Denver brewery to open fourth taproom in Parker

Cerebral Brewing is not afraid to expand. With a wide footprint across metro Denver that includes taprooms in West Highland, Congress Park and Aurora, it plans to add a fourth location in downtown Parker.

“When I walked on downtown Parker’s Main Street, I said, ‘This is awesome!’” recalls Sean Buchan, co-founder and CEO of Cerebral Brewing.

And that’s all it took. Sometime next summer, Cerebral Brewing will open in a 4,200-square-foot space at 20117 East Main Street. Buchan estimates it will have “about the same” number of taps as West Highland’s 22, as well as an expansive patio of about 2,000 square feet.

He points to the walkability of downtown Parker and the neighborhood aesthetic, as well as the support from the city, as giving momentum to the decision to sign a 10-year lease for the space.

“They wanted to work with us and they’ve been great partners,” he says of Parker, a city that has focused heavily on developing its core in recent years.

The move follows the success of Cerebral’s West Highland location, which opened in 2025. That expansion earned the brewery our Best Brewery Expansion honors in the 2026 Best of Denver.

“I wouldn’t say that Denver is tapped out, but we’re not looking to cannibalize from our other taprooms,” says Buchan, adding that his team started to look at suburban locations before being led to the downtown Parker location.

Cerebral is working with UNUM: Collaborative for the architecture and NOVUM Construction on the buildout. Both firms are Denver-based and worked on Cerebral’s West Highland location.

Cerebral continues a strategy of opening taprooms and focusing on in-state and over-the-counter beer sales, where it’s easier to provide consistently fresh beer at a better margin. About 60% of its sales come from its taprooms, while 40% come from distribution. It self-distributes locally, while using Crooked Stave Artisans for handling more distant accounts in Colorado.

“Our model is basically using our Aurora Arts location as our main hub,” says Buchan, referencing the production space that opened a taproom in 2024. Cerebral owns that space and produces at least 90% of its beer there, he notes, with the OG Congress Park location focusing more on R&D batches and smaller-scale draft lagers.

Surprisingly for a brewery that sells so many IPAs, the largest seller across all three taprooms is Neon Lite, a light lager that sells for just $5 per 20-ounce pour.

“It’s just taken off,” says Buchan, noting that West Coast-style IPAs have seen growth at the taproom as well. “We’ve really been pushing and working on [that style] for years.”

Of late, Cerebral has focused more on opening its own locations than buying existing locations or brands. Buchan says that Cerebral is open to any and all opportunities, but building and promoting someone else’s brand isn’t necessarily at the forefront of his mind. For existing locations, Cerebral already has production space it is happy with, so all of the extra equipment that comes with existing brewery spaces isn’t something the company would benefit from.

“We’ve been able to use the past five years to essentially grow to a point where we felt stable because we own the building in Aurora, and we’ve seen friends and colleagues get pressured out by landlord issues,” he says.

For its leased locations, Buchan focuses on maintaining good relationships with landlords and long-term leases to help protect it from the sudden rent increases that have pushed other breweries out of business.

“We’re not trying to grow too aggressively, we’re not trying to force anything,” says Buchan. Cerebral grew in 2025 to 5,200 barrels of beer produced, up from 4,800 in 2024. It is on pace for about 5,700 in 2026. That number should continue to grow with the Parker location opening in mid-2027.

Buchan hasn’t decided yet whether Cerebral will partner with an outside company for food in the new location, or handle it in-house; the company is currently reviewing ideas in the food space. While not a necessity, he says food is a valuable component for today’s drinkers.

“I see food as kind of the future of where things are going,” he adds. “Talking to our friends out of state who have food, you really get the benefit of people viewing you both as a world-class brewery and an amazing food option, and I think people are merging their viewpoints on breweries and restaurants – it’s the same pool of money that they have for going out.”

Cerebral benefited from partnering with Outside Pizza at its West Highland location, where Buchan feels people tend to stay a bit longer and order an extra beer or two because of the exceptional food on-site.

In the increasingly competitive and challenging market of craft beer, what does Buchan see in the future?

“I think people are going to continue to innovate within IPA and lager, and we’re going to see new and exciting things pop up,” he says, pointing to a recent collaboration with Aurora’s Milieu Fermentations called Dope Trait, a trendier IPA substyle called “hop saturated ale,” as an example of innovation.

Buchan also thinks there will be more mergers and acquisitions, especially in Colorado’s crowded market.

“I think we’ll continue to see closures, but I’m also hopeful that we’ll see openings,” he says. “Any of these breweries that are closing are going to create an opportunity for someone else to have a new and fresh vision for that location.”

As for the possibility of a fifth location, Cerebral is definitely in a “let’s figure out Parker” mode, he says. “But we said the same thing when we opened West Highland. Then you get into a rhythm, and we have a really great team that does an excellent job in executing these concepts, and I just don’t know what the future holds.”