Colorado

Left Hand Brewing co-founder Eric Wallace has assessed today’s challenging landscape for craft brewers and believes his Longmont, Colorado-based company may have a solution.

A pair of alcohol-adjacent bills have been introduced in the Colorado Legislature. One (SB24-181) seeks to create a tax on beverage-alcohol products distributed in the state to fund “alcohol and related substance use disorder prevention, early intervention, treatment, harm reduction and recovery services” across Colorado.

In the latest installment of Brewbound’s A Round With – a weekly Insider-exclusive Q&A series with industry leaders – Karen Hertz dishes on running a brewery that’s defying the trends. Hertz is the founder and chief brewista of Golden, Colorado-based Holidaily Brewing, the country’s only certified gluten-free, woman-owned craft brewery.

Lafayette, Colorado-headquartered Westbound & Down (W&D) has acquired Aspen Brewing and Capitol Creek Brewery from High Country Brewing LLC. The deal, which closed December 1, includes Aspen’s 7,000-barrel capacity production facility and both breweries’ brewpubs.

Odell Brewing continues to expand its beyond beer offerings with Allkind Hard Kombucha, which will launch this fall. Last year, the Fort Collins, Colorado-headquartered craft brewery rolled out the OBC Wine Project, a collection of canned wines.

The craft brewery where the brut IPA trend started in 2018 shuttered with little warning over the weekend. San Francisco brewpub Social Kitchen and Brewery announced it would close its doors last weekend, citing lease issues.

After posting a 6% decline in volume in 2019, Durango, Colorado-based Ska Brewing has refreshed its packaging and launched a hard seltzer line, with plans to to release a low-calorie IPA and open a brewery and distillery in Boulder, in an effort to find new avenues to grow the business.

After three decades, Odell Brewing’s founders — Wynne, Doug and Corkie Odell — plan to exit the brewery’s day-to-day operations starting in January 2020, as part of a planned leadership transition. The employee-owned, Fort Collins, Colorado-headquartered craft brewery will turn to chief sales and marketing officer Eric “Smitty” Smith as its next chief executive officer.

Three Colorado breweries — Renegade Brewing, Good River Beer and Rocky Mountain Sector — have merged to create the Brewer’s Co-Hop, a new business venture that will share a production facility and back-of-house resources in Denver.