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Stefani H  0:06  
Welcome to another episode of Creative Distillation. Your hosts Jeff and Brad from the University of Colorado Boulder is Leeds School of Business discuss entrepreneurship research while enjoying fine craft beverages. This special episode of Creative Distillation is recorded in front of a live audience at the . Brad and Jeff moderate a panel of local brewers including Rick Holt, Head Brewer at , Colorado's first solely woman owned and operated brew pub, Casey LeFever Front of House and HR Director at , and Chris Coyne, Co-Founder and Chief of Brewing Operations at . They discuss their inspirations, challenges and successes, and the brewing landscape in Colorado, beer will be served. Enjoy and cheers!

Jeff  1:06  
Welcome to great distillation where we distill entrepreneurship, research and actionable insights. I'm your host, Jeff York, research director at the Deming Center for Entrepreneurship at the Leeds School of Business Boulder, joined by

Brad  1:17  
Hi, Jeff, it's Brad Warner, I am an entrepreneur, I also work with you at the Deming center. And this is a really cool venue that we find ourselves at

Jeff  1:25  
isn't very cool for you. But I want to talk about something else first, Brad. So we were fortunate enough to attend graduation. I guess it was two nights ago. And then somebody won a prize. Yeah. Thanks. Brad was the winner of the best MBA Teaching Award. Let's hear it.

Brad  1:47  
Thanks for embarrassing me, which I actually don't get embarrassed very often. Yeah, no. Totally shocked, by the way. Yeah, um, I have no idea. I have no idea how it's chosen or who paid for that one. But

Jeff  2:02  
Eric Mueller making some late. Tunes over there. No.

Brad  2:07  
So I was shocked.

Jeff  2:09  
Seriously, it's well deserved. Thanks.

Brad  2:11  
I appreciate it. When something like that, with that kind of talents around, was really touching.

Jeff  2:18  
I was really cool. I was excited for Did you know what events? No, I had no idea me. Nor did I know I would lose the one I was nominated for. But you know, the way it goes, board games, d&d, drinking contests, I lose all these things.

Brad  2:34  
But wait, there's one other word though. Was there but you and I picked up?

Jeff  2:37  
Oh my god, we Yeah. So we're co awardees. This you're not Oh, I can't I should have said the award winning creative distillation podcast. We are an award winning podcast to whoever was given to us by the school that pays for it. But still. It's still award winning. You know, we got to take it for what it is. All right. So we are an amazing place today. This is my first visit here. And I'm regretting not getting here sooner because it's really cool. We are at the boulder museum or the Museum of Boulder. I'm still confused. Museum of Boulder. Okay, see, that's how new I am to the experience. I do know I do have our effects sheet. I know why we're here. We are here for the beer here brewing a New West exhibit spending 160 years from 1859 to 2019. It cuts off at 2019. That's just the end of beer in Colorado. No, actually, it wasn't, thank goodness. It's really cool that we were walking around with it with a bunch of our guests. And it's been super neat to go through these guys because they know a lot about what he's talking about. But it's got like five sections that talks about beer on the mining frontier when immigrants planted mining towns during the gold rush. And then there's brewing industry Hello, Colorado became the industrial hub of the Rocky Mountain West. I didn't make it to that part of it. I did, however, learn interesting facts about prohibition and why Colorado went dry for four years before national prohibition. And then of course, there's Coors country. We have our panelists disagree about Coors a little bit, but we won't talk about that. And then the rise of craft when the connection grew between the rising outdoor recreation and brewing industries, which is mainly the reason I live in Colorado and other than working at the University of Colorado Boulder in the fabulous Leeds School Business. So this is going to be a little bit of a different kind of podcast we have no no research to talk about whatsoever.

Brad  4:21  
This is gonna be like our highest rated podcast then.

Jeff  4:24  
No. I mean, people are always fascinated to learn about insights from my academic research.

Brad  4:29  
Here's the thing that I found extremely interesting is walking through a beer exhibits, like the history of Colorado beer with three Colorado brewing experts. Absolutely. A really incredible I know let's

Jeff  4:41  
bring these guys into the conversation you want. You wanna introduce themselves and that way people know their voices. Right? Okay,

Brad  4:47  
sure. The grand spice you just started off we're gonna underline,

Chris Coyne  4:50  
Chris Coyne, one of the founders and chief brewing operations for Cintas Brewing Company here in Boulder.

Jeff  4:55  
All right,

Casey LeFever  4:57  
I'm Casey, I'm the front of house and HR director. For four noses brewing and Broomfield wild provisions beer project, which is a passion project we opened in May of 2020. Yeah, wonderful time to open a brewery in

Jeff  5:10  
2019 when the whole thing ended, right, yeah.

Casey LeFever  5:14  
October 21. We brought all 13 Indoor little birdie fans. Yeah, love out there. And we're hopefully opening our fourth or you know, another four noses location in Denver in the next two months.

Jeff  5:27  
Wow. That's exciting. Very cool. Really cool.

Rick Holt  5:29  
Very cool. Yeah. I'm Rick, hold on with Kokopelli beer company. I am one of the founders as well as the head brewer for Kokopelli beer company. We opened up in 2014. And we're expanding our facility as I talk. So come up and see us. Well,

Brad  5:45  
hey, Rick. And one other thing before we jump in, is let's talk about a co founder slash owner of the brewery, which I think is very interesting as well. So the

Rick Holt  5:53  
owner of the brewery is a female. She is the first woman to solely open operator brewery in the state of Colorado. She's seventh in the nation.

Brad  5:59  
That's freaking awesome.

Jeff  6:01  
Awesome. crowd goes wild after graduation. So the format tonight I think what we ought to do is start by tasting a beer and talking about and then we'll just kind of intersperse that with questions. It's very well planned out and very thoroughly designed for maximum coverage, as every episode of our podcast is. So cool. Sounds good.

Brad  6:20  
It sounds perfect. So I'd love to know what we're drinking, who brought it and maybe the background of what's going on?

Jeff  6:25  
I would like to know that too. I don't know. It's very tasty, though. I think this one is from because

Rick Holt  6:31  
this is me. All right, Billy beard. This is our latest version that was released three months ago. It's called featherlight. We have a lot of people that come into the brewery that ask for a miller or quarters or Yeah. Because we are a full blown restaurant. So we do have people coming in looking for domestic beers. So in the realm of that, I decided to design a light beer. And this beer has three ingredients in it. It runs at about 129 calories. And it's 4.5% Alcohol. So it's a good sessionable beer. And it's been selling. I can't keep it on I'm brewing 10 barrels every three months.

Jeff  7:13  
And it's not even summer yet. People are really mad. Yeah, so good. It's so clean.

Brad  7:19  
Well, first of all, Cheers, guys. It's really fun to have a beer with you. Yeah, so cheers.

Jeff  7:28  
Audience cheers. Man that is super, like clean is the thing I think it is. And because like so I used to be a homebrewer really wasn't very good at I would never have even thought about trying to push something like that. Because it exposes every possible flaw. What are the ingredients?

Rick Holt  7:48  
So it has Pilsner malt? It has chirofoam and it has rice. Rice is what crisps it up and cleans it out.

Jeff  7:54  
Okay, I was gonna say it's got like almost a support like thing is rice.

Brad  7:58  
Tell us about your process. So you have in your head that you want to try or build one of these new beers. So what do you do? Do you just don't open up the brewery and say, Hey, guys, I'm trying something new today. Piloting? Do you go through customer feedback? Do you just have a group of folks within the brewery that that this hasn't worked.

Rick Holt  8:17  
So when I pick up you're like, right now I'm working on a vise book. So I pick a beer, I research it, I go out, and I look at the original design of it. Then I look at what other brewers have done their flaws, their peer advances. And then so my pilot system, I have a two barrel pilot system. But right now it's in stores. So my pilot system is brewing a four barrel bat, which is the minimum I can do on my system. So we'll brew it and but I do a lot of research and everything before we actually put it into production. And then my burgers, I've got two young girls that worked for me, they have a very good palate. And honestly, I don't drink anymore. But um, they go through it. And then I turn it out to the public, which I've got a really good following at the brewery as far as regulars. And a lot of them have good palates. And I get their opinions on it. I've got a young lady that works for me, she's a Cicerone certified server, and she actually goes through all my viewers. We are very careful what we do. And we I don't just throw a beer together. I mean, I have once it's called the Frankenstein beer.

The Frankenstein bear

everything.

Chris Coyne  9:26  
fullbacks at the end of the year, pretty much

Rick Holt  9:28  
anything I could find on the shelf. I mean, we just throw it in there.

Jeff  9:30  
There was a moonshine bar I used to go to in East Tennessee and they had this drink called scraping the barrel. And it was basically they had a trough where they poured everything out that people didn't drink and you could get a drink of it the end of the night. It was got off it was I'm sure your Frankenstein beer was way better in that yeah, this one is really good though. Yeah, so Brian, you're probably a fan of this right? Yeah, you

Brad  9:54  
know we I like like Chris. Yeah, this is just just gets to it. Right. Thank you.

Jeff  9:59  
I said up to me. make you so happy early on and then as the Yeah, but I have no idea

Brad  10:03  
what's in store. So these guys don't know how to like a blogger fan. That's what I really, really like, you know, been through half stages in my life and all that. But for me just a good Chris

Jeff  10:14  
turned bread into a beer drinker.

Rick Holt  10:16  
Yeah, when we never when we opened I really wasn't looking to loggers because they take up a lot of real estate for quite a bit of time and, but then being German and my first one was is my Edelweiss, which is a Bavarian Pilsner. And then I've gotten into it. I've got nine loggers now on the docks,

Brad  10:32  
as well. So it means that the customers actually are loving it too.

Jeff  10:36  
Well, speaking of loggers, that's our next beer. Okay,

Brad  10:39  
what's what's on tap for us?

Chris Coyne  10:41  
Sydney, this was one we made. So everyday mountain bills. This is kind of our take on an American version of a pilsner. So, you know, kind of to Rick's point. We didn't start out making a lot of lagers, either. But these are the kind of beers that we want to drink at the end of the day. Like, I think these are the ones that make us happy internally, which gives us the drive to make them the way we like them. And we're lucky that the customers are really kind of coming along with us. I think we're seeing a lot more lagers being sold in the market and a lot higher percentage of our mix being driven by lager sales. Certainly, I think there is, I think a lot of potential for growth in American craft bloggers, you know, not necessarily just American macro loggers, but I think a lot of us craft brewers is going to be making more beers as

Brad  11:23  
you're making my nights. It makes me happy to Yes. Do you feel that you're bringing your customers along? Are they moving? Who's moving the market? Right? I mean, I'm really curious about that balance?

Chris Coyne  11:34  
It's a great question. I think it's a little bit of both, right? I've learned not to fight with my customers, right? If they want something, I'm going to try and find a way to give it to him within reason. But I've also found that it's important to be true to the things that we want to make and kind of build our own guardrail, build their barriers. And if it's something that a customer comes in and says, Man, I really want a an example of something that would never make

Jeff  11:56  
blueberry sour,

Chris Coyne  11:57  
you might make that pastry stout or something like that, that's really outside of the realm of what we like to make. We're going to respectfully declined to make that beer. But we're finding that a lot of our customers are really leaning into this. And I think we also have a space where a lot of outdoor patio, Sun is the beer that makes people had,

Brad  12:18  
this is a great, yeah, I

Jeff  12:20  
love your tradition with the train that you're doing. So tell us about that. It's great.

Chris Coyne  12:25  
So we are right next to the next. And so when we first took over the space, this was about 10 years ago, in 2013. We were like, Man, this train sucks. It's very disruptive, to the space rather than the windows, we have to find a way to spin this. So we came up with it originally started as making small beers. And then we've kind of evolved into really making specific beers for this trend beer concept. But when the train goes by, we put a beer on sale. And it's 250 for the pints. And it's cheap, and it's usually light, it's usually refreshing. And it takes something which is disruptive to your afternoon, your evening and our space. And now makes it fun.

Jeff  13:09  
Oh yeah, waiting for it to come by.

Chris Coyne  13:11  
Now, neighbors in our office park across the way that when the train goes, by the

Brad  13:18  
way you touch on this, and I think Rick mentioned it talk to me about the real estate issue. When it comes to loggers.

Chris Coyne  13:25  
It is a significant increase in the amount of time that a beer needs to spend in the tank if you choose to make it as a lager. Okay, so as a result, if you have a finite number of tanks in your cellar, and you choose to make loggers, you can have fewer turns on each tank in a year. So it becomes more expensive for your real estate to make lagers. Interesting, but we still like making them. And I think there's more stainless steel than there is demand in craft beer right now. So I think where it was much more of a premium 10 or 15 years ago, there wasn't enough space in most breweries. And now there is more capacity. And we can use that capacity to make beers like

Brad  14:00  
this. That's really cool. How you actually are able to utilize excess capacity to, in a sense, just expand your product line. Really cool. Yeah. Go I love it. I mean, so far, both these beers are hitting me perfectly. Although I think I needed a beer today too. So

Jeff  14:20  
I think you had an actionable insight. Oh, it's just for Eric. It's an actual insight like yo, thinking about using excess capacity and inventory to create new product lines is something entrepreneurs can definitely think about. It's a good way to like take, you know, if you have excess capacity, if you have some way you can try to diversify your product line, test your way into it as Rick was talking about double action, right here, right? Like rather than like just trying to like say, Hey, I got this new product. Everybody's gonna freaking love it. Yeah, and that's not but it's interesting. You're talking about people like diversifying into loggers, whereas like, you know, I don't know. 2030 years ago, the American palate was trying to just drink lagers, right? And there were like few nerds like us like going out drinking craft beer, trying to get

Chris Coyne  15:05  
some of the displays that they have. Yeah, exactly. Almost all those are else and I think it was really a reflection of the limited capacity that early craft brewers had. Yeah, they didn't have the capacity. Right. We now kind of experience as an

Jeff  15:18  
operational thing.

Chris Coyne  15:20  
I think it was operational was industry wide to wasn't about any one place. It was almost every brewery. Yeah. made almost exclusively outside. Right. Right. You know, you were weird. If you made lagers 20 years ago in the craft world. Yeah. No, not made much more normalized.

Casey LeFever  15:32  
I think a lot of us came to craft beer as a way to get away from the right right lager. I certainly did. Fair. There were only Okay. or downright bad. Yeah. Yeah, hills, nerves, and more. Oh, yeah. bloggers and these kind of more flavorful, more delicate styles. And I appreciate them more. Because not only are they refreshing, but they're actually good things we had to drink.

Jeff  15:58  
Yeah, it's interesting how people's like kind of craft beer tastes evolve over time. Like people often start off being like big hot beds, and that's what they're going for dark beer, right. That's the other thing. I've judged probably hundreds of brown ales, I was a BJCP. Judge forever. And you always like try to get in the frickin brown ale table because there's gonna be 38 Brown ales, you gotta taste and like, most of them are horrible. And some of them are just like, wow, but now I mean, but as you drink craft beer, you start to like, think about, you start to appreciate the difficulty of making a clean Light Lager. And like, I don't know, that's my preferred thing. Well, actually, I like milkshake IPAs, too, but

Casey LeFever  16:38  
don't Lapierre barely stout as much as a lot of people do. But I find that when I'm reaching for something in the fridge Yeah. saying some warm day or just a hard day or, or it's yesterday. Oh, you're

Jeff  16:49  
having double IPA. So the next like three hours?

Casey LeFever  16:53  
Fairly stout or there's that that Pilsner? I find nine times out of 10. I'm going for the Pilsner. Yeah. This bill is just refreshing. Like, just like this one. Yeah, yeah. So

Jeff  17:02  
what hops are in this because it doesn't have like the Sozzi peppery check sounds Oh, there you go. Totally completely. As I said that I tasted.

Chris Coyne  17:13  
It's Melanotan malt in Pilsner malt, German Pilsner mouths, some check size and then pretty simple lager yeast. Yeah, relatively cool ferment to the tank for about eight weeks. We're trying not to reinvent the wheel. We're just try and make it reflect the qualities that we wanted to have. It's good.

Jeff  17:27  
It's really good. This isn't your friends? Oh, no.

Brad  17:33  
So I'm normally a bourbon drinker. And I've never wanted to so fire. Awesome. That really hits my audience. What do you think? Good? Yeah. I think it's really interesting. And the other thing, though, that Before we introduce our third guest, Chris, and I have a person in common. So I have a student, Mandy Cataldo, who is an awesome entrepreneurship student, just graduated, who also works at Cintas.

Chris Coyne  18:00  
Yeah, she's amazing. She joined our team, I don't know, maybe a year and a half ago. She works behind the bar, and she is a ball of energy. And she's got she's got something, something in her life that is driving her towards this entrepreneur.

Brad  18:13  
And then the other thing is, she told me that she was able to collaborate in a beer with you. So I was at what's coming up. Is that time? The agenda? Yeah. Is that common, though? Do you normally will you get together with a bunch of folks from the brewery and collaborate on cool things? I think it

Chris Coyne  18:29  
ebbs and flows, there are times that we are more collabing, that typically is in our slower seasons, right, I would say we are less apt to do that in the middle of the summer was just go Go, go, go go. But this was really kind of a multileveled collab. For us. It was a fundraiser for the pink boots society. So the hops that we bought for him, were blended by members of the pink boots, society. And the purchase of those hops helps fund educational opportunities for them. And it's a collab with an organization called drinking in another state. And this is raising money for people who are in a state where they have limited access to women's reproductive rights. And so it gives them a chance to travel to places where you have access to health care, that's awesome. This is one of the things that I have this lab on and it was designed by the women runs on packaging line, Aaron hazard. So really cool. This was me getting out of the way and letting them be awesome.

Brad  19:23  
Yeah, but it's also values of the business and values that you share with your team. There are a lot of things that we could talk about here that I think would resonate with our audience resonates with your customers and your employees as well. So I think it's fabulous. We've

Chris Coyne  19:35  
learned that you have to live with your values. If you don't then you're just wandering aimlessly.

Brad  19:39  
You guys heard that from me before leaving with values. Yes, every day. Yeah.

Chris Coyne  19:43  
And so there's multiple breweries all around the country that have all participated

Jeff  19:46  
lost track of the beers

Chris Coyne  19:48  
and the recipe is not set. It's really the relationship with drinking fundraising organization. It's really cool. Yeah, we call so the group is called beers for everyone and It started with a tweet shortly after the dog's decision of, I'm gonna paraphrase. But if you need to go to another state and drink a beer in that state, I will help you drink that beer. And if you don't want to ever talk about it again, we don't have to talk. I thought it was great. Awesome. So yeah, I think we're 3536 through to do it. So it's all over the country. And I think really, this is this is us leading with our values. Yep. Love it.

Jeff  20:23  
In other senses, drinking in other states,

Brad  20:26  
okay. And just just so our listeners know that Eloise is always with us. She put this together. She's pouring beers, and we appreciate her very much very much doing a great job. Okay, so let's talk this one through. All right. Well, this is a different different animal.

Chris Coyne  20:40  
It is a wheat with grapefruit. Grapes, that's

Rick Holt  20:46  
what I was catching. Yeah.

Chris Coyne  20:49  
Yeah. So it has grapefruit and it's also dried up with the pink boots society blending from 2013, which is a blend of five different hops. I don't have the cheat sheet in front of me. But I think stylus and maybe 117, or one might be in there and a couple others. So hold up later.

Jeff  21:07  
Yeah. 11721.

Chris Coyne  21:10  
It's a unnamed hop. Awesome.

Brad  21:13  
Yeah. Quite a few of those. That's cool.

By the grapefruit though its prominence. Yeah, I

Chris Coyne  21:19  
think that's really its defining characteristic. And Aaron, who's been working with us for years, has been trying year after year to make the perfect rate for beer. And I think she really hated this you guys. This

Brad  21:28  
was this is terrific. Folks. Max out. Yeah. I like when

Casey LeFever  21:33  
we see these collaborations where it's brew this beer with this name and this cause but it can be nationwide, like Black is beautiful, as well. Beautiful on

Chris Coyne  21:40  
fire. Oh, in California, and we did that one as well. And that was that resolution IPA was leaked. I can't think

Casey LeFever  21:46  
of the name. Yeah, we all brewed the same beer all across the country. While there is money for the same cause there's one coming up soon, the suicide hotline awareness number is changing to nine, eight and someone in my little one little easier. Remember then the number and so breweries all across the country are naming a beer night at a number out there. So that'll be September for a Mental Health Awareness Week. These are the kinds of things trends we see is where someone gets an idea and puts it out there. And then breweries just love to lead with their values. Yeah, take hold. And this is

Brad  22:17  
really cool. So so we know that the boulder beer community are formed. I understand. It's pretty tight. Did you guys know each other walking in the door today?

Casey LeFever  22:26  
Now we've collaborated together without ever.

Brad  22:29  
Right? So the breweries know

Casey LeFever  22:30  
each other more than similarly and talked about we did this collaboration, the women of our breweries. I met Jordan, Schumacher bar, but are connected with some of the women at our brewery. And they took their word and they design the recipe, brewed the beer and named it and he stayed on the way like you said, yep. I mean, on the loading dock and Kokopelli at once every April. No pint glass, were one of the drop offs.

I met Christina and Rick on the rooftop of bad daddy's burger in 2013 when I met the first three woman owner in the state, so that would have been only

Jeff  23:07  
two years after you graduated from ¶¶Òõ¶ÌÊÓƵ, KC two, three years after that you can go to see boulder snowboard as much as you like. Well, maybe that's what you like as much as you humanly can, and graduate and find a great career.

Casey LeFever  23:27  
Absolutely. ¶¶Òõ¶ÌÊÓƵ is a great spot for that.

Jeff  23:30  
Alright, this beer is really interesting, because like the first sip of it, like the framatome I get a big grapefruit almost that like bidi. And you think it's Hobbs if you didn't told me grapefruit was I think, Wow, this is really wild. But it doesn't have a lingering bitterness that you would think if it was just like a hot bite kind of thing. It's really interesting. Built

Chris Coyne  23:49  
with relatively low bitterness. So relatively low edition of boiling hops, right? Less bitterness overall. Yeah. And the grapefruit went in post fermentation was grapefruit peel. Peel was boiled. So we're not putting a lot of the bitterness out of the pill, you know.

Jeff  24:04  
So it's really he's got it. What is this called?

Chris Coyne  24:07  
It's called drinking in another state. That's really the name of the collapse. So this particular version is the Greek free wheat. Nice. I would buy this. You should.

Jeff  24:15  
Yeah. I love the cause. So what do you think it is about craft brewing that makes people so interested in like social causes and collaborate is the kind I mean, I've always I've always been curious about there's a whole bunch of research about craft breweries as being a industry that defines itself as a category separate from and different from a traditional category, the mainstream main beer company. And what the research has shown basically is not surprising to you guys at all, is that when that happens, industries end up acting more like social movements and less like competitive industries. And just seeing or talking to three guys, I'm picking up on the same thing. Now what that paper doesn't do what the research doesn't do is tell us Why that is just an observation.

Casey LeFever  25:03  
Good question. You know, New Belgium, right? Yeah, exactly. Talk about how many case studies you guys talked about elite school of business? Oh, yeah, sure. Yeah. New Belgium about the sustainability goddess. social causes. And so for me having grew up like listening to Kim Jordan speak, at least Yeah, I'm sitting here saying, well, that's how breweries operate. That's just what you do. And that's where I want to be right now. Like you're attracted people with that mindset. Beyond that, it's a very good question. We're just getting good people,

Chris Coyne  25:31  
I think, a little bit older, new side, a different era, I think we actually have three different areas of interesting slice of how this industry kind of plays out. It's interesting for me coming up in this industry. I think what we're really sharing is we're all fighting the same enemy, which was bad. The craft beer, yeah. Macro beer, right. And so we were sharing enemy. And when you share an enemy, you become friends. Yeah. So we were looking for shelf space

Jeff  25:58  
in my enemy's enemy is my ally.

Chris Coyne  26:00  
Right. And so, you know, to get into a bar, or to get into a liquor store, you had to push Miller Coors bud off the shelf, right. And we also found, I think, from my experience that craft beer drinkers weren't brand loyal. They were style loyal. So if you like IPAs, like a lot of different IPAs, and if you like Imperial stouts, you like a lot of people seek out more of them? Actually, yes. So if you ally yourself with those other similar brands, by style, you share your customers. That's really interesting. So

Brad  26:32  
that was really cool.

Jeff  26:34  
I think that's an extra one. So I'm gonna let you summarize that when Brad?

Brad  26:37  
So Well, first of all I liked about the style loyalty, I thought that that really resonated with me, and you rarely hear a business that will say we could share customers. Yeah. And I think that you can collaborate, right? You because it gives you room to experiment. And I think that that is really cool, too. It's really understanding your customers, and knowing what that customer blend is, and not trying to, in a sense, isolate them towards your brand. But in a sense, please a palette with a style.

Jeff  27:05  
Yeah. I mean, it's actually creating a relationship with your customer, right, where they Hey, actually, we're interested to hear about other beers you had to Yeah. And breweries generally are. And it's really cool, totally different. And way more entrepreneurial, in a sense of creating an industry and a segment instead of creating a company. That's right.

Brad  27:32  
I mean, and you're not trying to own the industry, you're trying to be part of an industry. I mean, it's almost like the

Jeff  27:37  
opposite of a lot of tech startups.

Brad  27:41  
I actually think is there another industry that we could say that does that? I can't think of one off the top of my head.

Casey LeFever  27:48  
Tough to think of something with 400 Plus manufacturers will stay.

Brad  27:52  
That's right. Enroll homies. Yeah, yeah. I mean, seriously,

Chris Coyne  27:55  
you might be able to play music as a kind of, there's a lot of collaboration within music comes from a very creative place. But and I don't think people have pure loyalty to one artist in the world of music show. They like styles, they like country music, they like hip hop. They like IPAs, they like stats, you know, I think they also share customers. And I think that also leads to more collaboration. So

Brad  28:14  
we're looking then at brewing is an artistry versus just let's do it for the money. But both right I mean, you have to you have to

Casey LeFever  28:23  
be excited by the lights on other creative endeavors. You get excited about what other people are still excited by what my peers are doing. And it's me inspired and

Brad  28:33  
Rick's right though you got to keep the lights on balance, right. But it's understanding

Jeff  28:38  
that like, yeah, it's not, I don't know, it's interesting. It's just so interesting compared to how we think about strategy, often, especially competitive strategy. That's right thinking about instead as collaborative strategy, it's much more akin to the way political scientists think about creating common pool resources that is about strategic thinking about, hey, we're gonna, we're gonna own this segment. Alright.

Casey LeFever  29:01  
What's interesting is how competitive it does get me into the world of shelf space. Yeah, that's a different. We're talking about retail shelf space. We're talking about retail. Selling Yeah, in real estate. And you know, real estate back in the day, you could open a brewery in a back alley warehouse and as long as your beer was half mediocre and people find and then 20 1314 and the Denver beer cones went on Platte Park and straight up Avery was we all clearning in an alley Yeah, no,

Jeff  29:29  
I'm going to eat Yeah, I loved it. I liked it. And that was

Casey LeFever  29:34  
the beginning of the new wave of machine if you do why would you open it pleasant Taproom you know we're going to Kroger now unfortunately with you know, again it for better or worse. We have grocery store sales and gas station sales. Yeah. So we're competing over that shelf. Oh, no. And that's that's brutal, brutal, brutal in business.

Brad  29:57  
But doesn't the rubber meet the road though in the tap room?

Chris Coyne  29:59  
depends on your business model. Some breweries is only the tap room and some breweries have very little tap room presence at all. I think a lot of us, you know, share both, you know, the market, outside of our doors and inside of our doors. So, like for us, I would say about half of our beer goes to our tap room and half goes out through our distribution arm awesome.

Casey LeFever  30:20  
It's interesting. There's so many players, I'm never competing as any one person, right? I want that shelf spot doesn't mean we're competing against each other. Right? Like I am, but I don't. I'm implicitly shelf spot. Spot trying to take a spot. Yeah, I really want him to have all the spots in the world.

Brad  30:35  
So let's talk about the assholes in the industry that we're going after.

Jeff  30:41  
I have arranged the beer tasting order and I'm not trying to leave for news is to last. It's just you brought a couple of like pallet beers. So that's why we're so which one are we

Brad  30:52  
going with Jeff? Right now we

Jeff  30:54  
are tasting the What's this? Contour from? This is dark.

Rick Holt  31:00  
Cheers. Cheers. So this is that this is actually a Mexican Amber lager. Before we open the brewery. I either like the analog errs, or I liked those techies. Amber, right, right. And this is very reminiscent. So I built this this was one of my favorites to build. This one actually took me about six months to research because to build a good Vienna lager, or a Mexican Ember, which most Mexican breweries are German breweries, they're all opened by the Germans. So

Brad  31:29  
most people don't realize that

dream. So Rick means traveling to Vienna and to Mexico and go and hanging out and drinking beer. No, I wish.

Jeff  31:39  
I could think about research. Well, how can we get to Mexico?

Rick Holt  31:47  
But no, it turned out really well. This one was came off my pilot system before I took it down. So it came off my two barrel pilot system. And right out of the gate, it came out really well. And I was very pleased with it. It's taken a couple of awards. And we have a lot of following at the brewery for it. We were talking about loggers earlier. One thing about Colorado being an open state on an outdoor state loggers if they're made very well, they will sell because we're summer. I mean we have more sunshine than any state except Florida. So the loggers people love especially your bicyclists, we get bicycle groups that come through all the time, motorcycle groups, you name it, but they like the loggers during the summer and during the winter they're going to go a little bit heavier they're gonna go into their IPAs are going to start going into the darks. There's borders there, stouts and everything so but we keep loggers on I've got three loggers on poncho, Edelweiss, and feather being the three loggers that I keep on year round.

Unknown Speaker  32:41  
You sell us with a lime in the taproom

Speaker 2  32:42  
we do

Casey LeFever  32:43  
that sounds so good.

Yeah.

Rick Holt  32:45  
So is the next one that you're going to be tasting?

Jeff  32:48  
This is really nice. Like almost, is there a caramel malt or a little bit of caramel and just get that head on? It's not like that clean kind of tricky thing. But it's just a hint. It's actually it's cleaner tasting the actual Mexican outlet. It takes. Yeah, I do agree because I've tried to put into words I'm like, why is it better? It's enough of a hint of that flavor, but not enough where it's like overpowering and kind of cover stuff up.

Chris Coyne  33:14  
These are the kind of beers I drink when I go to other people's brewery.

Brad  33:17  
Yeah, exactly.

Speaker 5  33:18  
This reminds me of my my own temporary and Brighton big choice brewing formula Brimfield. But they do have Amber lager as my go to every time.

Speaker 6  33:25  
They're good friends of ours back. So we all grew up together, not grew up but through the brewing industry.

Casey LeFever  33:31  
The day they were some of the first suburban brewers and

Jeff  33:34  
so awesome here you guys

Brad  33:38  
about the network's and the evolution of beer. Hey, Brooke, how many ingredients in this one? Three. Wow, another? Yeah. That's incredible.

Rick Holt  33:47  
To make a good Pilsner, it doesn't take a lot of ingredients. We just it takes time. practice and patience. Patience. Yeah.

Chris Coyne  33:54  
You just have to wait for to get better.

Casey LeFever  33:56  
Yeah, there's a lot of ways to get like marginal gains and loggers that maybe your average person won't stream and I will notice but all matted up together. You want to have horizontal logger and tanks. Justification.

Rick Holt  34:07  
Actually, I'm just gonna draw are some of those.

Casey LeFever  34:09  
Yeah, those are those will help a little bit. Maybe you're spending you're absorbing your own natural carbonation. Yeah, that should in theory help a little bit. Maybe

Brad  34:19  
use for yeast to caulk burgers

Casey LeFever  34:21  
and decoction. Because these are all, you know, more spending more time together, and it's a big difference. Exactly. One plus one equals four. So

Rick Holt  34:35  
one of the things we do, and I can't speak for all of us, but a lot of the smaller brewers like ourselves, I mean, we don't have the filtration system. I mean, if you look at the beers, they're crisp, and they're clean, right, but we're not using a filtration system, you just wait longer Cold Crush, pick it down, take it down to 33 degrees and let it sit there.

Jeff  34:51  
This might be the most epic beer tasting we've ever done. Yes, so we're obviously big fans of the Colorado brewing and craft distilling scene. And we did a road trip out to California. I took Brad to a bunch of places, but there's something about Colorado. I mean, I know there's a lot of craft breweries springing up now and a lot of the Midwestern states, and it's really a way and actually pointed out in the, in the display over here that craft breweries are really a way that built industry, it can kind of create a lot of growth and people create destinations around outdoor activities, but also leads to gentrification, for better or for worse. What do you think it is about Colorado that there's just so many damn breweries? And it's like, so infrequently, you hear of one failing, at least from my perspective, like, I mean, you really gotta be, you gotta suck is a

Casey LeFever  35:36  
universally loved beverage across the world. So I think sometimes it's just legal boundaries. Colorado has been very brewery friendly for a very long time. Yeah. That's a monster.

Jeff  35:45  
In what ways? Like, because I've never really understood

Chris Coyne  35:48  
the market. Yeah. And self distribute here in Colorado. Oh, and a lot of other states. Can you have to go through distributors? That's amazing. And you have to have a minimum threshold to get the attention of distributor? Yeah, you can literally make beer and sell it to one store in your town.

Jeff  36:01  
Right. Right, right now, explain why this matters. Like the people who don't understand the alcohol like industry, like I mean, using this word podcast that's different. Gonna talk about legal research. But I mean, a distributor is why why is it so much better to not have to go through this jury? Surely a distributor will help you out. They're going to get your beers into lots of places. They're your friend, right? I

Chris Coyne  36:26  
mean, we did both. So we started self distribution. And about four years ago, we actually started own distribution company. Oh, so we found that as a small independent craft brewer, we had access to market on a small scale. But it's hard to get the attention of a beer buyer of a liquor store owner, when you say I've got these four skews, and they're like, I don't know if I'd be right now, I have the bud rep here. And he's got 94 skews that

Jeff  36:52  
I also have.

Chris Coyne  36:54  
So I think the access to market opens the door. So it gives the opportunity for a lot of places to exist. Yeah, we also have relatively low barriers to entry to just be open in Colorado. But with the distributor, they give you distribution, they get you to more places, and that's it. They don't build your brand. They don't make your beer, right. They just make beer go from a warehouse

Jeff  37:16  
to a point of sale, but it's literally logistics companies. It's not marketing or branding company right

Chris Coyne  37:20  
now. So like, that isn't really the end all for making brew successful. Well,

Jeff  37:24  
right. And they take a pretty damn big cut. 2% Yeah, I mean, 30% I mean, yeah, so imagine that right? Like you're starting your business, and you're gonna sell your product and in order to get into a place where customers might actually see it. Oh, that's gonna be 30% Off the top of Colorado. Yeah, exactly.

Casey LeFever  37:41  
Right. Yeah, there's definitely benefits to both I don't want to bad top distributors we have relationships with

Jeff  37:45  
Well, of course.

Casey LeFever  37:50  
But I think what they call it right up until the recent grippy laws with grocery, we had 1400 independent liquor stores, you can only have one liquor store license, right. So every liquor store you went to had was its own and there was one Costco, one target one King Soopers. That's all right. Because you can have one that means in stature, they don't have that I'm trying to go to total why? Kroger, target Walmart. And I have some shelf space trying to break into that. But walking down the street local liquor store Hey, man, I just opened a brewery a mile that way do German care on your shelf and the guy says, No, your beer sucks. Try the next. That's a totally

Jeff  38:28  
went out of business in Colorado. That's literally how

Casey LeFever  38:32  
we all literally put beers in our Subaru Outback drove around, door to door. Easy way to grow organically and slowly first have to open and try to immediately be at a regional grocery store. That's really hard to do in other states. So not very motivated to open package. Just try. Yeah.

Jeff  38:49  
Just pushing me we have to taste them. Yeah. So

Rick Holt  38:51  
this one was a pro elementary a couple years ago. So this is a Mexican lager, but it's a lime lager. This has lime leaf or it's both it's got it's got dried Persian limes, and karamba, lime leafs and ice. And then we are asked earlier, we serve this one with lime as well.

Chris Coyne  39:11  
I played around with those prison black lines. They're awesome. They are it's like raisins, plus citrus plus, like fermentation sour, and they're super cool. Yeah.

Rick Holt  39:22  
This is, again, this is a one time a year and people look forward to it. And we bring it out the same time of year. They always look forward to this beer. I brewed a little early this year because one of our older employees is getting married and they requested it so

Jeff  39:39  
infinitely better than any beer. You would squeeze a lime into the bottle and turn upside down and all that nonsense. This is good.

Chris Coyne  39:46  
Well, I think the complexity of the types of ingredients to is going to be just so much more profound than just the citrus from fresh.

Jeff  39:53  
I mean, it has a lime flavor, but it's not like bad, like you know, like candy. What do you think? Really good. It's good. I just love it. So great summertime beer thank you yeah really really wants to set was on the patio talked about we're sitting in like a reproduction of some kind of said like a a tap room that would have been in Ward that's a scary concept

Casey LeFever  40:21  
to hear history sure that Alexa the largest brewery west the Mississippi prior prohibition was zaimes Brewery brewery none of us have probably heard of, I've never heard him saying a paid off saying what eight also been in breweries. But there was called Sainte Marie was in downtown Denver, where like the aquarium is now Yeah, and they got all the grain from a little railroad depot off of words. Now highway 36. All the farmers bring the grain to the railroad depot called Zheng spur now known as Broomfield. So, wow, I always like to say like our little town is built on beer. Yeah, but only like a five minute walk from our temper. The grain silos still there like where they wouldn't download grain elevator. They love that. Oh, that's pretty cool. That was the biggest brewery, this half the country. Speaking of

Jeff  41:13  
prohibition, I learned some things I walk around the display today are kind of interesting. So if you err on the side of prohibition, you err on the side of the mafia. Because of course, they established a criminal network in Denver during Prohibition as the first time the mafia had come to Colorado. So that was one unexpected and where

Brad  41:33  
they came from, by the way,

Jeff  41:34  
were they there, Chicago? Oh, yeah. But the other interesting thing was, guess that organization was largely charged with enforcing prohibition when the police couldn't quite muster enough strong arms to do so. That's it, not the Pinkertons

Casey LeFever  41:54  
Rocky Mountain Rangers or something,

Jeff  41:56  
though? Anyone anyone was the Treasury? It was the Ku Klux Klan. No way. I what I learned in there and it was really interesting, at least according to display in there. This is first I've heard that it's fascinating. They were able to combine a lot of the prohibition narratives around immigrants coming and ruining our country and drinking and all this stuff. targeted the Irish and others. I agree. So the lesson. The lesson learned is if you're on the side of prohibition, you're on the side of the mafia and the Klu Klux Klan. So there you go. So cheers. Do what? I thought it was pretty fast. All right. So well, we have we have oh, this is the Blarney. Okay, so similar. Kokopelli. Bear. And we didn't talk about what's the where can we where can people get these beers like so

Rick Holt  42:49  
Kokopelli beer company, and then we're in both total beverages? Davies or Dave's data? Yeah, thank you. I'm not the distribution. We actually are itself distribution. We have a young lady that worked for us that takes care of our distribution. We are in 35 different restaurants and tap houses. We backed off quite a bit on distribution. When we were talking earlier, basically our big sales are announced and then kegs are our second and then canning is our third. We weren't doing bottling for a while we got out of that thing. We just recently sold our bottling line

Jeff  43:25  
this anybody bought anymore? Like I mean, like very infrequently.

Rick Holt  43:29  
It's specially

Casey LeFever  43:31  
it's just barely stouts and wildstyle.

Jeff  43:35  
Special. Well, a

Casey LeFever  43:37  
bummer, though, because I love drink on a hot day. Yeah, cold beer in a cold glass bottle.

Jeff  43:41  
Yeah, that's true. That's true.

Casey LeFever  43:44  
Yeah, I wish. Yeah.

Speaker 6  43:46  
But the cans have taken over. They've just taken over, especially the CANS because it's

Casey LeFever  43:51  
heavy fragile,

Jeff  43:54  
like recycled. Cups. roadbase. Well,

Brad  43:58  
so what's this beer?

Rick Holt  43:59  
Blarney Stone. This is a multi award winning Irish bread. Actually, this one. When I I used to work in the Canada industry, the aluminum cans industry. And when I was in Ireland, there was a beer that I fell in love with over there. And it was an Irish read. And I did the research on it. And I tried my hardest to clone it and I think I did pretty good as far as cloning it. It's multi, low alcohol. It's only it's only 5% and it's got it from the beginning your palate all the way down to the back. It's just got a really good finish to it. Yeah, super smooth.

Brad  44:33  
Yeah, really smooth.

Jeff  44:34  
You guys remember Killian dread? Does that still? That's course. Oh, I know.

Rick Holt  44:40  
But it was an original Irish recipe though. Really? Well, yes, it was. So they like brought the recipe over and tried. I mean, I was just bought the recipe from my understanding. Yeah.

Chris Coyne  44:51  
I spent two years filling kegs of Killians for Coors while I was in political to beer. So why did a perm they called it the BA Okay, here's the big ask a good self contained glycol jacketed bright tank on an 18 wheel truck, backed it up to the loading dock. And we built a manifold setup where we would unload killings Irish Red into six barrels only it was under pressure. It was yesterday, we had to run a co2 line out from the brewery from the brewery run itself. So we are under pressure under pressure to fully fermented fully carb to do that anymore. We did it for

Jeff  45:34  
you do whatever you want.

Chris Coyne  45:37  
So we have we filled but 40 kegs an hour for 24 hours a day, I worked the night shift for two years filling kegs, of course, at Boulder beer company, the volume wasn't enough to make a change to the packaging learning course. And a lot of it was if you kind of picture the six barrel concept is a very narrow and thin keg. The pitch for them as from the sales side was you've got four taps, there's a hole in the middle of those four kegs. Let me slide the six barrel ready. And now you can have a specialty beer on tap in your, you know, Podunk bar, wherever you are. So this was their, their angle to sell more Killians was to do this particular package until it got big enough to make the changes to their actual packaging line. You know, so we did a ton of work with a QA QC department to make sure that we were getting their quality standards and you know, got to see underneath back behind and all the good bad and that's really cool. Yeah,

Jeff  46:32  
actually worked right. I mean, they sold it a bit. I mean, I just remember in the 90s like your your the Kathy Ireland, like cardboard stand up everywhere. And like that was the big thing.

Chris Coyne  46:43  
Yes, I did that for quite a while. Yeah. Pros and cons.

Jeff  46:47  
Let's beer. This beer is infinitely better than that's low praise, but this is really nice.

Casey LeFever  46:53  
I am curious how well Irish Red cells in the tower? I bet it

Jeff  46:57  
does. Because people have like just said, you know, Inkling in the back of their head of that beer and then they're like Irish

Casey LeFever  47:03  
man, that's, that's real. Good. Well, you said our style. Oil, right. And other breweries that make the style. I don't know. If I want to put an Irish read on it might take me months to sell. Yeah, because people don't come to my tap.

Rick Holt  47:18  
We're having a restaurant. I mean, because we sell pizza, you know, soup salads. And so it makes sense, right? You have people that come in with so many different pallets, right? But I can make a barrel aged beer and it won't sell. Not that's not the mentality of of my public.

Jeff  47:33  
Understand your customer. Don't try to make your customers can form your brand. Right? You know, knowing that like hey, a barrel each beer is not going to say sell in our tap room because people are coming here just did they just wait dinner and just have a beer.

Brad  47:44  
Think about Rick and Chris really knowing their customers, right? In a place for pizza and families and the expectations all going into a foreknows? Is not that right? So I mean, in the customers will find you I think it seems to be in this taste collaboration that we talked about earlier. Absolutely.

Rick Holt  48:01  
What taprooms seemed to sell more of the the I don't want to call them off beers, but to the different style beers like like barrel aged beers sours, right, they seem to sell more of that than a like brew pub,

Chris Coyne  48:14  
you probably pre selecting for certain customers that are willing to go to a Taproom right, especially when it doesn't offer food, right, they're looking for an experience that is different fundamentally different than a racetrack. And they're probably a lot more open to the oddball stuff. You

Casey LeFever  48:26  
know, nowadays, so many people specialize. So when we go to primitive, it's great it had an IPA, I wouldn't want to know if I got a beer, stand on water and a lager and

Jeff  48:41  
get something else

Casey LeFever  48:44  
out there. So I think just kind of knowing why your clientele are in your building in the first place.

Jeff  48:49  
This happens to me at well provisions all the time. I take people there and they insist on buying like the beer we're gonna taste next

Casey LeFever  48:56  
decided to make the weirdest beers possible. And we said if we're gonna do that, and then we have to also have on Normal View

Jeff  49:04  
ever since I went there, I've had every like faculty event I could have there because I just wanted to get a drink for that check. This podcast but it is finally gonna taste a Ford noses.

Casey LeFever  49:16  
You know, we have a sensory program. So our Director of Quality runs our lab program where we're testing for foreign bacteria, foreign microflora, and she's also monitoring how our beer tastes and so whether it's over time or just out of the gate, so when we do a one off beer we're filling out in descriptive surveys a company wide staff on what we're smelling, seeing tasting, really and then we do something that's cool. Once a beer has been done a few times we're gonna continue to make it we've now established a brand description what the beer should taste like, right? Well here is that might change over time. The whole staff like

Jeff  49:49  
is teaching the beer and often they're nuts.

Casey LeFever  49:51  
They're required to taste beer.

Jeff  49:53  
Wow.

Chris Coyne  49:54  
Every process is training people how to teach bear arms. Do you know me? Yeah.

Jeff  50:01  
every viewer is gonna be happy. This is chock full of actionable insights, more actionable insights. So we have we have research, which Brad loves. Yes, I'm speaking of I imagine, like my go work that already right. I'm gonna go work in Rei. It's my first job out of high school, whatever. Yeah, they're gonna like, tell me about the gear and they're going to train me on. But I'm not going to get to have any say about whether it's a good piece of gear. They're not going to serve me there. I got asked me and I'm being generous. Like, if I go work in a factory, they sure as hell I know, I've worked in a T shirt factory. Yeah, ask me anything about the T shirts. You guys are involving, like everybody in your organization and tasting the beer and offering their feedback, and then saying that's what the beer should taste like what we collectively have defined? Is that create like ties with people that I'm just

Casey LeFever  50:50  
agency and their job. Right, right. Everyone's welcome to suggest even beer ideas, beer names, all that fun stuff. But in this case, I mean, everyone's going to taste and smell different things right? into certain flavors and really sensitive to other things a flavor. So having multiple people the taste that's often goes through a pretty good training program, or lab manager, Amanda, she does a wonderful job training everyone off flavors and descriptive words. So it's like a beer

Jeff  51:17  
judge certification program.

Casey LeFever  51:21  
Not only do we learn more and more to practice important things, the feedback loops, we all do sensory every Friday. Yeah, and the number of different beers and then the next week, we're gonna report Hey, this beard, this is how it came back. As we all said, you didn't know this, but we want to help carbonation last week to see what would happen and turns out you guys liked it more has also kind of settled that's how we turn the knobs a little bit and adjust and improve our beers, subtle tweaks. But in this case, you know our this is a one that we've been making year round, but it started as a one off and we all tasted it week after week. And eventually we had all these notes and this little sheet here is what came from that and so I don't have the best palette I'll be honest, you know I don't have probably one too many boxes I have from all that snowboarding. Get to so did me and so it's fun for me to read all these descriptions and see what everyone else got to

Jeff  52:13  
say what we're getting before.

Casey LeFever  52:15  
We're talking to talk now this is all Texas a platter and fog. One of our core brands of beer you can buy a year round from us. It is a hazy IPA, hazy IPAs being less bitter, softer, mouthfeel and citrusy more tropical, amazing aroma really reopened for a big nose lot of dry up in there. The malts are Pilsner malt too low and oats oats are going to soften that mouthfeel make it taste a little less crisp and a more smooth, a little thicker. And then hops. We're looking at just pretty simple Centennial and Citra which pretty straightforward for hazy

Jeff  52:48  
around the horn. Everybody give it a script or whether it is I guess

Brad  52:51  
I'm still actually getting a little bit of grapefruit.

Chris Coyne  52:53  
Yeah, I get a lot of citrus. And again, a little bit of like, a lava has sort of like an undertone.

Jeff  52:58  
Oh, yeah. Okay, that's that's the guava. Yeah.

Casey LeFever  53:02  
So guava's on the sheet. You got that. Yeah.

You guys think What do you tasting? What do you taste? For? Sure. Yeah. Cool. Very refreshing for them. Right? Yeah. No

Jeff  53:14  
bitterness at all.

Casey LeFever  53:15  
I would imagine when modern people hear IPA to this day to think better. Yeah, right. And they're not wrong. That's IPS had had for forever. This newer style. It feels crazy to call it new these days. But hazy IPA or New England style IPA. Basically, any one of these extra hops are not added during the boil. So the you're not extracting a lot of bitterness you're not converting was Alpha acids. So instead, you're retaining your essential oils, your beta acids and getting more aroma and flavor. Yep. So you're getting aroma flavor hops. So many strains. He's asking to create all these fun flavors that taste like oranges and pineapple and guava. And creamsicle is a fun one. Yeah, that's gonna be softer mountain. You see, it's clear. hazier? Right, but it has that kind of softer mouthfeel it's almost like a white IPA sticker. I don't like about a hazy IPAs, to me are too heavy to filling. And we like the Nars, aren't they still I can drink more than wanting to sit in. I can have a few. So

Jeff  54:12  
right off. Well, I mean, this is just really nice. You know if this is the basis of the velvet beers, it's not it's not

Casey LeFever  54:21  
theirs. But, and then the velvet beer has been a milkshake style IPA, which means you've taken a page, just hazy style like this, and you're adding lactose often vanilla and then often free

Jeff  54:32  
to other flavors. Okay, I was just curious. I'm really into those beers.

Casey LeFever  54:35  
I couldn't. I'm sure they have similarities. I

Brad  54:36  
couldn't tell you. All I can tell you is that every beer that we've had so far is good. I mean, that's the thing. That's actually pretty. There's like, you know, this one I never want to Well, we haven't gotten to massage yet. How many beers do we have?

Jeff  54:49  
I told you it's gonna be epic. Epic beer tasting. All right, there's only three more I'm good. So we're gonna take one more IPA. We're gonna attendees need his iPad externally.

Chris Coyne  55:01  
So I guess to reference some of your preference for churches and bourbons, this is actually a rye, IPA. So done with both flaked and multi dry. We brewed this. So my business partner Mike just had his second kid when other leads alone, right he Mike is not leads but just see

Jeff  55:18  
oh, well see that's good now medications go up so he's great.

Chris Coyne  55:21  
Yeah. So he just had a second child. So we brewed a batch of about four years ago for his daughter when she was born, called mama peaches. When first daughter was born, they called it a little peach on the inside, it was really sweet. And then when his son came along, we decided to call it mimic the younger which was both a somewhat tongue in cheek reference to Pliny the Younger, right, which I draw some inspiration from this is kind of that maltier hoppier, bitter West Coast style, but also a nod to like in his expanding family. So this is really different, but we've been having it is it's very different than the last.

Jeff  55:56  
So yeah, plenty. Pliny the Elder implies a younger are both like typical west coast, IPAs considered good. Well, they're considered like one of the top West Coast IPAs. And so these are like, these are both IPAs that were drinking back to back. So the last beer and this beer are both Indian parallels. But one is an East Coast. One is the West Coast. Yeah. Yeah, right. West Coast. Yeah, the rise is really nice.

Rick Holt  56:20  
It's very, very smooth for right. Because a lot of rise you can get they can be too dry. Right. And this one's very smooth. It's nice. Yeah.

Jeff  56:28  
Yeah.

Brad  56:30  
All I believe is, is that like, three burgers taste each other's beer. I think that's amazing, right? I think that you guys are like learning about each other's breweries. I think the collaboration here is really cool. And everybody's nodding when they try something. It's like, oh, yeah, this is really good. Well, I mean,

Jeff  56:45  
all the beers we've had to

Casey LeFever  56:48  
kind of emphasize enough. I am not a brewer.

Brad  56:51  
I just represent one.

Casey LeFever  56:52  
I just want to get a brewery.

Rick Holt  56:53  
You probably drink enough beer to talk about. Professional beer

Jeff  56:59  
drink. All right, so So hops are in the sky.

Chris Coyne  57:01  
Mostly centennial, a handful of others. metallus in there. Yeah, Charleston, relatively new one. I think you got named maybe two, three years ago,

Jeff  57:08  
up to these new hops, man.

Chris Coyne  57:09  
Gotta stay on it, man. It changes. I know. Remembering numbers now, I make beers with hops that just have numbers.

Jeff  57:18  
That's crazy. Yeah. Is that just because there's been such a proliferation and different hops? Or I think

Chris Coyne  57:23  
for us, internally, we really enjoy the newness and sort of novelty of these experimentation. Right? Yeah, it's interesting.

Jeff  57:32  
And I think your customers probably do too, actually. Because you got a bunch of beard or

Chris Coyne  57:35  
timidness. Any we do. And I also think that from the hot breeders because there's such demand for newness, I think the salespeople tell us like what's new is what every bartender and every liquor store owner always asks them. Our customers always walk in and say what's new. So this is a way to give new. And we're doing the same thing to our hops suppliers. We go to our suppliers and say what's new I've already brewed with cascades, I've already brewed with citrus, what's new, what's new? What's new? Because I want to be able to turn around and share what's new with my customers. They're asking me for what's new

Jeff  58:06  
madness, right has given this like a complexity that's beyond like, it's only 7%. And it's almost got like, I'm almost getting like an old ale kind of thing. Like with the complexity of what you're really

Chris Coyne  58:15  
multi for, I guess what we would consider a current IPA. Yeah, this is somewhat of a throwback in terms of Yeah, a stylistic approach, you know,

Jeff  58:23  
very cool. Yeah. All right. Bradley, come to your favorite time of the tasting. Lucky you.

Brad  58:29  
If it has pumpkin in it. I'm out.

Jeff  58:32  
No, but but I've got a pitch for noses. I really want to see a pumpkin velvet come fall. I know you make pump and pump pump action, which is the only beer to win a medal. It's a fantastic beer cup. And it's actually featured on our Halloween episode. So if you go back a few cuts you can find that and a dancing Christmas tree. There was a dancing Christmas tree there was sampling of mushroom adaptogenic a huge fan of

Casey LeFever  58:57  
that beer and I have tears in general to be honest. Oh, yes. Bland after my own heart. That's how we have a disagreement. fisticuffs

Jeff  59:07  
good milkshake IPA? Which ones were which one is what?

Chris Coyne  59:12  
This is our lemon berry sour. So this is a kettle sour. So we use lactic acid bacteria, lactobacillus plantarum for a limited fermentation. relatively warm temperatures in the kettle. Just gives it a nice lactic tan kind of like a yogurt. Yeah, along those lines. We then sterilize it and then fermented with a saison yeast as well. And then we add some lemon puree, some strawberry puree and some blueberry puree to kind of mimic the sort of strawberry lemonade of summer.

Jeff  59:43  
I'll get like a total white Meyer lemon like lemonade.

Brad  59:47  
It looks like lemonade kind of verb actually. Looks like the blueberry actually

Jeff  59:50  
comes from the nose.

Casey LeFever  59:52  
That's actually drivers with a sonic slushy, kinda

Speaker 1  59:54  
Yeah. And like for us, our customer base is driven by our Your space. Yeah, this is sitting on the patio. This ice cold.

Jeff  1:00:05  
No, it's really good. It's so unique. But it

Speaker 1  1:00:09  
almost kind of falls between like a, like a Belgian style sour and like a rattler, which would be sort of like yeah,

Jeff  1:00:15  
that's what I was looking for you know Radler. Yeah. It's like somebody would drink outside of Munich. In the summertime for the limit. Right. Right. Exactly. That's what that's the flavor. I was trying to figure out.

Speaker 1  1:00:24  
Yeah, please in that same space. Okay, this is right. What are you

Jeff  1:00:33  
experiencing? Right?

Brad  1:00:35  
I'm just thinking about Munich kind of thinking about

Jeff  1:00:39  
you. All right. Think about. Think about this. You go for like a hike in the Alps. And you come up to like this Bavarian building, and a guy comes out and plays that long pouring thing. And you're all hot and you drink something like this. It'd be refreshing, right?

Brad  1:00:55  
So I I really like Chris Encinitas. I think this is just not a style for me. Between preference

Chris Coyne  1:01:02  
and quality,

Jeff  1:01:03  
we're really not judging.

Casey LeFever  1:01:08  
Maybe, those are often different.

Jeff  1:01:11  
I don't really have any styles. I dislike No, I certainly might sit around and just drink like these over and over again. But I do like, Yeah, well, I went to actually probably, but it'd be the time of year but man, it's so unique. Like, so are you aiming for like a Rambler? Kind of? Really? The blueberry comes on the back, too. That's what's kind of crazy. This

Chris Coyne  1:01:31  
is us kind of leaning into knowing our customers, you know. So we started out making some kettle sours probably about six years ago and played around with a lot of different flavors. And last year, maybe two years ago now actually, there's two years ago, I did a version in summer with a prickly pear cactus period. Interesting and funky. It was way more sour, though. And no, it's like people are like, Is this what's this like? Pears? I'm like, no, no, it's cactus and like to tell the story in the side of a label or in a 10 second interaction over bars for limiting. So we really kind of went back to the drawing board that hits the seam, you know, notes and feelings of, you know, like a lemonade in the summer. And so kind of playing with that idea of rattler kind of brought the lemon in and really got inspired by kind of that raspberry or strawberry lemonade that you get in the summer. And realizing that this is the kind of stuff you want to drink when it's hot outside and the beautiful Colorado afternoon like I know it's a little rainy today but like the sunny days are coming

Jeff  1:02:28  
Alright, so last but certainly not least, this is pretty epic. How many beers did we test 10 That's the most beers we've ever tasted. So we are now drinking while provisions beer project only beer from all provisions tonight. Echo rude.

Casey LeFever  1:02:42  
Rude rude me is a Flemish word for rent. Ah, so boy I feel like I'm gonna hide the whole podcast here but so the vision is for your project we focus on wild fermented sours and check loggers this being a wild fermented sour so sorry, that's not your jam. Yeah.

Jeff  1:02:58  
Second thing with sours everybody the first taste of like a Flemish style sours like ah you got you got your second taste

Casey LeFever  1:03:07  
is not wrong in that first one's a little bit pH will adjust right that's why we're having steps aren't so harsh your mouse pH will adjust as you drag sour beer and then yeah, so you miss the first beer was called rude and it was a beer made with raspberries strawberries and cherries and wild sour and after we use whole fruit so a whole raspberries whole cherries often local farms if we can so so pits in everything the whole women just bear this bear rebrand was delicious super jammy really fruity. And what we're left with is this fruit and and like French wine you have is this concept of bucket reusing the grapes leftover there's still sugars left and flavor left and making like a lower alcohol secondary wine that's what you give your farm items. Yeah, it was that concept of what was free still inherited still good right putting more beer on it had been fermenting in our fooders and puncheons for this case fooders for four months and but on top of that fruit and got even more you know more flavor out of this time more subtle I think it's still pretty you know out there pretty intense but um There we got used this fruit twice a second use fruit and then blending it with another one of our wild sours that was aged in Buffalo Trace. Bourbon fan there is a hint of Buffalo Trace. Looking for that?

Jeff  1:04:30  
Third sip, take a third sip. I'm telling I'm telling you no no seriously, like the second sip was still pretty damn big. But the third SIP actually see? It is different. That's different. Like different.

Brad  1:04:47  
Totally different though.

Casey LeFever  1:04:48  
Yeah. So Justin gets used to it and after a long night of engineering it's goodness after mindset to like I'm in a wine bar. Yeah, and that's maybe a different I would say wild sour beer is another different wine experience.

Jeff  1:05:03  
Yeah, this is got the real like Belgian sour I mean really Cantiones only beer I can think of. And I actually have been to well provisions a fair bit but I'd never ever get around to tasting the sours because I love the Czech lager so much. So I always just buy a ball at a comb and I haven't bought this one yet but this is serious like this is for people that really love sour Belgian beer and I appreciate the craft

Casey LeFever  1:05:25  
that goes into it. Yeah. months or years to be honest beers and, and unique vessels and unique processes.

Jeff  1:05:32  
Audience Did you taste this one? Yeah.

Think they might be with Brad, but I think this beer is absolutely fantastic. Is

Casey LeFever  1:05:45  
it more acidic? Oh, yes. So lower pH, right. So lower pH be more acidic. And also, not all wild salaries have to be this. I don't want to just make your first one. There are funky versions of say songs and all this stuff that do not have to give me more funky. Absolutely. They have to be sour. Yeah, this is just one

Jeff  1:06:07  
one of them. Yeah, but syneos and wild revision have like way more approachable sours available. This is this is one for the aficionado. Brendon? I like it. Well, I thought I think I chose wisely having it last because I do not be able to taste anything else. Yeah, me too. Actually, this is great. TierPoint

Chris Coyne  1:06:25  
is an efficient auto product. It's often inaccessible to the untrained right, to really appreciate the subtlety, the craftsmanship that goes into a product like this, it often takes an understanding of ingredient of sourcing and all these other things that can give you context to go, Okay, I kind of get what's happening here. And, you know, just coming into it, you know, the first time you have, you know, really smoky, peaty scotch, you might be like, ah, you know, and then all of a sudden, you get to the point be like, Oh, I get what they're doing here. They're layering this phenol with the sweetness. And then, you know, you understand the craft and you understand the product. This is a someone layering, you know, strong acidity with some funk and some fruit and some really nice balance, you know, but this is not for the faint of heart.

Brad  1:07:09  
You've given me talking points when I go and have a martini, right when we're done.

Casey LeFever  1:07:14  
Second, one's better. It's a different approachability, for sure it costs more, right? It takes a lot more time. Like I said, we don't use whole free we're not using puree ism. None of our breweries use extracts. But it's

Jeff  1:07:25  
pretty amazing. I mean, honestly, the fact this beer came from like, down the road, like a couple of years, that's kind of crazy.

Casey LeFever  1:07:32  
You know? Like,

Brad  1:07:38  
actually, so I appreciate the artistry. Greatly do. Oh, it's just, it's just not my style. Right. Cheers

Jeff  1:07:44  
to that. Appreciate the hours. And I think that sums up this whole display. And this, this Yeah. I mean, man, the people that didn't come to this missed out because it got a sample.

Casey LeFever  1:07:57  
teaser for the next one. Yeah, absolutely.

Jeff  1:07:59  
Absolutely. Chris Casey, and Rick, thank you all so much for coming out. Is there anything you want to say about your brewery where to find you anything we haven't covered. We'll make sure it gives you the time for

Chris Coyne  1:08:10  
us. Certainly appreciate the hospitality love the opportunity to talk about the craft that we do the beer that we make. A couple things we got going on is we're about to open our second location where we're about to open and Englewood, just a few weeks from now. We are very excited. It's been a slog, a labor of love and all of the above. We're very, very close. We're waiting for some permits and a few other things are gonna go out on all of our socials. So looks

Jeff  1:08:37  
so great. We absolutely love some news. It's just such a cool syncing community there. I mean, you got people drinking beer, doing yoga people playing board games. I mean, you got the train going by. I mean, it's just if you're ever in the boulder area or the Inglewood area. You definitely gotta check it out.

Chris Coyne  1:08:52  
I think to some for us, we tried to find ourselves as Building Community Through patios and pints. Mission accomplished. Yeah. So I appreciate the fact that you recognize that from the outside looking at,

Jeff  1:09:05  
of course. So all right. Anything else? Casey break anything you guys want to say about that?

Casey LeFever  1:09:10  
Yeah. Thank you guys. I love being here. Right? Just like that. We're also opening another location a bigger better matter Denver. Denver location focus is Brewing Company in Denver, 40th and Dahlia near i 70 in Colorado. All right. Opening hopefully, late June, early July,

Jeff  1:09:28  
I'll have a place to prepare to visiting my son at ¶¶Òõ¶ÌÊÓƵ Denver. I'll be good

Casey LeFever  1:09:32  
there. Yeah. Always be close to good beer. I know. That's for sure.

Jeff  1:09:34  
That's gonna be important as is it my son in college, I'm sure.

Casey LeFever  1:09:39  
Yeah, so we got our hands full and we're super excited. That's great. Awesome. All right, anything else you want to add?

Rick Holt  1:09:44  
We just appreciate the offer to come in today and having a good time meeting good people and everything. We're not opening a second location but we are expanding. We're actually opening a coffee and tea shop as well. It's called Kokopelli deja brew. Ah, So if you've if you've ever had mag greens is going to have the same concept as everything we're using dasblog coffee. Yeah. We're expanding the brewery right now on 800 barrel system a year. And I'm looking to go to about 1250 1400. And then we're expanding our kitchen and our seating area as well. We've got a lot of events coming up for the summer car shows, patio parties and everything. So come on out and see us.

Jeff  1:10:28  
Yeah, so if you're in Colorado, all these studies, they can find all you guys. So so go check them out. I mean, literally, we sit here. We drink 10 beers. And Brad was really happy until the very last one. And I gotta tell you, the last one is amazing. So if you're if you're really into sour beer, I mean, you gotta go check this out. And if you're not then Oh, my God, we had so many good beers. It's amazing. It was fabulous.

Brad  1:10:55  
Thank you to everybody that helped put this together. And the folks that came out.

Jeff  1:10:59  
Yeah. Jeff. Oh, yeah. So come check it out beer here, bring a new West. The displays here. It's pretty amazing. I learned a ton going through it. And unfortunately, because you weren't here tonight, you won't get the sample beer as well you go through, but you can still come see it'll be here through September. You could definitely come check it out. And then you can go to any of these breweries very easily nearby and check them out. So thanks for joining us on crib distillation. It's been really an honor having all you guys here. It's been an amazing learning experience and amazing tasting one on one that will live in my memory. Very good. I'm Jeff York, research director at the Deming, sir I'm joined by my co host,

Brad  1:11:36  
I'm Brad Warner and Cheers to all of you we will talk to you so cheers

Stefani H  1:11:47  
We hope you enjoyed this special episode of Creative Distillation recorded in front of a live audience at the . Thanks to new Nyasha James-Davis at the Museum of Boulder for coordination assistance. Beer Here: Brewing the New West runs through September 3. For more information, please visit . Learn more about our guess breweries by visiting their websites at , (that's the number 4 noses brewing.com), . We'd love to hear your feedback and ideas email us at CDpodcast@colorado.edu, and please be sure to Subscribe to Creative Distillation wherever you get your podcasts. The Creative Distillation podcast is made possible by the Deming Center for Entrepreneurship at the University of Colorado Boulder's Leeds School of Business. For more information, please visit deming.colorado.edu. That's D-E-M-ING and click the Creative Distillation link. Creative Distillation is produced by Joel Davis at Analog Digital Arts. Our theme music is "Whiskey Before Breakfast" performed by your humble hosts, Brad and Jeff. Thanks for listening. We'll see you back here for another episode of Creative Distillation. If you've enjoyed this episode, you may also enjoy Leeds Business Insights, check them out at .