River North Brewery’s Birthday Kicks Off a Big Year for the One Decade Club

It takes “a special kind of stubbornness” to stay in business for ten years, says Matt Hess. Especially for a small brewery in a competitive market, and in a city that seems to grow and change every day. But that’s "the nature of entrepreneurship," Hess adds. “Challenges come and go.”

This weekend, River North Brewery, which Hess founded in February 2012 with his wife, Jessica, will celebrate the past decade with a party and a huge anniversary beer that is worthy of the milestone.

But the celebration will also kick off a year’s worth of ten-year anniversaries for a group of tenacious small breweries that helped lead the modern wave of craft beer taprooms in Denver and have since become synonymous — both locally and afar — with this city’s vibrant craft beer scene.

That list includes TRVE Brewing, Hogshead Brewery, Our Mutual Friend Brewing, Black Shirt Brewing and Prost Brewing. In addition, Vine Street Pub opened in 2012 (though it has been shuttered for the past twenty months because of the pandemic), as did Crooked Stave's original barrel cellar and taproom (the brewery itself was founded the previous year in Fort Collins).
These breweries were part of a group of 33 taprooms that opened in Colorado that year, according to the Colorado Beer Geek, a social media personality who tenaciously tracks Colorado brewery openings and closings in partnership with the Colorado Brewery List. Of those, 25 are still in business.

That's a pretty good rate compared to the national average for small businesses, which shows that only about one third of them survive for at least ten years. It's also new territory for craft breweries. Although the industry has been around since the late 1970s, only about 15 percent of the 9,100 existing breweries have a decade or more under their belts, says Bart Watson of the Brewers Association.

Some of these breweries have gone through significant changes over that time — including new owners, expansions, added kitchens or changed lineups — but they're still kicking.

River North is among those that made some changes. “Many people still remember that we started as a Belgian-style-only brewery,” Hess says. “These days we brew far more IPAs and stouts than Belgian-style beers, but we still regularly pour some of my original recipes, like the J. Marie Saison.”

Those people will also remember that River North began its life in a small taproom space at 2401 Blake Street, in the front part of what had once been Flying Dog Brewing. At the time, that corner was on the edge of LoDo's busy commercial district, but in just a few years, development pressure would become so great that River North would be forced out of the building when it was torn down to make way for a multi-story luxury apartment building — something that could have destroyed the company. Hess still has a few of the original bricks from that building that he rescued on demolition day as keepsakes.

But the Hesses adjusted, expanding and moving into a 10,000-square-foot production space at 6021 Washington Street with hopes of re-entering RiNo in the future. They also overhauled their beer lineup and began canning as New England-style IPAs became the most popular style of the times. In addition, River North boasts one of the most accomplished and well-developed barrel-aging programs in the state.

In 2017, the brewery secured a new location, at 3400 Blake Street, exactly ten blocks from its original location. Numerous planning, permitting and pre-construction delays held things up until finally, in July 2019, River North reopened in its namesake neighborhood, which is now one of the most densely populated in the city when it comes to breweries and other beverage makers.

Then came the pandemic. But Hess says the business is recovering. "The last decade has been pretty wild.... It's amazing how fast it goes by. I'm sure the next ten will be just as exciting." One of the keys to surviving all of that time: "We keep it fun," he adds.

In that vein, River North has cooked up two special beers for its party.

The first is Anniversary 10 Stout, a special project beer that was aged twice in bourbon barrels before being aged a third time in Colorado whiskey barrels. The ambitious, boundary-pushing beer came in at 22 percent ABV, making it one of the highest-alcohol beers ever produced in this state.

The second is Party Excuse, a 4.5 percent ABV dry-hopped lager that River North made in collaboration with "as many of our local brewer friends as we could think of," Hess says. And by "collaboration," what he means is that they just got together and partied while the beer was being made. Thus the name.

"Running a brewery is a particularly fun business," Hess says, adding that it's "the friends we made along the way that we're always happy to grab a pint with whenever we see them" that make it that way.

River North Brewery celebrates its anniversary on Saturday, February 19, by tapping Birthday Cake Stout at 1 p.m. at both taprooms. There will be food trucks at both locations and a free brewery loop running between them from 1 to 5 p.m. Additional tappings will take place throughout the day. River North will also be selling custom hats and special merchandise, including T-shirts and glassware.