Every year, Denver turns into craft beer’s Mecca as brewers and beer enthusiasts from around the country descend on the Mile High City for the Great American Beer Festival, which runs from Thursday to Saturday in the Colorado Convention Center.
The epicenter for the city’s craft beer experience is in the heart of the River North neighborhood, where multiple breweries have created a kind of craft beer Disneyland with a funky, hipster vibe.
More than a dozen breweries have opened in this area north of downtown with some of the state’s largest breweries recently setting up shop. Few people have had a better view of this expansion than Zach Rabun, the owner and mastermind of the quirky Mockery Brewing Company on Delgany Street.
Rabun, 33, opened his brewery just as the River North wave began, a stroke of luck that came after near tragedy.
“I like to tell everyone I knew it all along,” Rabun said.
In 2010, Rabun was working at a brewery in Parker and was riding his motorcycle on Arapahoe Road to meet his wife for lunch when a driver turned left across the road and hit him straight on. Fortunately, Rabun was wearing a helmet, but the crash crushed his left ankle and left him bloody from road rash.
“It ended up being a blessing,” he said.
After surgeries and healing, Rabun took his insurance settlement and enrolled in the prestigious Siebel Institute of Technology in Chicago, the oldest brewing school in the United States. After learning more about brewing, Rabun returned to Colorado and began looking for a place to open a small brewery. He wanted a place where he could experiment, create unusual brews and create a following. It turned out to be exactly the ethic that abounds in RiNo.
Smartly, he attended Denver city planning meetings and began to learn about RiNo’s future plans.
RiNo has become a focal point for development. The area that once housed clusters of marijuana warehouses now has becoming almost Brooklyn-esque in its hipness. It is home to some of the most critically acclaimed restaurants, eccentric galleries and trendy bars.
And, of course, breweries and other adult beverage manufacturers are part of the scheme.
“I think I recently counted 23 liquid libation businesses, and there’s a bunch more coming,” said Tracy Weil, co-founder of the River North Art District. He believes creative brewers are attracted to the arts vibe in the district.
RiNo’s craft beer success story is somewhat different than the industry’s overall narrative. Craft beer growth that was once booming at almost unheard of rates has slowed to more normal patterns. More breweries are closing than in years past. And the Great American Beer Festival itself o longer sells out instantly as it has in past years.
It isn’t to say craft beer production is on the decline. It still is growing at about 5 percent a year, when the overall beer production decreased by 1.2 percent in 2017, according to the Boulder-based Brewers Association.
“It’s fair to say craft isn’t growing at double the rate it was,” said Bart Watson, economist at the Boulder-based Brewers Association. “No industry can grow at that rate forever.”
In 2017, about 1,000 breweries opened across the country and 165 closed — a closing rate of 2.6 percent. However, the year before, 116 breweries closed, which represents a 42 percent increase in closures. A boom cannot happen forever.
A total of 6,266 craft breweries were operating in the United States in 2017 – up from about 2,400 in 2012. And about 400 breweries are operating in Colorado, which has also seen closures lately. In 2017, 30 breweries opened in the state but 15 closed, according to a blog called Colorado Brewery List.
“We’re still doing really good,” said Steve Kurowski, marketing director for the Colorado Brewers Guild. “We’re still having a $3 billion economic impact on our state. The problem is breweries are opening faster than we are making craft beer drinkers.”
Colorado brewers are girding for a different upheaval. In January, grocery stores will be able to sell full-strength beer and wine for the first time since Prohibition. That proposition has many small craft brewers worrying about whether that is going to change the state’s vibrant beer scene. Will smaller breweries be able to get their products on the shelves next to the big companies?
“Holy mackerel! Talk about the biggest change that the state will see since Prohibition,” Kurowski said. “Any brewer who is distributing should be consciously thinking about their strategies.”
And perhaps the best thermometer of the industry’s health is The Great American Beer Festival. The industry’s annual event draws 800 breweries from around the country and sells about 70,000 tickets overall to its four sessions. A week before the festival, tickets were still available for purchase for the Thursday session. In the recent past, all sessions would sell out within the first day.
Reasons abound why the sales aren’t as robust. This year, the Brewers Association expanded the festival by 100,000 square feet, allowing for about 500 more tickets to be sold across the four sessions. It is also well known that beer lovers can hit up many beer-related events happening outside of the festival, which may be drawing crowds away.
“It’s still an awesome event,” said Rabun, who always enters beer into the competition but has yet to win a medal.
Mockery, however, isn’t budging. Rabun bought the building that houses his brewery and taproom in 2014, when there were only a few breweries in the hood. Now, his brewery sits adjacent to a plot of land that will be a new Denver park and near some of the state’s most popular beermakers.
In the past four years, RiNo has welcomed a massive Great Divide Brewing Co. facility; an Odell Brewing Co. tasting room; Coors-operated Blue Moon brewpub; Oregon-based 10 Barrel brewpub; Utah-based Epic Brewing; and a New Belgium Brewing facility that is part of the new upscale Source Hotel.
These joined breweries already in operation, including Black Shirt Brewing, Ratio Brewing and Our Mutual Friend.
Rabun’s Mockery specializes in unusual, small-batch creations. He’s not pouring at GABF this year and doesn’t package or distribute his beer, except for a few kegs he supplies to bars and special bottle releases. He figures he has made about 120 different types of beers since he’s been open. His sales are mostly from behind the counter.
He’s not worried about the coming grocery store upheaval.
“We really are not driven by profits,” he said. “For the most part, we are a very, locally driven brewery. We use nontraditional ingredients and processes to make unique beers. We don’t have any flagship beers.”
For example, recently on tap was a dandelion farmhouse ale and passionfruit and pink guava gose. For GABF week, he will have a big, boozy French toast stout collaboration with Baere Brewing Co. that has been aged in both bourbon and whiskey barrels and a bottle release of a golden sour with plums, vanilla and cassia bark.
Not long after opening, Denver’s flagship brewery, Great Divide Brewing Co., announced it would open a massive new production facility and taproom a stone’s throw from Mockery. In most businesses, that would be a death knell because of the competition, but not in the collaborative world of craft brewing.
“That was a windfall,” Rabun said. “We’ve heard people say, ‘Oh, that sucks that a brand name is coming in.’ But we are really tight with them and have a great working relationship.”
The city plans to build a park behind Mockery and more breweries are expected to open nearby. As the craft beer scene adjusts to more typical growth, everything remains crazy in RiNo. And Rabun, who followed his dreams after nearly dying on the road, wouldn’t have it any other way.
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