Buying Beer Is Both Legal and Illegal on Sunday Nights in Minnesota

It was a little after 6 p.m. on Sunday night—that bizarre time when buying booze is simultaneously legal and illegal in Minnesota.

I’d been catching up with some old friends at Utepils Brewing in Minneapolis and, as we headed for the door, I grabbed a few cans of the brewery’s signature pilsner, intending to bring them home. The bartender refused to let me buy them.

Had I had too much? Hardly. In fact, she would have been happy to pour another round of drinks for all of us.

The beer was perfectly legal to be sold, and the cans in the cooler marked “to go” were available for purchase—just not at this very moment.

In Minnesota, to-go alcohol sales are allowed only until 10 p.m. most days of the week, but the cutoff comes four hours earlier on Sundays.

The more you think about it, the less sense that rule seems to make. If I’d wanted to have another pilsner while sitting in Utepils’ gorgeous beer garden, I’d have been welcome to do so. If I wanted to buy six beers to share with my friends, that would have been perfectly legal. If I’d gone to the bar a few minutes earlier—before the arbitrary 6 p.m cutoff—I would have been allowed to legally buy those cans and take them to go. If it had been any other day of the week, the purchase would have been legal.

I was a willing customer, and there was a business that would have happily consented to taking my money in exchange for six cans of beer.

Alas, there was someone I’d forgotten to ask: Minnesota legislators.

Of course, Minnesota is hardly alone when it comes to silly, arbitrary rules for buying and selling alcohol. In my home state of Virginia, I have to go to two different stores to buy beer and tequila. In Indiana, grocery stores are forbidden from selling cold beer. Every place has its own weird restrictions, and navigating them successfully is one of the markers of being from that place. On Sunday night, the confused look on my face as I was told that I couldn’t buy beer to go from a cooler that was literally labeled with a “to go” sign surely marked me as an out-of-towner.

These rules are always arbitrary—there is no rational public health reason to allow beer sales at 5:55 p.m. on a Sunday but not 10 minutes later—and they almost always carry a political dimension. In Minnesota, that underlying factor is that liquor stores in the state are also required to close at 10 p.m. during the week and at 6 p.m. on Sundays. Breweries, bars, and restaurants are allowed to stay open longer, but the limit on to-go sales is meant to prevent competition with liquor stores. Here’s a crazy idea: Just let people buy and sell whatever they want, whenever they want.

And, in fairness, Minnesota has been making strides in the right direction.

Until 2017, you couldn’t buy beer or liquor to go on Sundays at all. Hosting a Super Bowl party and you waited until the last minute to buy booze? That’ll cost you a round trip to Wisconsin, where liquor stores line up at the border to capture the sales that Minnesota forbade.

Sunday sales are now legal, which means that the annoying and arbitrary 6 p.m. cutoff is actually evidence of improving personal freedom in the Land of 10,000 Lakes. The state has also loosened its booze rules in a bunch of other ways recently, like legalizing THC-infused seltzers.

Freedom is a journey, not just a destination. But it’s a journey that you still can’t take with a six-pack on a Sunday night.