Saddle Up and Head Downtown, Denver Has a New Honky Tonk

On Saturday afternoon, Broken Bow Western Bar and Dance Hall was filling up fast.

Groups of mostly young people chatted along the long wooden bar, clutching bottles of Lone Star and Coors Light. A few people were on the red-and-white checkered floor near the entrance, where two pool tables sat beneath neon beer signs illuminating wood-paneled walls adorned with Western memorabilia.

At the far end of the room, a stage and dance floor awaited beneath a massive American flag. Outside, the sound of people conversing at tables and in wooden chairs, as well as the smell of burgers from Dalton’s Cheeseburgers, wafted through the air.

Everyone was there to check out the new bar and dance hall at 2201 Lawrence Street during its preview weekend, which gave Denver its first look inside the physical home of Broken Bow, the Western lifestyle brand founded by 19-year-old Colton Patterson in the former home of Mile High Spirits. Patterson may not be able to drink legally yet, but he has managed to turn a social media page celebrating Americana into a brand with over a million followers, as well as a bar where that culture can be lived offline.

“This started in the most organic way possible,” Patterson says. “I was sixteen years old, and it was just something fun I did. I was posting old music that I loved and old grandpa movie clips on this social media account, and it took off.”

At the time, Patterson was a student at Columbine High School. The page was intended to be a private digital scrapbook of vintage country songs, old Western photographs and cultural artifacts that he felt connected to but rarely saw celebrated among his peers.

“I posted stuff and it blew up without me thinking it would at all,” he says. “It kind of just snowballed from there.”

Soon Patterson began posting his own artwork inspired by the same imagery. When followers asked to buy his designs, the hobby started turning into a brand. The project grew quickly enough that Patterson faced a difficult decision about what to do after high-school graduation: He’d been admitted to the University of Michigan’s Ross School of Business.

“I was very lucky to get into Michigan Ross,” he says. “But it became apparent it wasn’t really what I wanted to do. I took a gap year and then just dropped out of that opportunity because I love what I do now a whole lot more.”

The company’s aesthetic, which includes dusty photographs, vintage Western graphics and references to classic country music, is highly personal. Patterson says much of it traces back to one person: his grandfather.

“It’s all copied from my grandpa, pretty much bar for bar,” he says. “Everything is based off the values that he lived with, the music he listened to and the lifestyle he embodied.”

His grandfather grew up in Colorado before moving the family to Missouri to start a farm, despite having no background in agriculture.

“He bought an almanac on how to start a farm for beginners,” Patterson says. “His father didn’t do it; his grandfather didn’t do it. He just decided he wanted to do it and kick-started a whole generation of our family into that lifestyle, which is very impressive to me.”

For Patterson, those stories represent a kind of cultural grounding that many younger people feel slipping away.

“Things are very scary being a young person, especially now, with the way the world is,” he says. “You see traditions fall apart, so it’s always been about remembering a very old grandpa lifestyle that I saw growing up and having something that you know is true and that you can rely on. That’s probably the most fundamental tenet of Broken Bow.”

That ethos lived online for a couple of years through Broken Bow’s imagery, apparel and storytelling before Patterson got the idea of opening a physical venue.

Patterson’s stepfather, Brandon Jundt, is an HB Hospitality executive and helped bring together the team behind the project. The venue itself operates as a collaboration between Broken Bow’s cultural brand and the hospitality group’s operational experience.

“We didn’t have any idea of, ‘Oh, we want to open a brick-and-mortar or we want to open a honky tonk,’ but we just knew we needed a location for this,” Patterson says. “My stepdad works in restaurants, and they were doing things with Western bars or thinking about that concept, and we just realized it would be perfect to use Broken Bow as inspiration for the venue and promote it to our core audience.”

That opportunity arrived when the former Mile High Spirits distillery space became available. The building is in Denver’s bustling Ballpark neighborhood, directly across from the Denver Rescue Mission’s Lawrence Street shelter.

“It’s not rural at all,” Patterson admits. “That’s the big elephant in the room. It’s not on the Front Range of Colorado, but it looked perfect to us because the brand is all about lived-in places that have a deep history to them, which this space does.”

The exterior remains largely unchanged from its previous life as a distillery — the Mile High Spirits logo is still visible on the side of the building — but above the entrance now hangs Broken Bow’s emblem: a skeleton wearing a cowboy hat with a piece of straw in its mouth.

Inside, the transformation is striking. The cavernous room has been redesigned to resemble a classic Western dance hall, with wood paneling, vintage décor and artifacts sourced from antique shops, family collections and online auctions.

“Broken Bow online is kind of a mood board of old photographs, songs and artifacts,” Patterson says. “When we started building this place, it was like, ‘Okay, now we actually go find those things.’ The space has been renovated to look much more like the bar styling, wood paneling and linoleum that you’d find in the older pool rooms in Western dance halls that used to litter the United States.”

Music remains the centerpiece of the concept. Patterson intends to showcase both established and emerging artists, with a focus on those associated with Red Dirt country, a Texas and Oklahoma-based genre.

“We want artists that people know, but also artists that maybe aren’t household names yet,” he says. “When you have an audience like ours online, you feel a responsibility to help get good music in front of people.”

Programming will include songwriter rounds, acoustic performances and full-band shows. The goal is to create a venue that sticks closely to traditional country sounds rather than chasing nightlife trends, Patterson says.

“Denver has great spots like the Grizzly Rose,” he notes. “But what we see a drought of here is something that feels very traditional Western. We really will not deviate into playing the more EDM, loud styles. This was founded as a Country/Western space and we want it to be a down-the-middle, what-you-see-is-what-you-get place. Something that feels like a dance hall you’d walk into thirty or forty years ago, instead of kind of a new scene that comes and goes with trends.”

Even as Broken Bow grows, Patterson insists he has no interest in turning the concept into a chain.

“I don’t know that we would expand this concept into other cities. I’m a big believer that things tend to get diluted once they spread out a ton,” he says. “So at the moment, we just want to keep it very local and try to make it a destination for country music.”

The preview weekend served partly as a test run, but Broken Bow Western is now officially open. The venue plans to settle into regular hours and live music programming in the coming weeks, though exact schedules are still being finalized.

Patterson is looking forward to welcoming those who have followed Broken Bow since its inception. At the same time, he’s eager to meet newcomers who walk in knowing nothing about the brand.

“I hope random people stumble into Broken Bow and get a sense of a traditional Western lifestyle they were previously unaware of,” he says. “Having the physical space just legitimizes everything and gets more people involved.”

Broken Bow Western Bar and Dance Hall, 2201 Lawrence Street. Check the website for hours and updates brokenbowwestern.com.