During the 1860s, Jordan had become an early industrial center in Scott County and brewing became one of its thriving industries when two breweries were established there. Frank Nicolin and his sons nestled the main (northern) section of this brewery against the bluff, and caves were built into the hillside where the beer could be kept cool while it aged. An addition was completed around the turn of the 20th century that almost doubled its size.

Nicolin sold the brewery to Schutz and Kaiser in the late 1860s. The brewery operated later as the Schutz and Hilgers Brewery and then the Mankato Brewery until 1948. After being vacant for a couple of years, the complex was gutted by fire in 1954 and left the building was left in ruins. After sitting abandoned, the ruins were purchased in 1972 at a tax delinquency auction. The building was then restored in 1990 with apartments on the top floors and retail space on the ground level.

1979
2019

After an unusually wet spring In 2014, a massive chunk of the hillside slid into the brewery building after 14” of rain fell on June 19th. Nearly 40 tons of trees, rocks, and mud crashed through a back wall of the building and filled top-floor apartments with debris. Plans to restore part of the building to its original use with a microbrewery and taproom were abandoned and the fate of the building was in limbo. Not sure if the structure could be saved, the building sat empty for more than a year as engineers and city officials tried to figure out if a plan to stabilize the building and hill behind it were even possible. Vandals broke windows and doors and the interior was covered in graffiti as the building sat empty. It took more than three years after the landslide for the structure to be stabilized and used again–this time as commercial space.