Chapter 1 - An Autobiography

In a cold garage with a bottle of Oude Lambiek De Cam and a grip of hand rolled cigarettes, a question was pondered, “Is there a strictly sour beer tap house?” Sour breweries, sure, but a tap house with a collection of the best wild and sour beers all under one roof? No. We all looked at each other, and an idea was born.

Two weeks of endless calls, texts and few shared sour beers in that same garage, we garnished our idea and had a plan. First, we must find the new digs. We traveled from one location to the next with nothing living up to what we had envisioned. Finally, after a day of walking from one dusty space to the next we arrived at our last stop, 2801 Welton Street. She stood right there in the heart of Five Points. Old, run down, hobbled and on its last leg, we entered. We took in our surroundings with awe. Our gaze was met with patched floors, a ceiling falling in above us, and four decades of undisturbed dust. It didn’t look or feel like much, but when the shock settled from our eyes we knew this was where Denver’s first sour beer tap house would lie. It didn’t look like much, and the project seemed a bit out of reach, but that cold garage vision was starting to take shape.

We loved the location, and the space was looking just right, but something kept us looking further, we were intrigued. We continued exploring the 2801 Welton. As we paced deeper into the shadows, that's when we saw it: a trap door. “What’s down there?” we thought. "Probably a basement full of dirt, we’ll just seal it up." We descended a makeshift ladder into a cold, dark cellar. Cellphone flashlights lit our way. We glanced around the cellar with our dull, synthetic lights barely illuminating our faces and like newlyweds looking at their first house, we all exclaimed in unison, “It’s perfect, we’ll take it!”