Brewing, Cideries & Spirits  July 5, 2013

Kettle and Stone brewery began as ‘leap of faith’

BOULDER – Lease in hand and ready to sign, co-owner Eric Huber was getting set to fly to Wisconsin to buy the Kettle and Stone Brewing Co.’s brewhouse last year when things fell through on the location of the new business.

Huber and co-owners Marty Lettow and Sanjiv Patel might have had to scramble, but they were hardly deterred, purchasing the brewhouse – former dairy tanks that had been repurposed into brewing equipment – anyway.

“We bought the brewhouse without even having real estate,” Huber said. “Marty’s like, ‘Buy it. We’ll find the field. Just buy the tractor.’ We did it all on a leap of faith. … Pretty soon after that, we found this location.”

SPONSORED CONTENT

Ways to thank a caregiver

If you have a caregiver or know someone who has been serving as a primary caregiver, March 3rd is the day to reach out and show them how much they are valued!

If Kettle and Stone’s June 21 soft opening was any indication, such a leap was barely even a risk. The owners moved an estimated 400 people through their 1,000-square-foot Gunbarrel taproom that day. Such is the life of a craft brewery in the beer mecca that is Boulder County.

Kettle and Stone opened officially on June 26 at 6880 Winchester Court, capping off about 18 months of planning and construction for an ownership trio that came together from diverse backgrounds.

Huber, a California transplant, had been brewing for about 10 years, first for Mountain Sun in Boulder and then for Longmont-based Oskar Blues, when he met Marty Lettow, a native Iowa farmboy, home brewer and Lutheran minister at Shepherd of the Hills church in Gunbarrel. The two hit it off at a beer dinner in Lyons in 2010 and eventually hatched the plan for Kettle and Stone, bringing Patel, a Cleveland native and the cousin of Huber’s wife, onboard as the numbers guy after he’d spent 15 years working in the accounting department for Rock Bottom Breweries.

If you haven’t heard of Kettle and Stone, that’s kind of the way the owners planned it. Not wanting to get lost in the discussion of the area’s exploding craft beer scene while in planning, they kept quiet about their endeavors.

The trio estimates they spent a little less than $250,000 to get the brewery going, avoiding taking on equity partners and saving about a third of the actual cost by doing much of the work themselves.

The result is a 5,000-square-foot, 10-barrel operation expected to produce about 750 barrels of beer in the first year with room to grow.

Lettow said he and the other owners joked as they added finishing touches a couple of weeks ago that, “This is ours now, but it’s about to not be ours anymore.”

That happened on June 21, Lettow said. “It was like, OK, it’s everyone’s but ours at this point. We’re just steering the ship.”

Serving up Solstice Wheat, Opening Day IPA and Freedom Stout, Kettle and Stone has room to grow in its new digs and plans to distribute eventually. But priority No. 1 is serving its neighbors in the taproom. Kettle and Stone is nestled in an office park with businesses such as Micromotion, Emerson and IBM nearby, not to mention a couple of sizable neighborhoods.

“I always knew deep down this is what I wanted to do,” said Huber, who created Deviant Dale’s IPA while at Oskar Blues, of starting his own brewery. “We want to expand and grow, but we want to maintain an extreme eye on quality.”

BOULDER – Lease in hand and ready to sign, co-owner Eric Huber was getting set to fly to Wisconsin to buy the Kettle and Stone Brewing Co.’s brewhouse last year when things fell through on the location of the new business.

Huber and co-owners Marty Lettow and Sanjiv Patel might have had to scramble, but they were hardly deterred, purchasing the brewhouse – former dairy tanks that had been repurposed into brewing equipment – anyway.

“We bought the brewhouse without even having real estate,” Huber said. “Marty’s like, ‘Buy it. We’ll find the field. Just buy the tractor.’ We did it all…

Sign up for BizWest Daily Alerts