- Local
- Community
- Journalism
Support the independent voice of Denver and help keep the future of Westword free.
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.
Keep Westword Free... Since we started Westword, it has been defined as the free, independent voice of Denver, and we would like to keep it that way. Offering our readers free access to incisive coverage of local news, food and culture. Producing stories on everything from political scandals to the hottest new bands, with gutsy reporting, stylish writing, and staffers who've won everything from the Society of Professional Journalists' Sigma Delta Chi feature-writing award to the Casey Medal for Meritorious Journalism. But with local journalism's existence under siege and advertising revenue setbacks having a larger impact, it is important now more than ever for us to rally support behind funding our local journalism. You can help by participating in our "I Support" membership program, allowing us to keep covering Denver with no paywalls.