TRVE Brewing, which opened in Denver in 2012 with a tiny three-barrel brewing system and a big personality, said Wednesday that it will stop making beer at the large off-site production facility it added in 2015 — a non-public-facing building known as the Acid Temple — and shift all of its Colorado production to New Image Brewing in Wheat Ridge.
The heavy-metal-themed brewery will keep its 227 Broadway taproom open, however. Plans are also on track for a second taproom, opening later this year next to the Mission Ballroom.
“The reasons for this are multifaceted and complex, like any business decision, and one that our management team certainly didn’t take lightly,” said TRVE founder and co-owner Nick Nunns in an email. “We’ve been making beer at The Acid Temple since 2014 in a very old leased building on a very manual brew system. Like every rented building in Denver, our rent has raised exponentially in the last year while the quality of that rented space has continued to decline.”
In addition, Nunns and his co-owners, Zach Coleman, who is head brewer, and EJ Nunns, who is chief operating officer, have all moved to Asheville, N.C., where they are opening yet another taproom and brewery for TRVE. (Nick Nunns and EJ Nunns are married.)
Hyoung Chang, The Denver Post
Denver, CO – JUNE 10 : TRVE Brewing Co. is photographed in Denver, Colorado on Friday, June 10, 2022. (Photo by Hyoung Chang/The Denver Post)
The move comes amid a wave of craft brewery closures, mergers and consolidations over the past year as the industry reshapes itself after the COVID-19 pandemic and because of flat beer sales nationwide and rising prices for raw materials. In November, for instance, Dry Dock Brewing shuttered its Aurora production facility and moved the majority of its beer-making to Great Divide Brewing.
“If you’re in craft beer right now, we’re all pivoting towards combining resources, lessening our collective footprint, and looking for innovative means by which to grow our businesses while not over-leveraging them,” Nick Nunns said. “I think because beer is such a community-driven and celebratory beverage, it’s easy to forget that when you strip it down, it is a business.
“It’s beholden to the same tides that pull on any product-based, money-dependent endeavor: inflation, rent hikes, cost of goods (aluminum, glass), employee retention and satisfaction, crowded marketplaces, and the list goes on,” he continued. “If we could make beer and listen to metal music in a vacuum we would, but that’s just not how small businesses … function.”
New Image Brewing, which started in Arvada in 2014, opened its own large production space and second taproom at 9505 W. 44th Ave. in Wheat Ridge in 2022. Last year, another brewery, Primitive Beer, also closed its taproom and moved production to New Image.
Nunns said he met New Image co-founder Brandon Capps during the Great American Beer Festival last fall. “Brandon … has, a huge reverence for what we’ve built in TRVE, especially what Zach has built in our beer program, so we were encouraged by the amount of care this would likely bring to the table. After many discussions around the business, recipes, process, buying power, and company ethos, we mutually determined this would be a great move for everyone.”
For his part, Capps acknowledged that making beer at another company’s brewery — which in most cases is known as contract brewing — “has long held a less than stellar reputation in craft beer, and, being candid, it’s not totally unwarranted.”
“It tends to be associated with compromise, where brands have to work within the limitations of a typically very large manufacturer, beholden to their processes, ingredients and general willingness to go out of their way to do anything special. Historically, it’s not been a model that’s known for passion and creativity,” he continued. “But we see a different path forward.”
Capps said the two companies both have a dedicated staff, but scale matters.
“When we’re talking about how to afford the cost of real estate in a market like Colorado, how to afford truly liveable wages for brewing employees, how to continue to invest in our infrastructure and improve our processes, you’re talking about growth. That said, the kind of growth we’re talking about is difficult to achieve with one brand anymore and in many cases, that kind of growth pushes us away from the focus on creativity and quality that got us into beer in the first place.
“By pursuing the right kind of partners and relationships, we’re enabling ourselves to re-invest in our core identity… brewers. We’re invested in making beer that we can stand behind, period. Contract brewing, co-manufacturing, whatever you want to call it, it’s an opportunity to learn, to take on new challenges and to expand our own skill sets as brewers.”
As a result of the change, TRVE had to lay off one person, but Nunns said the rest of the brewing team have been offered other jobs at TRVE. Eventually, TRVE hopes to open a third location, a “small brewpub-style space in Denver with a system appropriately sized to brew the smaller project beers we love to make.
“Colorado will always be home to TRVE, and we’re excited about what this reimagining and expansions means for our future out there.”
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