Absolute Threshold Brewery planning summer opening in Fort Collins

FORT COLLINS — A taproom and microbrewery will open by late summer in a densely populated but underserved area of west Fort Collins if permitting and construction go as planned.

Absolute Threshold Brewery is planned for the western end of the same building that houses a Safeway grocery store in the Drake Crossing shopping center at Drake and Taft Hill roads.

“We’re about a month out from construction,” said owner Will Herdrick of Fort Collins. “We’re just waiting for the alcohol permits and building permit. We hope to open by late July or August.”

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Herdrick plans a 2,200-foot taproom and 4,500-square foot patio for what he described as a family-friendly, dog-friendly space. It’ll be a neighborhood brewery and community gathering spot.” Live music may be featured on the patio in summer, he said.

It’s the first such project for Herdrick, a software coder and salesman who holds information-technology degrees from Missouri State University in Springfield, Mo., and Regis University in Denver. He moved to Fort Collins from Denver with his wife in 2013. They started homebrewing about a decade ago, he said, and won a “best in show” medal for a milk chocolate stout at the Denver County Fair last summer. However, he said the taproom wouldn’t specialize in any particular genre of brews.

“We won’t specialize in Belgian or German or anything else,” he said. “There are a lot of different things we’d like to do.”

Herdrick has no partners — “we’re self-funded, unfortunately,” he said — but he’s optimistic because there are few taprooms in that part of the city.

The name Absolute Threshold simply caught his eye, he said.

“Back in the day when we all used to read books, I liked to read encyclopedias,” he said. “I came across ‘absolute threshold’ and it was a scientific term that just stuck in my head.”

An “absolute threshold” originally was defined as the lowest level of a stimulus — such as light, sound or touch — that an organism can detect. In more modern times, it has come to mean the level at which a stimulus can be detected at a specified percentage — often half — of the time.

Herdrick said he plans to invite food trucks to the site, “and we’ll look at possibly adding a kitchen in phase two or three.”

Fort Collins-based RB&B Architects will oversee the tenant finish on the business at 2160 W. Drake Road. The building is owned by Dominick’s Finer Foods Inc. of Walnut Creek, Calif.