Celiac-safe beer is pouring again in St. Paul’s Midway neighborhood, where SAW Brewing opened this summer in the space Burning Brothers left behind.<\/p>\n
Kasey Pate opened the brewery with her mother. Pate spent five years brewing at Burning Brothers, the gluten-free brewery that closed last year after more than a decade in the same building.<\/p>\n
“An opportunity was there to pick it back up,” Pate said. “It’s always been my dream to have my own.”<\/p>\n
The name is an acronym. It stands for “strong-ass women,” Pate said.<\/p>\n
Everything that comes into the building is certified gluten-free \u2014 the grains and every other ingredient she brings in \u2014 because the facility itself is dedicated to gluten-free brewing, Pate said. That makes the beer celiac-safe, a distinction that matters to drinkers who can’t rely on beers brewed with barley and then treated to strip the gluten out.<\/p>\n
Pate is gluten-free herself. Now she’s brewing her own recipes, including an English pale ale currently on the board.<\/p>\n
“I wanted to bring my own kind of spin on things at the start,” she said.<\/p>\n
The opening comes at an uncertain stretch for craft beer. Taprooms around the metro have closed or changed hands over the past year. Bauhaus Brew Labs<\/a> announced it would shut down after more than a decade in northeast Minneapolis.\u00a0HeadFlyer Brewing<\/a> served its last call with Dangerous Man set to take the space. And in St. Paul, Barrel Theory Beer Company is moving into the former Lake Monster site<\/a>.<\/p>\n Pate thinks SAW is filling a gap the rest of the market isn’t.<\/p>\n “There’s not a lot of options for people in the celiac community,” she said.<\/p>\n She also sees the taproom as a way to hand something she cares about to the city.<\/p>\n “It’s really just like giving back something that I put passion and love into for other people to enjoy as well, and that’s something that’s super special to me,” Pate said.<\/p>\n SAW Brewing is open Thursdays through Sundays.<\/p>\n \n More from CBS News\n <\/p>\n