Australia is famous for a lot of things: kangaroos, koalas and a wildlife population that seems genuinely intent on making humans look small. But if you ask the folks behind Boulder’s newest hotspot, , there is one glaring omission from the American understanding of Australian culture: hard ginger beer.
Down under, alcoholic ginger beer is as standard a bar offering as a pale ale.
“If you walk into the liquor store in Australia, you’d probably find 50, maybe 60 different types of hard ginger beer in cans to choose from,” said Stewart McGrath, co-founder of TooSteppin.
But back on Christmas Eve in 2023, McGrath and his family discovered a starkly different reality here in Colorado. As his wife prepared for a liquor store run to grab wine for dinner, a visiting relative from Australia piped up with a request: “While you’re there, can you grab me some hard ginger beer?”
“We kind of all looked at each other and said, ‘Sorry, but we can’t. It doesn’t exist here,’” McGrath recalled. Out of the hundreds of beers stocked at a typical Colorado liquor warehouse, they had found exactly zero.
By the time Christmas dinner was over and the wine bottles were empty, one of McGrath’s relatives threw down a gauntlet: You should brew your own. Then, as one apparently does on a holiday afternoon, the family held an impromptu naming workshop. A shared love of country music carried the proceedings, and by the end, a name for the theoretical hard ginger beer company existed: TooSteppin.
The gap in the market quickly evolved from a party conversation into a business plan. McGrath, who grew up in Western Sydney, rounding up sheep on his uncle’s farm and playing in a country band, had moved to Boulder a decade prior for a tech startup. After selling the company in 2023, he found himself at a professional crossroads, wondering where to turn next in his career. The answer materialized through a serendipitous business partnership with his longtime friend, TooSteppin co-founder Patrick Sullivan.
Sullivan’s path to TooSteppin was different but equally beverage-forward. Originally from Northern California, he spent a decade in Napa and Sonoma working for large wine companies before relocating to Boulder in 2015. Sullivan met McGrath through mutual friends, and their families grew up alongside each other over the next decade.
When McGrath started brewing ginger beer in buckets and hauling it to parties, Sullivan was among those offering feedback. Some batches were great. Some, in Sullivan’s diplomatic phrasing, were “terrible.” But a pattern quickly emerged, and they kept watching what happened when a cooler full of TooSteppin sat next to a cooler full of everything else.
“They would put their hand in the cooler, move past all of the other IPAs and all of the other beers and things, and they would grab another ginger beer,” Sullivan said. “We’d just sort of look at each other across the room and smile.”
They spun up a pilot brewery in East Boulder, filed the paperwork, got their licenses, and brewed their first commercial batch. Their first keg went to Sanitas Brewing, which quickly began ordering 10 to 12 kegs a month until the after citing rising costs, shifting habits and a maturing market.
McGrath and Sullivan are introducing a beverage category that remains relatively unfamiliar here at a moment when the traditional craft beer market is getting tougher, not easier. shows U.S. craft beer production fell 5.1% in 2025, with closures outpacing openings for the second straight year.
Ginger beer, though, appears to be moving in the opposite direction. McGrath described hard ginger beer as “the fastest-growing alcoholic drink category in Australia,” and reporting from has likewise characterized the category as one of the country’s fastest-growing alcoholic drinks segments.
On Jan. 29, TooSteppin Saloon opened its doors at 4843 Pearl St., Suite A1, becoming Boulder’s first dedicated hard ginger beer brewery and taproom. Since then, they have been, in Sullivan’s words, “going gangbusters.”
For many American drinkers, ginger beer still carries the faintly unfortunate reputation of being either a mixer or a sick-day soda, something sweet, fizzy and vaguely medicinal that belongs beside a bottle of bourbon or a box of tissues rather than on its own in a pint glass.
But a proper hard ginger beer like TooSteppin is much more sophisticated. While commercial ginger sodas are typically made by combining carbonated water with syrups and ginger extracts, TooSteppin relies on traditional brewing mechanics, the brewers begin by chopping and boiling fresh ginger root to draw out its natural heat, then add in herbs and spices. From there, the liquid is combined with cane sugar, “Colorado snowmelt” (aka water), and yeast for fermentation. As the yeast consumes the sugars to produce alcohol, it naturally reduces the sweetness of the final product.
The result is a brew that is drier, sharper and much more intensely spicy than the nonalcoholic versions most people know. It has an intense gingery kick that is internally warming, but because the sweetness is more restrained, the drink feels clean and crisp.
“We use real fresh ginger when we make our ginger beer,” McGrath said, noting the stark contrast to supermarket sodas made with extracts and carbonated water. It is also — a fact that will matter to a meaningful slice of Boulder’s population, including myself and Sullivan’s son — 100% gluten-free.
“The guys here joke that the only gluten in this brewery is in my sandwiches,” McGrath added.
Apparently, ginger has a lot of friends in the flavor world, and the TooSteppin lineup reflects that range. Eight hard ginger beers are on tap at the saloon at any given time. “The Original” is, well, the original ginger beer, and the one McGrath recommends for first-timers. From there, drinkers can explore flavors like “The Prospector,” a tropical blend of mango and tart passionfruit, or “The Outlaw”, which features a touch of honey and a kick of Peruvian Lemon Drop chile grown specifically for TooSteppin by a local farmer.
“The balance we try to strike is between the punch of the ginger, the sweetness and the carbonation, and then finally the alcohol level,” McGrath said. “If that means you’re drinking one somewhere and in your head it all of a sudden transports you to the back of a boat, or a lake, or someplace by a beach, thatap what we’re going for.”
For the committed beer drinker skeptical of giving up hops, Sullivan has one more argument: hard ginger beer lacks the bloating and fullness associated with traditional beer. While he’s careful to note that TooSteppin makes no medicinal claims, he cheerfully offers that nobody has ever complained about ailments as a result of drinking it.
“We haven’t done any scientific testing, so we can’t say whether the health effects associated with ginger carry through into our hard ginger beer,” he said. “What we can say is that people who drink it don’t complain about feeling bad afterward. Quite the opposite, in fact — they say it feels refreshing.”
“There’s something that comes with the word ‘refreshing’ thatap a really nice way of saying that they’re rejuvenated and they feel good, and thatap what we want them to feel.”
Tucked into an understated East Boulder backdrop of warehouses and auto repair shops, the saloon strips away the pretense of a typical craft beverage bar. Itap warm, loud and unpretentious. Itap a place where you can wander in dusty from a hike or kill time while waiting for your bumper to get replaced. That come-as-you-are energy perfectly matches the ethos McGrath established from the beginning: “Take the product seriously, take the business seriously, but don’t take ourselves too seriously.”
Programming at the saloon has been expanding steadily. Karaoke runs on Wednesdays, trivia is on Fridays and free family bingo fills Saturdays and Sundays. The Sunday Sessions — a weekly live country music afternoon — is a natural expression of McGrath’s own passions, running in partnership with Roots Music Project, TooSteppin’s next-door neighbor.
TooSteppin Saloon is at 4843 Pearl St., Suite A1 in East Boulder, with hours from 3 to 10 p.m. Thursday and Friday, noon to 10 p.m. Saturday, and noon to 8 p.m. Sunday. For anyone not ready to make the trip to the saloon, McGrath said the ginger beer is now poured at about 30 spots around Boulder County, including Rosetta Hall and Rayback Collective, with additional bars, restaurants and stores listed at .
