While some of Colorado’s biggest craft brewers have been making moves lately, a few of the state’s smallest beer makers are also growing and changing in order to compete.
The two latest, Cellar West Artisan Ales and MainStage, are both in Boulder County.
Lafayette’s Cellar West, fresh off its latest medal at the World Beer Cup, plans to open a second taproom and cafe in August in a converted 100-year-old home in downtown Erie.
“Itap a super cool space, not huge but lots of character. … It has a back patio, really great shaded beer garden, as well as a secondary cottage building that we will use for additional seating and private event rental,” said Zach Nichols, who founded Cellar West in 2016.
Located at 445 Briggs St., just off of Main Street, the Erie location won’t include any brewing equipment, but it will have a kitchen, where the Cosmic Coyote food truck will set up shop.
“We hadn’t really been hunting for a second tap room. If anything, we’ve spent the last year or two looking for a nearby location to expand brewing operations, as we are physically maxed out. It really kinda fell into our lap, and itap such a cool space we just couldn’t pass it up,” he added.
Nichols said Erie deserves to have a bigger craft beer scene and that Cellar West plans to focus more on nearby communities rather than on distributing its beer far and wide. The brewery, 778-B W. Baseline Road, specializes in small-batch saisons, lagers and IPAs.
“It’s sort of a breath of fresh air to find some white space to settle into in a, frankly, pretty saturated Front Range beer market,” he added.
In the meantime, MainStage Brewing, which opened in Lyons in 2021, announced in April that it is taking over Beyond the Mountain Brewing’s property in the Gunbarrel area of Boulder.
MainStage has been brewing its beer at Beyond the Mountain for the past few years anyway, so the move makes sense. “We plan to keep the amazing beer, community and music alive in Gunbarrel by formally adopting their space as our primary brewing facility and second tasting room,” MainStage owners Eric Kean and Sam Scruby wrote on their social media pages.
Seven-year-old Beyond the Mountain, at 6035 Longbow Dr., closed on April 27, and MainStage reopened the door under its own name on May 2.
