MISQUAH — The creamery on Second Avenue has stood empty since 1987, when the last of the area’s dairy routes consolidated out of town and the doors closed on a tile-floored main room that several generations have since agreed was a shame to waste. People kept finding reasons it couldn’t be used — the plumbing, the zoning, the cost, the sheer inertia of a building everyone walked past and no one walked into. In August it reopens as a brewery.

Annika Holt grew up three blocks from the building, on Birch, and left at eighteen for the Cities like most of her class. She and her husband Jonas, a brewer of twelve years, are coming back to open Misquah’s first taproom — and the first anywhere on the Chain — in the creamery’s main room, a high-ceilinged space of original white subway tile and a worn concrete-and-tile floor that Jonas called, the first time he stood in it, “the best room in town that nobody could use. You can’t build this. You can only inherit it.”

The equipment arrives next week: two fourteen-barrel fermenters, a small canning line, and a walk-in cooler that the Holts noted, given recent events down the street, “will have a very good latch.” They appear before the city council July 7 for a brewer’s taproom license — the first the city has ever issued, which required Clerk Donna Skoglund to locate and dust off a section of ordinance “nobody had any reason to read until now,” and which the Lutheran Ladies’ Aid has already filed comment upon, favorably but with a reminder.

Harold Aas, who at eighty-one remembers the creamery in operation, walked through last week at the Holts’ invitation and stood a while in the main room. “They hauled milk out of here when I was a boy,” he said. “Trucks lined up on Second at five in the morning. Then for forty years it was nothing — a building we apologized for. Now it’ll be full again, of people, at night. I didn’t expect to see that. I’m glad I waited around for it.”

The flagship beer will be named for one of the seven lakes, a decision the Holts have learned to approach with caution. “We mentioned it casually at the Daybreak and nearly started a war before our coffee came,” Annika said. Mud Lake has lobbied hardest, on Dorothy Knutson’s theory that becoming the flagship would finally settle the matter of the lake’s dignity once and for all. The Holts remain non-committal. “We’re leaning toward whichever lake won’t get us run out of town,” Jonas said. “Which, around here, may not be a lake that exists.”

They expect to open by the county fair in August — “if the fittings cooperate,” Jonas said, a contractor’s hedge Annika translated, for the paper, as “September.” It will be the first new gathering place on Main in some years, and the response has been warm, the lone reservation coming from the Ladies’ Aid, which wished the Holts well and noted, for the record and twice, that the church basement remains available for events “of a different character.” The Holts have invited Marlys to the opening. She is, she said, considering it, which in Misquah is most of the way to yes.