Minnesota Then
In 1941, the Grain Belt Beer sign, a bottle-cap–shaped approximately 50-by-40-foot billboard constructed by the General Outdoor Advertising Company for about $5,000, was placed on top of the Marigold Ballroom at 1330 Nicollet Avenue in downtown Minneapolis. The sign featured the brewery's distinctive red "M" inside a circle and more than 800 feet of neon tubing, making it one of the largest and brightest displays in the city. It quickly became a familiar feature of the Minneapolis skyline, appearing on postcards and in promotional advertising.
The sign was moved to Nicollet Island in 1950. It was put on land owned by the Eastman Family Trust, facing downtown alongside the Hennepin Avenue Bridge. Rent for the location was $1,000 monthly, plus fifty cents for every barrel of beer sold. This move offered better visibility across the Mississippi River and reduced competition from other neon advertisements downtown.
It remained illuminated until 1975 when the Minneapolis Brewing Company, unable to compete in a consolidating brewing industry, was forced to shut down. Around the same time, developer Irwin Jacobs purchased the brewery complex for $4.1 million, intending to redevelop the area near the river. The Grain Belt brand was sold to G. Heileman Brewing Company of La Crosse, Wisconsin, which continued production at the Jacob Schmidt Brewery in Saint Paul. The sign went dark.
In the fall of 1985, the Eastman Family Trust, the Minneapolis Heritage Preservation Commission, and G. Heileman Brewing started discussions to revive the sign. After four years of negotiation, Heileman agreed to sponsor a $125,000 restoration. When workers began, they discovered years of decay, including large quantities of squirrel and bird nests inside the structure. Deterioration and wiring damage made it difficult to determine the original colors of the lights. On May 24, 1989, after fourteen years of darkness, the sign was relit.
The sign remained lit for seventeen months. In October 1991, Heileman sold the Grain Belt label to Saint Paul's Minnesota Brewing Company. The on-again-off-again sign was turned off once more. Discussions to relight the sign led to it being turned back on in a small ceremony on February 18, 1992, coinciding with the introduction of Grain Belt Light. It stayed lit until 1996. That year, declining sales of the brewery's flagship brands, combined with other financial pressures, forced Minnesota Brewing Company to cut costs. The Grain Belt Beer sign, expensive to maintain and steadily falling into disrepair, was turned off.
By the end of the decade, only the letters "R-A-I-N E-L-T" flickered faintly across the river at night. After a brief sales increase in late 1996, the company spent the rest of the decade in financial decline, eventually closing its doors in June 2002.
In July 2002, August Schell Brewing Company of New Ulm purchased the Grain Belt brand at auction. Despite widespread desire to see the sign operating along the riverfront again, financial priorities took precedence. The brewery expressed a commitment to restoration but first focused on stabilizing the brand and rebuilding distribution networks. The Eastman Family Trust, owners of both the sign and the land, put both up for sale in 2009, offering to donate the property to a nonprofit willing to care for it permanently.
Community discussions began to find the necessary funds for restoration. Plans called for replacing the fragile neon tubes with energy-efficient LED lighting—a move that would reduce maintenance costs from nearly $50,000 a year to less than $8,000. Additional billboards, including electric ones on the back of the sign, were considered to bridge the funding gap.
In November 2014, Schell's Brewing announced plans to buy the sign and the land it sat on. The sale was made official in January 2016, marking the beginning of restoration efforts. Schell's began selling commemorative packages for $100 each, giving the public a chance to "buy a bulb" and sponsor part of the project. Each package included one of the old bulbs, a certificate stating which letter the buyer helped restore, a T-shirt, and a porcelain Grain Belt sign. All 1,107 kits were sold.
On December 30, 2017, at exactly 5:30 p.m., the Grain Belt Beer sign was switched back on after being dark for over twenty years. The updated display replaced 800 feet of neon with thousands of LED bulbs. The brewery organized a pub crawl to celebrate the relighting, followed by a gathering near Nicollet Island. Bands played, and beer flowed in the Nicollet Island Pavilion as the city marked the return of the illuminated sign to the Minneapolis skyline.