Photograph by Caitlin Abrams
Sara Bonvallet and Rob Miller, owners of Dangerous Man
October kicks off barrel-aged bottle release season for Dangerous Man Brewing Company. Once a month, every month through January, a line will form early in the morning outside the Northeast taproom and brewery. This line will have folks in vintage plaid stamping their Red Wings together and folks in North Face boots with backup iPhone chargers hidden in their advanced tech coats. When the doors open, this line will stream in and buy every last bottle Dangerous Man offers, and it just might bring the taproom to full capacity, prompting a fresh line at the door composed of people who won’t be able to enter until someone else leaves.
Is Dangerous Man’s beer really that good? Yes. Once the brewery made a triple IPA clocking in at 138 International Bittering Units, which was one of the most delightful beers I’ve ever had—it was like a rattlesnake bit you and just stayed in place, letting you see through a portal to divine light. The Peanut Butter Porter is one of our fair city’s cult beers—people get to chatting about its smooth, roasted depths at parties and then edge toward the door to rush off and meet it. It is no secret in Minnesota that brewer Rob Miller is one of our greats, coaxing malt, water, and hops into flavors never seen before: This one’s a bouquet, this one’s a biscuit from a wood-fired potbellied stove, this one’s a hazelnut semifreddo. What’s less known is that Dangerous Man the brewery just as well might have been called Dangerous Couple; it’s not just a brewery, it’s a love story.
It’s a story that began fall term of their senior year when Sarah Bonvallet and Rob Miller met at the University of Montana. Friends set them up, knowing both liked jazz and the Grateful Dead, and they headed to downtown Missoula for a $5 burger-and-beer special. By Christmas, Rob was home in Minneapolis, telling his mom he’d met the one. Sarah was home in the Chicago suburbs telling her dad the same.
These would become important figures in the Dangerous Couple story, and not for the usual reasons. Rob’s mom, EvaLee Miller, now known around the brewery as The Dangerous Mom, is the source Rob credits for his chef’s palate and cook’s willingness to wrestle ingredients all day. “She was a big-time French cook. She took multiple French cooking classes at Sofitel. She knows so much about dough, breads, noodles—I have vivid memories of spending whole days, and I do mean whole days, just hanging out around the kitchen island while she cooked and cooked.” At the end of the cooking, the Millers’ house would fill up with young families. “They liked to party well,” says Rob.
Sarah’s dad, Mike Bonvallet, an engineer and lifelong home brewer, could hardly suspect his daughter’s confession would lead him to become a brewery’s in-house and onsite engineer, living in Rob and Sarah’s basement for six months while designing and installing the brewing system that would allow Dangerous Man to be as dangerous as it is. But I’ve jumped ahead.
Upon graduation, Rob and Sarah didn’t much know what they wanted to do, though they knew they wanted to do it together. Sarah got a job in Chattanooga, Tennessee, as a photojournalist, and Rob worked at the local co-op stacking plums and learning about produce. They got pregnant, and as all Minnesotans know, that’s when the homing tractor beam activates, and so Rob convinced Sarah that with all the Twin Cities’ theater and Doomtree, Minneapolis was it.
“It was below 20 degrees for five days in a row when we got here!” says Sarah, still in some amount of shock. Rob got a job at Whole Foods, now managing produce departments, and that was where he made a friend who was a home brewer. “The first brew I ever brewed, I thought: This is what I want to do,” Rob says. “The process is so interesting, the end product brings people together, and people love it.” Soon Rob was not just a home brewer, but he was an obsessed home brewer. He’d invent recipes all day, then hit the home brew supplier. Staff learned to set aside his grain orders with a note: “Rob needs to grind his own.” Just like his mom, Rob soon found he was hosting a constant party, in order to move home brew out to make space for the next batch. But then friends asked: “Can you make me a keg of that IPA for my wedding?” or “Can I buy a keg of that single-hop for Christmas?”
This was highly illegal and also good training. The young couple talked it over: They would start a taproom-only brewery, like they’d seen in Montana. A brewery called 3 Floyds had posted its business plan online for young brewers to use. Sarah found it, cut and pasted it into a fresh document, and the two started filling in the sections. Who was their demographic? “We had this old iMac in the basement, and I’d hop on and add something, change something, he’d come to me with an idea and I’d say: ‘Go to the basement! Type it up!’” says Sarah now. At night, heads on pillows, they’d toss ideas back and forth, adding the edits the next day. Soon the first baby was a toddler and was joined by a little brother. One fateful weekend they packed up the family to go to a wedding in Austin, Texas.
“We had rented a house, it was a bunch of us, families with little kids,” Rob recalls. “There were a couple of late nights. One morning, all the kids were watching TV in the main room, and I had this long hair, a big beard, and I came through to get to the kitchen. My best friend’s daughter ran screaming: ‘Mom, there’s a dangerous man in the house!’” It was the talk of the wedding, not least because Rob was the least dangerous person any of them knew, a gentle introvert. Thus the brewery was named and the logo born.
There’s an Internet meme that says, Find someone who looks at you like X looks at Y, and it has to do with a gaze of adoration. That’s how Rob generally looks at Sarah, if you peer into the protected space between his ever-present hat brim and cascading beard. The Dangerous Man logo, a beard and hair and blankness in between, is a bit of an inside joke; while outsiders can project whatever toughness they want into the void, to people that know the couple, it’s clear that space holds a loving gaze.
Logo and business plan in hand, they gathered everyone who had been drinking their home brew. “You guys owe us a lot for all this beer over the years,” Sarah began her PowerPoint presentation; the last page was investment options. They walked away with $30,000 of promises.
The rest is the rest. They found the perfect space, in Northeast, but it was an empty box without bathrooms or HVAC; they leased it nonetheless. For six months, the Miller and Bonvallet families put in 10-hour days to get the spot open. Sarah remembers spending Thanksgiving welding glycol chillerlines with her dad, eating a Thanksgiving meal of peanut butter amid the debris.
Then came the beers that win all the awards and are in hot demand. In their business plan they hoped to sell 100 pints a day; on a good Saturday nowadays they sell several thousand. Something that wasn’t in the business plan happened, too: employees who have gone on to very big things inspired by Dangerous Man. They’ve founded breweries like Minneapolis’s Modist and Somerset, Wisconsin’s Oliphant; they’ve founded food destinations like Farmhouse Madeline Island. The pillow-talked business plan did a lot.
So now they’re giving it a new sibling. This dangerous couple just bought a 40-acre farm on a private lake in Clearwater, on I-94 on the road to St. Cloud. They’re moving their family out there, since the kids are now 13 and 10 and want a horse. While it would be illegal for Rob and Sarah to open a second taproom, they’re thinking the farm will eventually become something for the eating and drinking public—maybe a farmstead brewery, maybe a distillery, maybe even an inn. Rob knows he wants fruit trees and lots of animals—dogs, cats, chickens, maybe even goats. “We want to take it slow and let the land speak,” says Rob. Sarah adds: “We know we want it to be a place where people from the city come out and get filled up.”
So they’ve started a new business plan and are writing this one just like the last, each dropping in to add a few thoughts, checking what the other added, and talking it over at night when the lights are out. It’s a new chapter, perhaps entitled: The Dangerous Couple Buys a Goat?
