New Brewery Series: Great Storm Brewing
This week we are showcasing some new breweries that are set to open soon in the area. We are very happy to welcome three new breweries to Colorado Springs and one in Poncha Springs, just outside of Salida. We'll post one or two a day for the first couple days of February. This post will be dedicated to Great Storm Brewing...See the whole New Brewery Series here.
I am pleased to announce what seems very likely to be Colordado Springs' next brewery - Great Storm Brewing. This will be a little place to start out, a true mom and pop shop. The folks behind the scenes are Lynn and Jeff Jacobs. They've got a location picked out and it looks as if they'll be opening up before you know it. I'll let you read what they're planning to brew and how they've gotten to this point. We'll definitely keep all of you posted on when they open up officially. The questions below were just a series of questions I fired off to Lynn and Jeff in a couple emails.
I hear you have a location picked out and you might open really soon?
Yes, our address is 204 Mount View Lane #3, Colorado Springs, CO 80907. Directions to the spot by car or by bike appear on our website. The brewery is currently under construction and we hope to open our taps in the spring, probably in March.
What's your vision for the brewery? And what size brewhouse will you have?
We like to say that our beers are a marriage between the traditional and the rebellious. We're looking for that perfect balance between uniqueness and drinkability. We hope that Great Storm Brewing will offer our customers something they may not have seen before, yet something they'll want to drink again. With friends.
I think when we open we will be Colorado Springs' newest, and smallest brewery. With only a one-barrel kettle and eight one-barrel fermenters, we'll be giving new meaning to the term "hand-crafted." We'll be a production brewery to begin with, focusing on what we feel we do best: making beer. However, we do hope to partner with some restaurants in the area to provide food at the brewery. If our small start is a success, we'll look to add other offerings that we think our customers may want.
What kind of beers do you plan to focus on? Do you have any ideas on what your main line-up will be or what kind of special beers you'll make?
We have so many beers we have made that have turned out well, but alas, only eight taps initially. So we hope to rotate new things through all of the time, and let our customers decide which should have a permanent place in the kegerator. Ideally, I'd like to have four taps dedicated to favorites, and four dedicated to seasonals and new brews so we always have something different and fresh for people to try.
We hope to reproduce some of our best recipes that we enjoyed when we were homebrewing. Some of them include: Seven Wolves IPA, a very hoppy and strong but very pale IPA. Shine On, a Belgian golden ale that’s heady, smooth and spicy. Black Bear Zwartbier, a spiced and light-bodied black lager. Rum Raisin Stout, a creamy and sweet oatmeal stout flavored with rum and raisins. Still retooling that last one since it’s illegal to add rum to beer commercially.
How did you decide you wanted to brew beer?
I'd always been interested in making beer, but always had other things going on. Then my wife's sister and her future husband moved to town, and he and I started kicking around some ideas of things to do together, and he told me he thought it would be fun trying to make beer. I told him I'd always wanted to try that too, so we went out and bought a beer kit and made our first batch, an IPA, together. The first batch I made was around this time in 2006. It turned out so well, I was hooked, and the hobby just kept getting bigger and bigger.
What are some of your favorite breweries that you have been inspired by?
There are so many great breweries out there that have inspired me, I fear you don't have the column space to list them all. One of the great things about the craft brewing community that I have not seen very often in other industries is the sense of collaboration and family. Craft brewers tend to share their experiences, ideas and passions and inspire one another in the pursuit of better beer. Every craft brewer I've met has inspired me in some way.
If I must name names, we like big beers, bold and flavorful beers, and were inspired early on by the kinds of beers Stone makes. We’re also continually inspired by the creativity and uniqueness of Dogfish Head. And we’re real hop heads so we’re always in awe of folks who make a great IPA like Odell, Ska, Breckenridge, New Belgium, Surly and Russian River. But I hesitate to put down a list for fear of who I’m leaving out. You can pretty much name a brewery and I can tell you something I love about what they’re doing.
How did the name Great Storm Brewing come into being?
It started as a kind of tongue-in-cheek suggestion based on our dog's name, Storm. But the more we thought about it, the more we liked the connotation of something big about to happen, and the kind of stormy swirl of foam and beer you get in a just-poured glass, and the name just kind of stuck.
Location and Opening Date?
204 Mount View Lane #3, Colorado Springs, CO 80907. Opening probably in the Spring, probably in March.
Staying in touch with Great Storm Brewing:
Great Storm Brewing website.
Great Storm Brewing on Facebook.
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