06/12/2026
Hi folks,
Kirk Bangstad here from the Minocqua Brewing Company. These are the times when it helps to have a sense of humor.
Last night, all the beer that is canned and packaged for the Minocqua Brewing Company in Illinois was seized from both our taprooms in Minocqua and Madison. One of our customers filmed it happening, and that’s the pic you see here.
Here’s the timeline behind why I think that happened:
2020-21—Biden wins election. Our “Biden Beer” sells wildly throughout Wisconsin. General Beverage, Wisconsin’s largest beer distributor, sends us a contract to distribute our beer and encourages Glunz Distributing out of Chicago to do the same thing. Days after we start looking over the contract, we’re told that the owner of General Beverage no longer wants to distribute our beer. It’s “too political.” Glunz no longer takes our calls and no major distributor in Wisconsin, Illinois, or Minnesota has taken our calls to help distribute our beer ever since.
2021-22—We start self-distributing throughout Wisconsin and land a major account at the Woodman’s grocery store chain. After a year, the chain drops us because they’ve gotten too many calls from MAGA trolls threatening to boycott them for carrying our beer, and a number of their own right-wing beer buyers in various stores are upset that our beer is being sold there. Their head beer buyer, a left-leaning guy out of Madison, simply didn’t want the hassle of having to defend us to his customers and employees anymore.
2022-23—Demand for our beer is still high, but our desire to partner with distributors and chain grocery stores is low, so we figure out a way to send our beer straight to our fans around the country by selling it online. The Wisconsin Department of Revenue Alcohol Enforcement Division informs us that even though selling beer online was legal during Covid, it is now illegal and we could no longer do it—cutting off a major sales channel for our company.
2024—We move our online sales operations to Illinois, where selling beer online is legal. We also start working with a brewery in Illinois because it costs less to transport beer to our Illinois-based online fulfillment partner. We are told by the Wisconsin Department of Revenue Alcohol enforcement division that we can’t send beer to our Wisconsin customers from Illinois even though it’s legal for Wisconsinites to receive wine in the mail from out-of-state wineries—thus cutting off about half of our online sales revenue.
2025—
--Our accountant starts paying excise taxes in Illinois for the beer we’re making there, instead of in Wisconsin. Wisconsin Department of Revenue Alcohol enforcement division tells us we need to pay excise taxes in Wisconsin for 2025, about $500 ($1 dollar per barrel of beer sold in Wisconsin). When we try to do so, they tell us we can’t because the beer was made by another brewery in Illinois—even though we have a permit to import their beer to Wisconsin.
--We asked our partner brewer to enter into an “Alternative Proprietorship” so that the beer made in Illinois is technically the Minocqua Brewing Company’s beer, which would enable us to pay taxes on the beer sold in Wisconsin. They say yes, buy that process takes months, especially because the federal government that regulates beer (Alcohol, To***co, and Trade Bureau) was shut down in late 2025.
--Now that our beer is mostly being made in Illinois, we build a refrigerated warehouse in Madison to be able to distribute it throughout Wisconsin from a central location. Wisconsin Department of Revenue alcohol enforcement division tells us we need a permit to store beer at that warehouse.
2026
--We apply for a permit to store beer in that warehouse in January, while we don't have any beer being stored there. The inspection for that warehouse was delayed until yesterday, June 11th—5 months later.
--The Wisconsin Department of Revenue alcohol enforcement division tells us that although we have made over 500 barrels of beer in 2025, we made most of it in Illinois and didn’t hit the 250 barrel threshold to carry a “Retail Service Permit,” which allows brewery taprooms to be able to serve wine, cider, and other people’s beer. Their reasoning? That 250 barrel threshold is only for beer made in Wisconsin. We immediately start making more beer in Wisconsin so that we can hit their 250 beer threshold, but didn’t think we’d be able to hit that mark until August. We asked the Wisconsin Department of Revenue Alcohol Enforcement Division to give us some leniency, because this 250 barrel threshold to get a Retail Service Permit has only been law for 1 year, and we were one of the first breweries in Wisconsin that they were using as a guinea pig to “interpret” what the enforcement of that new law should be. Our liquor lawyer also told them that this “Wisconsin Production Only” 250 barrel rule was probably illegal given the 2005 Supreme Court case Granholm v. Heald, which prohibited Michigan from requiring out-of-state wineries to have more stringent regulations than in-state wineries. Such a precedent would certainly apply to our situation in Wisconsin.
The Wisconsin Department of Revenue Alcohol enforcement division set a date to inspect our warehouse yesterday— June 11th—5 months after we applied for a permit to hold beer in there, and after cancelling inspections twice over the last 5 months--when that warehouse largely sat empty. Since our taproom in Minocqua is very popular in the summer, we had to make beer and had to store it in this refrigerated warehouse to keep it fresh, even though we still didn’t have a permit. They told us that they’d confiscate any beer that they found in that warehouse during their inspection, so we moved it all to our taprooms in Madison and Minocqua two days ago—where we are legally allowed to store it.
Yesterday, June 11
After a clean inspection of our Madison warehouse, the Wisconsin Department of Revenue Alcohol Enforcement Agents asked me if they could also inspect our Madison taproom. I had no problem with that, because I believed all the beer being stored there was legal.
When the agents, my lawyer, and I got to the Madison taproom, they pulled a bait and switch, called for reinforcements, and started seizing the beer we had in our Madison taproom that was made in Illinois. When we asked them why, they said that we were selling it without records of any excise taxes being paid on it in Wisconsin, which made the beer “contraband." We told them that we had complied with all of their demands since the beginning of the year, and had TRIED to pay the measly $500 in Wisconsin excise taxes, but they hadn’t let us. We also told them that our partner in Illinois had diligently worked to get their alternative propriotership in order—which we agreed to do once we found out that would put us into compliance. We told them that in order to stop them from confiscating our beer, we could get our partner to pay the ~$500 in excise tax the next day. This didn’t matter to them, they kept on taking our beer. Over the last several months of negotiation with the WDOR, they never gave us any indication that they would seize our beer while we were waiting to get the proper permitting to come into compliance.
At the same time our Illinois-made beer was being seized in Madison, another group of Wisconsin Department of Revenue alcohol enforcement agents had gone up to Minocqua, deputized the Minocqua police, and started seizing our beer up their as well. All in all, they probably took $25K worth of beer from us yesterday, and haven’t put it under refrigeration to keep it fresh—all because we weren’t allowed to pay approximately $500 in Wisconsin excise taxes.
Today, June 12
My lawyer, Fred Melms, is filing an emergency injunction in Dane County circuit court to get our beer back into our taprooms, and under refrigeration, so we can still sell it while we sue the Wisconsin Department of Revenue for breaking interstate commerce laws relevant to Granholm v. Heald.
My liquor lawyer, Collin Schaefer of Ogden Glazer and Schaefer, one of the most prominent law firms in Wisconsin that deals with liquor laws, said he’s never seen beer get confiscated as a result of excise tax violations—especially ones as small as ours.—in his ~10 years of practicing law.
These are my immediate reactions.
Ever since we started selling beer online after being boycotted by Wisconsin beer distributors, we’ve been hounded by the Wisconsin Department of Revenue Alcohol Enforcement division. I personally know many other breweries in this state who operate similarly to us that have never received any scrutiny at all.
The Tavern League of Wisconsin has an undue amount of power in Wisconsin, and have become an arm of the Republican Party. They have been able to get the Republican majority legislature in Wisconsin to pass liquor laws that benefit beer distribution companies and hurt small breweries. I have no doubt that the Wisconsin Department of Revenue Alcohol Enforcement Division is receiving guidance on how to treat and inspect our company from representatives of the tavern league or beer distribution companies, because I’ve been successful in selling my beer without having to give a dime to these useless distribution middlemen who have undue amounts of power in Wisconsin’s liquor industry.
Selling beer online should be legal in Wisconsin—as it was during Covid—and as it currently is in many other states. Every one of the issues that led to my beer being seized yesterday stemmed from me simply trying to sell my beer online to Wisconsinites and customers around the country that want to buy it. If the Department of Revenue Alcohol Enforcement Division was able to relax these laws during Covid, with statistics showing that no harm was done to folks having beer delivered to their doorstep verses driving to a store to buy it, they shouldn’t be dropping the hammer on breweries that want to do it today. The only reason brewers in Wisconsin can’t sell beer online to our customers is because the distributors who run the Tavern League of Wisconsin want a cut of our profits, which they don’t deserve.
The level of punishment—publicly seizing over $25K of my beer—didn’t fit the crime of accidentally paying excise tax to Illinois instead of Wisconsin. This is especially true since we tried to pay the tax and weren’t allowed to do so and were told to get the right permits—which we immediately set out to do. The lack of leniency in allowing us to come into compliance borders on malicious harassment.
The Department of Revenue falls under Wisconsin’s Department of Administration which is under the purview of our corporate democratic Governor Tony Evers. I’ve been very critical of Governor Evers over the last year for not being proactive in stopping Trump’s regime from abusing Wisconsinites, and based my candidacy for Governor on forcing him to protect our upcoming elections from Trump’s slow-burning nationwide coup. Since my liquor lawyer has never seen this level of punishment being exacted on any of his other brewery clients before in his career, I can’t help but wonder if there’s someone directing these enforcement agents to come down on me extra hard as a way to “teach me a lesson.”
Lastly, about that sense of humor. This too shall pass, and it will be a good story someday. While I can’t believe the level of small-minded pettiness that led to the seizure of my beer, it’s only beer. We’ll make more, people will love it, and we’ll move on. That being said, both of our taprooms are still open, but there’s a lot less beer in there for you to buy—temporarily.
