Today’s Buffs are finding gold in brewing vats

You don’t have to be a CU-Boulder grad to find success as in the wonderful world of brewing, but, as alums show, it sure doesn’t hurt

By Clay Evans

Call it the buffalo-gold effect: You don’t have to be a University of Colorado Boulder alumnus to find success in America’s booming craft-brewing industry, but it sure doesn’t hurt.

Tap into breweries, pubs and tasting rooms across Colorado and the West—including some of the nation’s largest and most well-established—and all kinds of Buffs bubble up. Perhaps that’s no surprise, given Boulder’s status as one of America’s craft-brewing hopping hubs.



“Just being in Boulder, where even 10 and 20 years ago there was a craft-beer market, is awesome,” says John Frazee (CivEngr’01), who co-founded Louisville, Colorado’s Gravity Brewing in 2012 with Ryan Bowers (MechEng’00) and Julius Hummer, son of one of the founders of venerable Boulder Beer. “I actually started brewing in the dorms freshman year.”

Both the city and the campus were on the leading edge of craft brewing in America. In 1978, Charlie Papazian and Charlie Matzen founded the American Homebrewers Association (AHA) in Boulder, where it’s still going strong.

In 1979, physics professors Alvin Nelson and David Hummer received the 43rd brewing license issued in the United States and started Boulder Beer Co., Colorado’s first microbrewery and a pioneer in the business nationwide. And of course the Great American Beer Festival® debuted at Boulder’s Harvest House hotel in 1982.

And the astonishing growth in the market shows no signs of abating. Craft-brewing brands accounted for 7.8 percent of the American market in 2013, up from 6.5 percent the previous year, with a 14.3 percent retail dollar share of the industry, according to the Brewers Association.

Following on the heels of industry pioneers, CU grads are playing key roles at booming breweries large and small, old and new, including Left Hand, Stone, Tabernash, Gravity, Sanitas, Mountain Toad,Fate, Bootstrap, J Wells and others.



After earning an MBA from the University of Arkansas, Jeff Mendel (Econ’83) returned to Boulder. He took three low-paying jobs, including one as a waiter at Old Chicago, which is legendary for its enormous beer selection. Then in 1987, he took a job fielding questions for Zymaturgy, the journal of the AHA.

“They put me on a two-line rotary phone and said ‘go to work.’ I made $5 an hour answering questions and letters on microbrewing and calling breweries to see what they were up to,” Mendel says. “I wouldn’t consider myself first generation (in the business), but second generation is safe to say.”

He went on to found the association’s microbrewing institute and start an annual conference and trade show for craft brewers. In 1993, he co-founded Denver’s Tabernash Brewing, which later merged with Longmont-based Left Hand Brewing. Left Hand sells some 50,000 barrels of beer annually—Black Jack Porter and Sawtooth are among its favorites—making it the fourth largest microbrewer in Colorado and among the 50 largest in the United States.

Mendel is retired from the day-to-day operations at Left Hand but retains part ownership. He considers himself “a preacher of the craft beer gospel” who proselytizes through beer-appreciation classes and hosting beer and chocolate events with Boulder business Piece, Love and Chocolate.



Steve Kaczeus (MechEngr’82) came to the party a little later, after retiring from a high-tech career in 2011. He’d been making his own beer since his wife Leslie bought him a home-brewing kit in 1993 and, strictly out of love for the art, had begun attending beer conferences and talking to such big dogs of the Colorado brewing scene as Dale Katechis of Oskar Blues and Eric Wallace of Left Hand. He soon decided to take a seven-month course and internship through the Vermont-based American Brewers Guild.

“After I graduated, Leslie and I said, we’re either going to start a brewery or we’re moving to the Caribbean,” Kaczeus says.

Rather than sipping Mai Tais on a sugar-white beach, the couple started Bootstrap Brewing and opened a tap room in Niwot in June 2012. Just two years later they were distributing their punchy, hoppy, American-style India pale ale, Insane Rush, in a distinctive can featuring rabbits, rattlesnakes and, as Kaczeus puts it, “more cow-bell.” Bootstrap will begin canning its Stick’s Pale Ale in early 2015.



Kaylee Acuff (EnvStudies’04) earned a master’s degree, worked for a meteorology software company, earned a Ph.D. in environmental economics at the Colorado School of Mines and began teaching. Then in 2012 she and her husband started Mountain Toad Brewing with three partners—two of them Ph.D.s—in the shadow of the original Coors brewery in Golden.

“Six years ago my husband and I started a hobby. There were 110 breweries in Colorado and we decided to visit all of them,” says Acuff, who handles the business end of things for the brewery. “Once we got to about 100, the number had doubled. But it really helped me develop an affinity for craft beer and quality.”

Like many start-up brewers, Michael Memsic (Comm’03) did informal apprenticeships at some of Colorado’s biggest breweries, including Oskar Blues and Boulder Beer, before co-founding his own business, Sanitas Brewing, in 2013. Unlike many industries, established breweries are surprisingly supportive of start-ups.



“I still have outstanding relationships with both those brewers, and they have been incredibly supportive,” Memsic says. “We don’t look on anyone as a competitor. They are peers in the industry and friends.”

Not all Buff brewers are the stay-at-home type. Some have roamed out to the West Coast, from Rick Blankmeier (ChemEngr’05), brewmeister at San Diego’s nationally distributed Stone Brewing Co. (see accompanying spotlight) to Elan Walsky (Psych’00), co-founder of Coalition Brewing in Portland, Ore.

Like most craft brewers, Santa Fe native Walsky got his start with homebrewing, but he also attended America’s oldest brewing school, the Siebel Institute of Technology in Chicago. After graduation, he moved to Portland, another of the nation’s craft-brewing meccas, where he found a job at F.H. Steinbart Co., the nation’s oldest continuously operated home-brewing supply store.



“I realized I really enjoyed the marriage of art and science. It wasn’t the rigid structure of a laboratory, but I still got to play with science-y stuff,” he says.

He met his business partner Kiley Hoyt when she came into Steinbart in search of high-end brewing equipment and found that they had dreamed up the same name for a brewery, Hobo. They decided to start a tasting room and restaurant, but couldn’t use the name due to a copyright issue. In late 2014, they expanded the brewery in a new space, contracted out the restaurant business and were working on getting Coalition brews distributed up and down the West Coast.

With new craft breweries opening all the time in Boulder County, Colorado and beyond, some business analysts have begun to wonder how much growth is sustainable. But the fact that large global producers now mass produce cleverly disguised “craft” brands, such as MillerCoors’ Blue Moon and Anheuser-Busch’s Shock Top, and have begun buying up small breweries, suggests that retraction isn’t on the immediate horizon.

Mendel believes that changing societal values bode well for craft brewing’s steady capture of market share from big, industrial brands.

“There is a growing distrust of industrial producers of food and drink,” he says. “And there is a growing ethic of business closer to home, a smaller carbon footprint and keeping money in the local economy to create employment opportunities for your neighbors.”

Clay Evans is director of public relations for CU Presents.


Feb. 16, 2015