BOULDER — Rising rents, higher prices for ingredients and minimum-wage increases have affected the region’s brewing industry just as they have many other businesses. But an overriding challenge among executives at Tuesday’s BizWest CEO Roundtable was much more basic: People aren’t going out as much as they used to.
“The general going-out culture has been set back,” said Jeffrey Green, co-owner of Very Nice Brewing Co., which lost its Nederland brewery to a fire on Oct. 8 but still has one in Gilpin County. “I know a lot of people say young people aren’t drinking, but I think it’s a bigger problem. People have stopped going out in general. My wife owns half the brewery, and she doesn’t drink either.”
Steve Conrad, head brewer at Busey Brews Smokehouse and Brewery in Nederland, noted that “the younger generation doesn’t seem to be engaging in the craft-beer world as much as people my age that are on the way out.”
That shift has been very real for Davin Helden, owner of Liquid Mechanics Brewing Co. in Lafayette.
“The generation that helped craft beer get cool are boomers now,” he said. “We’re getting older, and our doctors are saying, ‘Hey, don’t drink four IPAs a day. Maybe like one or two.’ We’re seeing people that are in that age demographic still coming in, but it’s one or two beers instead of three or four. And it’s twice a week instead of three or four times a week. Those are the regulars.
“And then the younger kids, the 21 to 35, grew up differently,” Helden said. “When I grew up, if you wanted to have fun, you found other kids, and eventually that turned into also drinking beer.”
That’s changed with the advent of the internet and cellphone texting, he said. And Green added that “they’re so enthralled with being on social media instead of being with each other in a room.”
“My daughter is 17,” Helden said, “and she’s perfectly content to have contact with anybody she wants to, instantaneously, from the comfort of her own room. She still goes out but it’s less frequent. But even the occasions for drinking are going down with the younger age group.”
That translates into an overall drop in business.
“Overall, we’re down a little under 5% compared with last year, but last year we were also down about 3.5% from the year before. So it’s a slow, steady dropoff,” Helden said. “Some of my friends are also brewery owners, they’re down 40% or 50%. They haven’t made rent in awhile. We’ve seen a lot of closures, and that’s just the tip of the iceberg.”
Lynx Hawthorne, co-founder of Best Craft Distribution and co-owner of Loveland’s Grimm Brothers and Crow Hop breweries, added that “I’ve heard wine coolers and seltzers were going to kill brewing.”
Health concerns are part of the downturn in beer consumption, the brewers agreed.
Helden noted that people today carry apps and other devices that measure their heart rate, how they slept and other factors, and added that, “if you have one or two beers in the afternoon, that score is going to tank.”
Still, said Green, “I think it’s important to remember that we were the pioneers of moderation.
“I grew up with the keg in the cornfield in Ohio where you got really obliterated on not the greatest beer,” he said. “So I think a lot of it with the kids, they grew up watching their parents over-imbibe a little, and it left a bad taste in their mouth.”
High-country brewers such as Very Nice and Busey are conscious that their customers will leave their taprooms and drive on twisting mountain roads.
“We know our customers are driving down the canyon,” Conrad said, and Green agreed, noting that Very Nice offers three beers of less than 5% alcohol by volume.
“I think it will come back around with craft beer, though,” Green said. “Instead of a big bucket of macrobrew, they’re having two or three nice beers. I think it’ll come back to that.”
Helden, too, expressed optimism that the downtown is cyclical.
“At some point, it’ll be like a flip,” he said. “The younger kids will say, ‘Hey, maybe what my parents were doing was cool, being out in person, sitting around a campfire with a keg.”
The brewers agreed that experiences such as trivia nights can still draw customers in.
“People’s habits have changed,” said Matt Wiggins, associate vice president for economic vitality at the Boulder Chamber. “The places that have developed an environment or an ambience, people want to go back there.”
Customers are looking for experiences, Helden agreed, but the remnants of the COVID pandemic linger.
“People didn’t go out,” he said. They got used to drinking alone at home.”
For Bob Baile, owner of Twisted Pine Brewing in Boulder, the prime mission is “AIS: asses in seats.”
Baile’s brewery stopped dealing in distribution, he said, so “we converted our packaging area into an event space. So we’re trying to fill up a lot of that empty revenue to try to get a lot of events, whether it’s just a gathering of 20 or 30 people or a full-blown 100 people where they can have a bachelor party or a wedding rehearsal or something like that.”
Breweries have traditionally been family-oriented places, Baile said, “and even more so now. We’re seeing people in their 40s and 50s that are bringing in their kids and their grandkids, which is a nice thing about our event space. When we’re not having an event, it’s like a family room. We occasionally get the unruly kid, but for the most part we welcome families left and right.”
Advertising can be a part of the recovery as well, noted Kyle Busey, founder of Busey Brews.
“How we can enhance marketing without being part of a conglomerate,” he said. “What can we do other than Facebook and Instagram and all that stuff and a couple sandwich boards on the highway.”
Visibility can help as well.
When Grimm Brothers relocated to The Forge, the former Hewlett Packard campus in south Loveland, “Year 1 was just brutal,” Hawthorne said. At first glance, the location looked to many potential customers like a college campus or a high-security area. But with 47 companies operating in the complex, he said, “that has drawn people in, and they say, ‘Oh, there’s a brewery here too.’”
Location has benefitted Twisted Pine as well, Baile said.
“Since we moved into the current facility that we’re in, over 1,800 residential units have popped up around us,” he said, “so we’ve been very fortunate in that aspect.”
Besides watching their health, Green said, people are watching their wallets.
“As painful as it has to be, prices have to go down,” he said. “People are choosing to stay home. People that would go out twice a week are now maybe going out once a month.
“If we’re going to get people to go out again, it’s not that they can’t afford it, it’s just that they don’t want to go out and spend all that money. They’d rather stay home, watch Netflix, make their own sourdough. I don’t know if I’d be going out much if a pint cost $9 or $10.”
A quip from Hawthorne summed up the issue of how to lure younger customers into taprooms: “I think these guys need a mortgage and kids and a wife, and they’ll start drinking.”
This article was first published by BizWest, an independent news organization, and is published under a license agreement. © 2025 BizWest Media LLC.
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