If you take the first exit off Interstate 94 in Hudson and make a right at the Dairy Queen, you’ll end up at Historic Casanova Liquor, a liquor store known for craft beer, specialty wine and, according to its owner, Tyrrell Gaffer, being the “first one off the interstate.”

Gaffer estimated that 60 percent of his Sunday sales before passage of the new law were from Minnesotans crossing the border to buy alcohol. “A lot of it was: ‘Hey, I forgot. People are at my house and I need something,’” he said. “Everyone in Minnesota knows this area pretty well.”

Compared with the owners of other border liquor stores, Gaffer is fortunate. His store is filled with high-margin niche beers and wines, and Minnesotans still come to buy products like Spotted Cow, the farmhouse ale from New Glarus Brewing, which doesn’t distribute to Minnesota.

What he now sells fewer of are name brand spirits and cases of low-margin beers from macro breweries, like 24-packs of Bud Light. “We haven’t gotten hit as bad as some of the other stores and other places around here,” he said.

Tom Salewski owns Valley Spirits, just across the Wisconsin border in Osceola, about an hour northeast of Minneapolis. There is no town directly across the river in Minnesota, but he would still see plenty of Vikings fans who forgot to buy beer.

“It blew me away sometimes when people would come in, trying to leave their place at halftime and drive 20 or 30 miles and try to get back for the fourth quarter because they ran out of beer for the game,” he said. “You’d really notice it if the Vikings played a later game.”