St. Louis Park Business Council Meeting

This monthly meeting gathers business leaders, owners, elected officials, city staff and community leaders for a conversation about business development and opportunities in the City of St. Louis Park. If you have a business in St. Louis Park or are interested in learning more about what's happening in this community, please join us! This event is free and open to the public.

On June 1st, we will be featuring local business owner Ralf Loeffelholz, President of Dampfwerk Distillery.

Dampfwerk Distillery is truly a passion project to bring a European, and more particularly German, style drinking culture to the Twin Cities.  Equally important, though, he is determined to build a sustainable family business grounded in his corporate experience.

Ralf started his career in the US on an ex-pat assignment in Pittsburgh, where he met his wife, Mary, a native Minnesotan.  You can quickly connect the dots as to how he ended up here!  A challenge for someone who grew up in northern Germany on the North Sea and wanted to live next to water….10,000 lakes was not exactly what he envisioned.

With nearly 20 years of experience in the food and beverage industry working for local institutions such as Ecolab and Cargill, he grew restless with German food and drinking being generally limited to sausages, sauerkraut, pretzels, and beer knowing that the heritage of the culinary and German spirit culture is far more vast and exciting in comparison to what we currently see on the retail shelves.  So, he left the corporate world and built a distillery.  Along the way, his two adult children joined the business, with Christian focused on the operation and Bridgit leading the creative for the lounge and sales and marketing.  As a family business, though, a Chief Family Officer is also needed to keep the peace, which is the role of his wife, Mary!

The St. Louis Park-based distillery’s products entered distribution in 2017, and they also opened their cocktail lounge in 2019.  They currently have 4 product lines of European-style fruit brandies, herbal liqueurs, gins/aquavit, and an American Single Malt whiskey.  You will find Ralf continuing to develop new products that achieve his passion for bringing many forgotten recipes back into our spirits culture.  Well, that along with tossing the ball to the 3 distillery dogs along the railroad tracks when they determine that it‘s time for a break!