Cellar West Finds New Taproom While Searching for "Forever Home"

As Cellar West owner Zach Nichols explored the future of his brewery, the chance to expand to a second taproom in Erie — one of the fastest-growing towns in the U.S., according to a recent U.S. Census report — became an opportunity he couldn't pass up.

Nichols expects that Cellar West will have to move from its current home in Lafayette in the coming years as his landlord considers selling the property. So he's been looking around, exploring various options for a “forever home” for the brewery, sometimes getting far down the road on different properties. He loves being in Lafayette, but isn’t dead-set on staying there, Nichols says.

“If a great opportunity landed in our lap in Broomfield or Erie or Longmont or something, we would explore it,” he adds. “We hadn't really been looking for a second spot. We were in touch with the town of Erie because they've been making some pitches towards us to potentially take this longterm project and do it in Erie. So we've looked at some opportunities there. Nothing's really jumped out. But one of the downtown developers was like, ‘Hey, you probably can't brew there because it's small and it's an old building, but this cool building just went on the market.’ And then I walked the space and I was like, 'Wow, this is really cool.' It's loaded with personality and character.”

Erie remains largely untapped, he notes, especially when compared to Lafayette’s scene of a half-dozen breweries, a great beer bar, a cidery and a distillery.

“When people want to go out on a Saturday afternoon and get a beer or a drink, there's a lot of options for a relatively small town,” Nichols says. “So it's not lost on us that we're competing from the same pot. We're all just taking turns with the same people because we just don't get a lot of tourism out here. Unfortunately, people don't really come in from Boulder or Denver and hang out in Lafayette.”

He hopes to have the new space in an old house open in August after some remodeling — adding a bathroom, building a bar, and doing some plumbing and utility work. The bar will seat about ten customers with counter space for ordering, and two offset rooms will fit another couple dozen people. There’s also a secondary building, a former garage that will offer additional seating and a private space the brewery can rent out, as well as a patio and an outdoor beer garden that will have picnic tables.

Cosmic Coyote, the food truck that's onsite at Cellar West, will build out a small kitchen space in the Erie location; Nichols is a part owner of that venture, too.

"We're not doing a grease trap or a hood, so they probably won't be doing burgers or anything fried," Nichols says. “I think they're going to lean more into small-play stuff like charcuterie boards, rotating sausages. They're gonna do soups and salads. More like a cafe-style menu.”
This isn’t Cellar West’s first time moving into a new community. The brewery originally opened in 2017 in north Boulder, where it built a reputation for saisons and barrel-aged sours before broadening the taplist and moving to the current location on Baseline Road in Lafayette, just west of Highway 287, in late 2018. Before the move, Nichols had brewed Cellar West's first lager and IPA; the larger space both required that he add more of those brews to the rotation and allowed him to expand the menu.

“I love brewing everything and I like drinking everything,” he says, adding that he hopes the additional sales in Erie will take up much of the remaining slack in the brewery's production capacity.

“We are pretty darn close to being maxed production-wise at our current space,” he says. “I’ve been telling the staff, we will get out of Erie whatever we put into Erie. If we treat it like an afterthought, it'll be slow and people won't care. But if we treat it like an extension of our business and are excited to be there and take good care of the folks there, it could be a great location for us.”

But first, Nichols will focus on getting settled in Erie; he plans to work some bar shifts himself so that he can get to know the locals there. Then he'll return to the big picture and the search for a forever brewery location.

“We'll see how it all shakes out,” he says. “There's some pressure on us to figure something out. So, lots of moving pieces, but I think it's all good things. And we're gonna continue to continue to lean into our local community, really try to
continue to invest in it.”

Cellar West's new taproom will open in August at 445 Briggs Street in Erie; learn more at cellarwest.com.