Troy Casey never wanted to open a brewery. The former head of the AC Golden (Coors) secret barrel program loved working in his corner of the brewing giant and thought he would spend his career there, as did his father before him. While his father, a brewing chemist, spent thirty-plus years honing the highly automated process for creating the perfect light lager, Casey’s budding interest in funkier brewing methods—barrel aging and mixed-culture fermentation—ultimately pulled him away from the corporate side.
“My then-girlfriend and now wife moved to Glenwood Springs [about 2.5 hours up in the mountains from Denver] for a great job. I’d make the drive up every weekend, and ended up falling in love with the Roaring Fork valley,” Casey says. “Eventually the switch flipped, and I realized I could start my own brewery. I always thought I’d be a company man at the big brewery—I loved it there—but over time the culture changed and it wasn’t where I wanted to be. So we came to the conclusion to do it; I wrote up a business plan, took some small business classes, raised money from friends and family, and was scared shitless for the next year.”
Launching a new brewery is tough. But launching a niche brewery that brews only barrel-fermented mixed-culture beers (beers fermented not with a single Saccharomyces _brewing yeast strain but with a culture of multiple strains that typically contain _Brettanomyces and Lactobacillus) is considerably tougher. Fermentation time stretches from weeks at a typical brewery to months with mixed-culture fermentation. And after brewing and loading up barrels for fermentation, there’s no guarantee a brewer will get something out of the barrel that tastes good.