Lone Tree Brewing opens today

Lone Tree Brewing Company opens today at 4 p.m., bringing Denver's craft beer revolution to the southeastern suburbs. Two years in the making, the brewery is owned by business partners Jason Wiedmaier, a high school teacher and former Dry Dock Brewing employee, and John Winter, a homebrewer who met Wiedmaier at the Brew Hut, a homebrewing store that Dry Dock owns.

The pair will have five beers on tap in their tasting room today -- a pale ale, an IPA, a blonde, a hefeweizen and an oatmeal stout. Another two -- a pilsner and a black IPA -- will debut within a couple of weeks.

"I know from talking to Arvada Beer Company and some of the others that they fly through it, and I didn't want that to happen to us," he says of the several other breweries that have opened in the area in recent months. Lone Tree is the seventh small or neighborhood brewery to open in metro Denver in 2011.

To start the brewery, Wiedmaier and Winter had to convince the City of Lone Tree to change its zoning code to allow for a tasting room. They had planned to open in October but were delayed by what Wiedmaier calls "your normal amount of unforeseen things."

They have a seven-barrel brewing system inside their 5,000-square-foot facility, along with seven seven-barrel fermenting tanks.

"The TVs are ready. The growlers are ready. We've just been waiting on the beer," Wiedmaier says. Now that is ready, too.

• Beer Man