Brewing Benevolence is a series of articles and interviews with breweries that are committed to more than just brewing beer in their communities. In this edition, I talked to Omar, founder of Surly Brewing in Minnesota . Read on to learn about the service projects Surly has undertaken and how they are helping their Twin Cities community.

Surly’s new charitable efforts program was given the moniker ‘Surly Gives a Damn.’ What events or projects will comprise the ‘Surly Gives a Damn’ effort?

We just completed our first Surly Gives a Damn event last week. We had over 50 Surly volunteers help out a local food bank. We sorted food and put together different food boxes. I meet with our Surly Gives a Damn coordinator weekly to figure out what events we will be doing in the future. We are looking at volunteering for race events and a greenway clean-up projects. At the moment, we are spending a lot of time figuring out what types of volunteer events that are available for groups of 50 or more. Most volunteer group events are built for smaller groups.

Service projects seem to be very important to Surly.  How have these service projects not only benefitted the community, but also the brewery? Also, why get involved in these labor intensive type projects as opposed to just donating beer?

We do both items, donating beer and merchandise and the service projects. The beer donations is a bit of a no-brainer, everybody loves free beer, but I think the service projects are really a great way to connect with the community. I have always felt that breweries are very local, connected to the communities they are in. Even if we sell beer all over the country, we are still a Twin Cities brewery. I think the service projects are a great way to connect with our community that has supported us so well.

Which charitable organizations have you chosen to work with?

We have worked with a number of different organizations; theater organizations, sports leagues, city planning groups, food shelves , a Mississippi River group, children’s services, MN Zoo, Faith’s Lodge. The list is actually pretty long and diverse. We get so many requests for help, we try and spread it around.

How have you chosen which organizations to support?

Who to help is the most difficult part of the Surly Gives a Damn project. There is not enough beer and donations to go around, so we do have to choose which groups to help. In general, we look to help charitable groups and events as opposed to individuals requesting donations. Other than that, we really do try to spread out donations to as many different groups as we can.

Why is it important for Surly to be involved in its community?

We have been really fortunate at Surly to be so embraced by the Twin Cities community, it seems natural to give some of it back. I have never been a big volunteer guy myself, but the amount of energy that is in the Surly Nation is pretty awesome. I said at the food bank event last week that the 50 people working together that night did way more than 50 of us working as individuals. As a company, we can really make a great impact in the community by harnessing that energy that Surly Nation has. It was actually a Surly volunteer, Jon Jackson, that came up with this idea.