where the timeline splits. While the bars and the brewery have moved fast, the other half of the Hamm's site, the part meant for housing, is moving at the pace you'd expect from a project that's been talked about for decades. The Saint Paul City Council designated the historic brewery buildings a Heritage Preservation Site in November 2025, a step that unlocks historic tax credits developer JB Vang needs to make the numbers work. The current plan calls for roughly 180 affordable apartments split between new construction and rehabbed brewery buildings, with connections built in to Swede Hollow Park and the Bruce Vento Trail.
But financing isn't finalized, and there's been friction along the way. Rob Clapp sued the city over what he characterized as improper rezoning tied to the housing plan, specifically a dispute over whether part of the shared parking lot he and his tenants rely on gets filled in with a new apartment building. As of the most recent public reporting, the developer was hoping for final funding approval by the end of 2026 or early 2027, with construction potentially starting in 2028 if interest rates and financing hold steady. After nearly thirty years of the site sitting mostly vacant, a few more years of planning isn't a surprise. It's just worth knowing that the "brewery district" you can visit this weekend and the "housing development" you might read about in a city council agenda are two different timelines on the same acreage.
Why the Distinction Is Worth Knowing
If you live near Payne and Minnehaha, you don't need a real estate agent to tell you a new cocktail bar opened up the street. But it's easy to assume that because a big redevelopment is in the news, nothing is actually ready to visit yet. That's backward here. The part of Hamm's that's open right now, the brewpub, the distillery, the tours, the Oktoberfest, is the finished product. The part still working through zoning disputes and tax credit timelines is the future phase. Treat them as separate stories and you'll get more use out of the East Side this fall than most people driving past the fenced-off sections realize is on offer.
If you're keeping an eye on how neighborhoods like this one change over time, or you're weighing what a corner of St. Paul with this kind of momentum might mean for your own next move, Mitchell Culbreath is happy to talk through what he's seeing on the ground. Let's Connect.
