How did the highest state come to be the nation’s top producer of beer? Coors Brewing Company led the way, Budweiser cranked its giant Fort Collins plant, and, as of 2008, more than 116 brew pubs and micro-breweries are doing their part.
Beer making – and drinking – has long characterized Coloradans characteristic. Before Denver turned one, Z. Salomon and Charles Tascher opened the Rocky Mountain Brewery in November, 1859, on the northwest bank of the Platte at Seventh Street.
By 1871, the Rocky Mountain Brewery had become the Zang Brewing Company, headed by Philip Zang. Zang’s became the largest brewery between St. Louis and San Francisco by the 1880s and remained on top until evaporating with Prohibition. Carrie Nation and other grumpy spoilsports imposed statewide prohibition on Colorado as of January 1, 1916, three years ahead of the nationwide dry spell.
Ultimately none of the Colorado Brewers would do as well as Adolph Coors, who survived prohibition by making near beer, malted milk and porcelain. After Coors discovered promising spring water along Clear Creek in 1873, he and partner Jacob Schueler opened a brewery in the foothills village of Golden.
Coors moved beyond the traditional German hand and horse power to install a steam engine that pumped water to the mash tub and on to the beer kettle. He installed a pond and dug an ice house into South Table Mountain. Then he installed a beer garden at his brewery which Golden’s Transcript on February 18, 1874, called “one of the largest in the West and is owned by men who thoroughly understand their business and have sufficient means to put their establishment on a successful basis.”
John Good’s Tivoli Union Brewery consolidated with Max Melsheimer’s Milwaukee Brewery, whose tower became the dominant landmark of the still-standing Tivoli complex on what is now the Auraria Higher Education Center Complex in the heart of Denver. After the South Platte River flood of 1965 swept nine feet of water into the Tivoli, its beer never tasted the same. It closed in 1969, leaving Coors as the only brewery in Colorado – until the brew pub and microbrewery revolution began in 1988.
The prime mover in Colorado was an out-of-work oil man, John Hickenlooper. With three partners, he opened the Wynkoop Brewing Company in 1988 after the legislature overturned a law forbidding breweries to sell their products on premises. The Wynkoop became an instant – and ongoing – success.
By 1997, when it served 5,008 barrels of beer over the counter, the Lower Downtown Denver (LoDo) watering hole claimed to be nation’s largest brewpub. Other such pubs soon sprouted up. By 1998, Colorado has 78 brewpubs, by 2008 it had 118, second only to California’s 333. Entrepreneurs and beer buffs dove in after doing the math: brewpubs typically sell a pint for ten times what it costs to produce.
Back in the 1970s, one super star – Coors – reigned as Colorado’s only brewery. Brewing, like other industries, had become a virtual monopoly with the little guys driven out of business. A strange thing happened during the 1990s: history began to go backwards with the reappearance of independently-owned local breweries. Colorado returned to the pre-prohibition scenario of many towns boasting their own suds maker and cities harboring multiple breweries.
Cheers!
Beer, and other libations will be served at a Night in Old Union Station, Wednesday, Nov. 11, 7-9 p.m. Get your ticket for the fund raiser to restore the Welcome Arch at . Contact Tom Noel at . EDITOR’S NOTE: This is an online-only column and has not been edited.
