End of an Era: Original Rock Bottom Brewery on 16th Street closed

Eight months after the official reopening and renaming of the 16th Street pedestrian shopping and entertainment hub, one of the last remaining vestiges of its previous iteration has disappeared …. along with the “Mall” from its former title. 

The original Rock Bottom Brewery, once the anchor of the strip at the intersection of 16th and Curtis streets has been permanently closed, unceremoniously dispatched with nothing more than an 8.5-by-11-inch printout taped to the front doors. 

“Unfortunately, we have permanently closed. Thank you for allowing us to serve the Downtown Denver community.”

That’s it. The sole official epitaph for the first and flagship location of Rock Bottom Brewery, which has stood on the spot since 1991, is the equivalent of a breakup text. 

That the current owners couldn’t even muster more words to mark the restaurant’s closure as the years it had in business is probably not what the Downtown Denver Partnership had in mind when it called 16th Street a place to “honor our stories and traditions … and embrace homegrown businesses.”

To be fair, few are likely to miss the restaurant. It wasn’t in danger of making any Top 10 lists other than that of biggest disappointments. What was once a homegrown brewery and bar quickly turned into a corporate chain, along with corporate-chain food, beer and service. 

But after 35 years, it does deserve more of a retrospective.

When Boulder restauranteur Frank Day founded the Rock Bottom Brewery in 1991, it was one of the first microbreweries in the city, after Wynkoop Brewing. Day was an early pioneer of Colorado craft brewing, having also opened the old Walnut Brewery in Boulder. His wife, Gina, once owned the Boulder Beer Company.

The brewery was located in a building that sat at the base of what was once called the Prudential Building (now Independence Plaza). As the insurance company’s logo is the Rock of Gibraltar, Day named the restaurant Rock Bottom in tribute.  

But Day, who died last August, was also a businessman, and had business intentions with his properties. Along with Rock Bottom Brewery, he also established the Denver Chop House, and the Old Chicago chain.

An aggressive expansion strategy in the 90s soon took the “micro” out of microbrewery for Rock Bottom Brewery. Day consolidated his restaurant brands into Rock Bottom Restaurants Inc., and in 1994 issued an initial public offering, becoming the first publicly traded restaurant-brewery in the country. 

Its so-called “brew-and-chew” model expanded across the country, at one point reaching with over 30 Rock Bottom Brewery locations nationwide. In 2010, Rock Bottom merged with the Gordon Biersch Brewing company to form Craftworks. Initially based in Broomfield, the company relocated its headquarters to Nashville in 2019. 

By 2020, things didn’t look so great. The Craftworks group went into Chapter 11 bankruptcy and temporarily closed 260 restaurants and breweries nationwide, including a Rock Bottom location in Westminster. The company was acquired by SPB Hospitality a few months later, which reopened many of the locations (but not the Westminster spot). 

That ownership proved short-lived. In 2024, SPB Hospitality sold the Rock Bottom Brewery restaurants and other brands to Kelly Companies, the California-based owner of such brands as Fox & Hound Bar + Grill, Craft Republic Bar & Grill, and others. 

Throughout the SPB Hospitality and Kelly Companies eras, the various owners gradually closed multiple Rock Bottom locations across the country until only six remained, with each closure getting closer and closer to home. Before today’s news, the last closure was the sudden and unexpected shuttering of a location in Colorado Springs this past April, noted with a strangely familiar sign on that door as well. 

“Unfortunately, we have permanently closed. Thank you for allowing us to serve the Colorado Springs Community.”

And now, that number is down to five. The other Denver-area Rock Bottom locations remain open at this time, including those in Highlands Ranch, Centennial and Loveland.

We’ve reached out to both the management of the Denver location and the corporate ownership at Kelly Companies for more information.

But if 16 words is all the parent company can spare to mark the passing of a 35-year-old business, we’re not overly hopeful about its response. And so to that terse “thank you,” we have a two-word response of our own. 

Good riddance.