Photo courtesy of Photo via WeldWerks Brewing
I started homebrewing in my garage about five years before we opened WeldWerks Brewing. I had no commercial experience and no formal education in brewing.
But somehow, our very first time at the Great American Beer Festival (GABF) we won a silver medal, and our very first time at the World Beer Cup we took a bronze. I don’t know how many breweries can say they’ve done that less than a year after opening.
A few months after that, we won the USA TODAY 10Best Reader's Choice award for the Best New Brewery in the country.
Winning competitions right from the start
A lot of people ask, "How did you guys get to this point? What did you guys do?" And I think it’s just that we have a lot of really good people on our team, and some really good people behind us. And winning competitions always helps.
The Vienna lager, which took bronze at the World Beer Cup, was actually the first lager I’d ever brewed. I’d never brewed one at home, because of the time it takes to brew one. I just really wanted to try it and then it won the competition, competing with breweries from Austria and all over the world that have been making lagers for, well, more than a year and a half – that’s for sure.
The humble beginnings in a garage
When I first started homebrewing, I had been working for a non-profit out here in Greeley. My partner, Colin Jones, was the IT guy for a local insurance company. So neither of us were super equipped to open a brewery, but here we are.
There were probably 10-15 of us that would brew together on weekends, and we’d do festivals and stuff. Eventually I got a little more competitive with my homebrews. I started entering competitions and started having success.
The reason the brewery actually got started was because of Colin. He sort of tipped my feet to the fire, and I said if we ever won a medal at one of the bigger homebrew competitions that I would consider it. Sure enough, we took a few medals at Vail Big Beers in January, and then by March we were off pursuing business plans.
Photo courtesy of Photo via WeldWerks Brewing
Starting a brewery in a small town
Once we decided to go for it, we started moving pretty quickly. We were open by the following February. There’s only five breweries here in a town of 100,000, so per capita we’re still on the lower end for the state of Colorado.
We’re about a half hour east of Fort Collins and an hour north of Denver, so we’re a little bit out of the way for most of the Front Range population. I think that kind of hurt us at first, as far as foot traffic goes, but I think it helped us since then.
It’s easy to get lost in Denver and Fort Collins. There are just so many breweries, and it seems like they’re opening up more and more every month. Not that it’s not great to have new breweries coming in, but consumers eventually won’t be able to keep up.
Being a little bit out of the way I think now has helped us, because people do seek us out based on our beer and not necessarily just based on our location. It kind of makes the beer a bit of a destination.
We’re only a draft brewery at this point, but we have almost 100 accounts that are serving our beer on the Front Range in Colorado. We’ve done some really, really limited bottle releases, and we’re hoping to work on cans really soon. It’s all been very small batch, less than 2000-bottle releases.
The barrel aged style we did, Medianoce, was our last release. We had a little over 350 people in line in front of our door before we opened.
Photo courtesy of Photo via WeldWerks Brewing
Growing pains
I went from brewing 15 gallons at home, at the most, to now brewing 15 barrels per batch. So to produce more beer in a day than I brewed in five years of homebrewing is humbling. Fortunately we haven’t had many challenges scaling up recipes.
We’ve just taken the approach that we’re not going to put out any beers we’re not proud of, and so if beer doesn’t meet our specs or doesn’t meet our quality, then we dump it. I think that’s a little bit harder to swallow as a professional brewer, to dump a batch when there’s a cost involved, but I did the same at home, too.
We’ve had a few kettle-sour beers and some IPAs we’ve had to dump, because they didn’t meet our standards. They just weren’t something we wanted to put our name behind.
At this point, it’s a little easier to justify dumping beer because our reputation is so important to us. I think there are too many breweries out there that are willing to put beers out that they’re not proud of, and that don’t meet high standards. I think that sets us apart as a small, new brewery to only put out the highest quality beers.
Photo courtesy of Photo via WeldWerks Brewing
Making a mark
Besides the Vienna lager, we have an American take on a hefeweizen that won the silver medal at the GABF, and that's the one that kind of put us on the map. And then we've received a lot of notoriety for our IPAs and the barrel-aged beers, so we kind of cover the whole spectrum.
There are so many great examples of beers out there, so we’re not trying to reinvent the wheel or anything, but we are trying to bring our own innovation into more classic styles and give them our own spin.
Other than that, the main thing is just committing to quality without compromise under any circumstance, and always putting our customers first in that regard. In Colorado especially, and in northern Colorado in particular, there are so many great breweries, so we know customers have a lot of choice.
Photo courtesy of Photo via WeldWerks Brewing
Go big or go home
We've probably brewed around 40 different beers. I think our barrel-aged beers have been the most ambitious. We have done a massive, 14% or 15% imperial stout we aged in bourbon barrels for up to 13 months, and on top of that, we got a little excited with the adjuncts. We used coconut and vanilla for the last release, but we've also done a coffee and coffee-maple.
We took those beers and tasted them from the barrels and decided which special ingredients would complement the barrel character. We added about 12 pounds of toasted coconut to one barrel, which seemed to be about double the ratio we found from most other brewers.
We weren’t afraid to use a lot of adjuncts, even though they’re expensive, because we thought it would complement the base beer. I’d say that’s the most ambitious brewing we’ve done, but Juicy Bits is probably the most unique for our market.
Photo courtesy of Photo via WeldWerks Brewing
Gaining steam
Juicy Bits is kind of a New-England style IPA – which is a style known for being juicy, hazy and citrusy, compared to a traditional IPA. There's a couple other breweries doing them, but not very many. Although, now it seems like the style is definitely picking up steam, so I think there will be a lot more this summer. But when we first released Juicy Bits, I think it was a really different IPA.
We can’t keep Juicy Bits in stock. We sell almost all of it in our taproom, and maybe a couple draft accounts, but we usually can’t keep up with it. We didn’t plan for it to be year-round, but it’s now very solidified its position as a year-round offering.
We've been talking about releasing rotating versions of Juicy Bits, starting this summer with a fruity version.
Photo courtesy of Photo via WeldWerks Brewing
A great place to be
The last four months, we’ve just had a huge spike in demand, so we’ve had a lot harder time keeping beers rotating. We just have some beers like our hefeweizen, vienna lager, Juicy Bits and our other IPA that are selling so quickly that we can’t even really rotate another beer into our tanks.
I never really expected to be in this place when we first started. I was just hoping we’d be able to do well and grow at a reasonable pace. Not only to have this big of a following here in Colorado, but to have any sort of national recognition at all – to make USA TODAY, to win that competition, to make Beer Advocate’s class of 2015, and have a bunch of other national press and media throw accolades our way – has been pretty crazy.
And now to be approached by some other great breweries to be pouring at festivals that have been our bucket lists has been pretty awesome. We’re very fortunate.
*As told to Brad Cohen, and edited for length and clarity.
