Colorado company brews 30 years of history

by Alicia Wallace
AP

Article Last Updated; Sunday, September 27, 2009 1:36AM

Photo by Cliff Grassmick/The Daily Camera

Mike Memsic pours in hops as he makes beer at Boulder Beer in Boulder on Sept. 2.

Its first beers, an unfiltered porter, bitter and stout, were born in a goat shed.

Its public offering raised nearly $2 million, but profits were hard to come by.

It saw the explosion and flattening and eventual growth of microbreweries.

It was reborn, rebranded and reorganized.

After humble beginnings and plenty of heady times, Boulder Beer Co. - Colorado's first microbrewery and the oldest surviving craft brewery since prohibition in the United States - turned 30 on Friday, the second day of the Great American Beer Festival.

"We knew that the beer in the U.S. was pretty boring," co-founder Randolph "Stick" Ware said. "I was confident that people were gonna like this product."

Boulder Beer now has eight beers available year-round, six seasonal beers and distribution that reaches 33 states.

Ware was 17 years old and a student at South Pasadena High School in California when he got his first taste of home-brewed beer.

A friend's uncle provided the lesson, and they used ingredients such as Blue Ribbon Malt and bread yeast to make a beer that "wasn't that good." But being high school kids, they weren't picky, said Ware, 65.

Twenty years later, as a postdoctoral scientist at the University of Colorado, Ware's hobby flourished when he bonded over home-brewing with colleague David Hummer, the chairman of the Joint Institute for Laboratory Astrophysics.

Hummer turned Ware onto malted barley, and they started making small batches, giving jars to colleagues, family and friends.

When the other professors started clamoring for more of the unfiltered brew, Ware quipped that the duo might be onto something.

"I said, 'Hey, we ought to start a brewery,'" he said.

Trying to make good on the statement, Ware and Hummer waded through a 2-foot-tall stack of paperwork from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms. Soon enough, on Sept. 25, 1979, the two, along with Al Nelson, got the 43rd brewing license in the United States.

They set up operations in a goat shed on a ranch near Hygiene, and by the Fourth of July, the crew known as the Boulder Brewing Co. sold their live yeast beers to the Gold Hill Inn.

They got help early on from Charlie Papazian - founder of the Association of Brewers, American Homebrewers Association and the Great American Beer Festival - and Jeff Coors, of the iconic Golden brewery. Ware and Hummer bonded with the other microbrewery startups such as Sierra Nevada Co. and Samuel Adams.

They "made every mistake in the book" during the early days, but they weren't ever deterred, said Ware, who sold his stake in the business in 1989.

"We were trying to make beer, we weren't thinking about business or profits," he said. "We just wanted to make beer."

The unique brew from Boulder caught on, and expansion was imminent. A couple of years into the gig, Boulder Beer moved from the farmstead to a custom-built, castle-like brewery on grassland near 30th Street and Valmont Road.

The firm went public to help its expansion and operating costs. It increased its capacity to try to meet demand, but its margins suffered in the process.

By 1990, the brewery had five different owners in a six-year span, got to the point where it was $2 million in debt and went bankrupt.

New investors emerged to save the brewery. They renamed it Boulder Beer Co., added a restaurant to the Wilderness Place plant and focused their efforts on the beer.

The brewery's owners added a different moniker for a fresh start in 1993, renaming the business Rockies Brewing Co.

New brewmaster David Zuckerman was credited with helping the brewery's Rockies beer become the best-selling beer at the Rockbottom Brewery in Denver.

The fresh start and focus seemed to help. During the mid-'90s, Rockies was among the 500 fastest-growing companies on Inc. Magazine's annual list, which ranks firms' five-year revenue growth. In the early 2000s, Rockies stepped out of the box a little and evolved with the industry with the release of the more aggressive-flavored "Looking Glass" beer series, which includes the mainstay Hazed & Infused.

Rockies also kept its more traditional English-style ales and, of course, its Planet Porter - the only surviving recipe from the early days.

"We want to stay current, but we don't want to forget about where we came from," said Tess McFadden, marketing director for Boulder Beer.

Now 30 years old, Boulder Beer continues on the path of keeping tradition alive and throwing in some tastes of experimentation. However, Boulder Beer is now doing it in a field that is more than 1,500 breweries strong.

During the last few years, the craft-brewing sector - which is defined by the Boulder-based Brewers Association as "small, independent and traditional" - has taken more bites out of the traditional, large-scale U.S. brewers.

But with only a 6.3 percent share of the entire beer category, there's plenty of room for growth, said Zuckerman, brewmaster and now a co-owner of Boulder Beer.

"What's really interesting is most beer drinkers now have grown up with craft beers as being part of the landscape," he said.

Boulder Beer also has benefited from the emergence of 100-plus microbreweries in Colorado, and especially in Boulder County, Zuckerman said, which have helped create a cachet for Boulder and Colorado around the country.

But just because it's an elder in the microbrewery industry doesn't mean that Boulder Beer will be resting on its laurels, Zuckerman said.

While keeping the competition friendly with its craft beer compatriots - especially the dozens of microbreweries in Boulder County - Boulder Beer will continue to evolve with the industry and consumers' palates, he said.

"The sky's the limit on creativity," he said.