Brewery closes Colfax location for new Golden facility

Bruz Beers co-owner Ryan Evans has been searching for a location to build a flagship brewery facility for five years. He toured many spaces, including churches, before finding the perfect spot in his hometown of Golden. The only problem? It was too expensive.

But where there’s a will, there’s a way. The Belgian-beer-focused Bruz ultimately came to terms on the one-acre property located at 17575 South Golden Road in November, with construction expected to begin in the next six months and a grand opening tentatively scheduled for mid 2028.

That means Bruz will close its longtime Off Fax home at 1495 York St., with a final hurrah on Sept. 24. Evans says that it’s bittersweet that they’re closing Off Fax but that it’s necessary in order to develop the Golden location.

“We need to focus on Golden, we need to put the bandwidth there, to make it our permanent home that we own,” he says.

Off Fax isn’t doing poorly by any stretch, he adds. Business has been stable. And when the landlord approached about a nominal price increase, Evans wasn’t worried at all.

“A new entity bought the building, they’ve done great things with it, the price wasn’t a hurdle,” he says. The space wasn’t even able to qualify for the construction grants that Denver is offering for businesses impacted by the Bust Rapid Transit (BRT) construction along the street. “You had to show three months of a 20% loss in business,” says Evans. “We couldn’t show that.”

The same can’t be said for many of Denver’s other recent brewery closings.

“A lot of breweries that are closing are landlord-negotiation closures,” says Evans, pointing to breweries like Copper Kettle — where the brewery was willing to pay the 40% rent increase that the landlord wanted, but only under a reduced footprint (the landlord balked, and Copper Kettle closed earlier this summer). “We lost a 15-year-old brewery because of a lease negotiation.”

While Bruz doesn’t own its larger space at 1675 W 67th Ave., it does have a locked-in, 10-year lease at the location with options to extend. But Evans wanted a location that could handle the brewery’s production equipment, hence the Golden move.

The new Golden location will house all of Bruz current brewing equipment, and become a better fit for its canning line. The current brewhouse area will likely become an event space and overflow seating for the brewery during its busiest times.

“This space isn’t designed for canning,” he says of the north Denver facility.

Evans, like many local brewery owners, never expected to can his own beer. He prefers to deal with customers over the counter, where you can get to know what clients do and don’t like, and the margins are also better. COVID changed all of that.

“Within two weeks, we were canning our first beer,” he recalls.

The deal for the Golden location almost didn’t happen. Evans couldn’t see the space making sense at its listed price, but he kept an eye on it. Modern commercial real estate deals are often about maximizing every dollar. It’s rare for a deal to focus on community. But that’s exactly what happened in this case as both the buyer and the seller call Golden home.

“Eventually the price dropped, but only by a little,” he says. That was enough for him to reach out to the longtime owners and find out more, inviting them to visit Bruz Midtown to show them what it was all about. Evans said that the meeting went so well, that they sent home “the suits” — the real estate attorneys who attended the meeting — and started hammering out the details on how to make the transaction work for both sides.

“The owners connected with our concept right away,” says Evans. “They saw it as a value to the town that they’ve been in for multiple generations,” he says.

A big part of what makes Bruz special to Evans is that he connects the space to the local community. When Bruz opened up its second location just before COVID–Off Fax, it had community in mind.

“We were just babies in a place that had multi-generational, family-run bars,” notes Evans. But the brewery’s taproom fit right in on Colfax–an area that missed the Belgian beers at the shuttered Cheeky Monk. “People would come in and say, ‘ Oh my gosh, thankfully Belgian beer is back on Colfax,’” says Evans.

The new Golden space is being designed by Golden’s Ewers Architecture. It will have sweeping views of the front range mountains to the west, as well as the Table Mountains to the north. A large outdoor garden is being planned, one that rivals Bruz Midtown’s vast community space–used to host large events and festivals. Details that Evans says he’s taken from guiding customers on beer tours in Belgium will also be incorporated.

“We’re looking at things like e-bike charging stations,” he says, adding that an important part of the Golden location is the ability for users to safely secure their bicycles in a place that they can see while enjoying the space.

Continuing with the community-theme, there will be a coffee and food partner going into the Golden space–the details aren’t yet ready to be announced. Evans says that this will include a drive-thru–one that will work for coffee and food in the morning and early afternoon, and then for beer in the evening and night, with food trucks handling the evening food.

“Imagine, it’s 4 p.m. on a Friday, and you’re on your way home, you just drive through and say throw me a four-pack of Tripel, and off you go,” says Evans.