Things are just peachy at Wiley Roots

GREELEY — What would you do with hundreds of pounds of Colorado’s famed Palisade peaches, fresh from Western Slope orchards?

Some area craft breweries might use them as an ingredient in a beer. At Wiley Roots Brewing Co., staffers created not one but two different beverages, using the same peaches twice.

The peachy products are part of the five-year-old brewery’s pivot to a “mixed culture” focus — many different types of yeast working together in the fermentation process. According to marketing manager Scott Davidson, the brewery made the move to stand out from its more well-known neighbor.

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“We’re next to WeldWerks, the cool kid in class,” he said. “It’s hard to distinguish your brewery in Greeley when nationally everybody knows WeldWerks, so we had to do something different. Our wild culture is not sour but funky and tart.”

The shift has paid off with medals at prestigious competitions, including a gold for its “Galaxy Funk Yo Couch” saison at last year’s Great American Beer Festival and a silver at the Mazer Cup International Mead Competition for a kettle sour brewed with orange blossoms and 150 pounds of honey to make a “mead beer” — one part honey to three parts beer.

Adopting the mixed-culture program was a risk for the young brewery, so Wiley Roots shared that risk with a small group of people who paid to become members of its “Catacomb Society” — “kind of like a wine club for breweries,” Davidson said, complete with apparel, special glassware, special events and the first taste of the new mixed-culture products.

“Packed With Peaches was one of the program’s first releases,” he said. “This year they bottled that beer and then, with the peaches that remained, aged another beer on top of that,” a lower-alcohol “table beer.”

“That beer turned out really well,” he said. “It’s not a sour beer. Unlike Packed With Peaches, it’s mostly tart from the fruit — funky, earthy, more of a Belgian-style beer.”

The program’s success has led to rapid expansion at the brewery, which has come a long way from its start on co-founder Kyle Carbaugh’s family’s farm east of Greeley. When Kyle and wife Miranda wanted to turn a home-brewing hobby into a business, Kyle’s father offered up his horse barn, “and the only rent his dad charged him was as much beer as he could drink,” Davidson said.

“Wiley” is a nickname for Kyle, who had been “a scrawny little redhead who got into trouble all his time, so his aunt called him Wiley” for his wily ways, Davidson said. The “Roots” part refers to Greeley — coming back home from Denver-area jobs to the Weld County town where both Kyle and Miranda grew up and went to school. Miranda had been a senior human resources consultant for the University of Colorado Denver, while Kyle had been a senior analyst in supply-chain management for Level 3 Communications.

“Kyle would make the trip from Greeley to Denver every day and then come back after work to work in the brewery,” Davidson said.

Those Greeley roots would prove invaluable for the couple when the young brewery faced a daunting challenge.

Wiley Roots opened in August 2013 in 800 square feet of leased space in part of a building that had been a cement plant before housing Crabtree Brewing. The disastrous deluge and flood that hit the northern Front Range a month later didn’t affect the brewery, but it compromised the banks of the Cache la Poudre River two blocks away — so that when the Poudre flooded nine months later, it sent a couple feet of muddy water into the taproom.

“It was a mess,” Davidson recalled. “The reason why that was so instrumental is because all the beer that we had in the tanks had to go into kegs, and what we couldn’t put into kegs got dumped because the cooling got turned off in the cold room. So we had five weeks to prepare for a first-year anniversary party after having dumped a sizable amount of beer.

“We were closed for about a week to clean up and get the water out. But the community stepped up and helped out. People came to the taproom and lent their hand. Kyle’s mom and dad are pretty handy, so they were a lot of help; even today they help paint the taproom and sand the doors.

“The crazy thing,” Davidson said, “is that soon after, they won bronze at the Great American Beer Festival for their American wheat. You can imagine how surprised they were that they won. Amanda thought it must be another brewery named Wiley Roots, but it was them.”

The expansion since then has come quickly for Wiley Roots, which produced 147 barrels in 2013 but 630 in 2017. The brewery added an additional 5,000 square feet of space in 2016 and 4,600 more — to claim the entire building — in July, for a total of 10,400 square feet. “That’s in the span of less than five years,” Davidson said.

Now comes the job of growing into the nearly doubled space.

The existing 800-square-foot production area is so small, he said, “that we actually have to roll the canning line into the production area and then roll it back out, because there’s not enough room to have it permanently fixed. With this expansion, we can take the production side and put it into that new 4,600 square feet.

“The brewing capacity will grow by leaps and bounds, with new fermenters,” he said. “We could potentially grow into 120-barrel fermenters down the line. It’s not possible right now because of financing, but that’s the goal — to eventually grow into that facility.”

Much of Wiley Roots’ production has been moved from bottles to cans to better fit the Colorado lifestyle, Davidson said. And every new innovation is spiced with a dash of whimsy.

“We rented a slushy machine just because we thought it would be fun,” Davidson said. “People found out, and it became so popular that we had to buy one. So the brewery, on weekends and during releases, will make special frozen versions of these slush beers.

“We made one called Peach Cobbler, with peaches, cinnamon, nutmeg and graham crackers in a frozen sour beer, and people loved it — especially those who weren’t your typical craft-beer drinker.”

This summer the brewery introduced slush-kettled sour beers, not fermented in wood but in stainless steel. “Instead of waiting a year, you can get a beer that’s sour in two days,” Davidson said. “It’s a lot less complex, and the cost is significantly lower than mixed fermentation.

“And what’s nice is that we’ve been playing with the flavors of ‘America’s favorite drive-in’ with cherry limeade, lemon, lime, strawberry, coconut hibiscus, a tropical slush with guava and mango” — and, of course, those peaches.

One feature of the taproom is “vinyl night,” Davidson said. “Every Wednesday we invite customers to bring in their vinyl records, and a proprietor comes in to play them. It’s a great event for locals who love listening to vinyl records, love hanging out and having a beer.”

A lot of that music, he said, is country.

“We’re a little more rustic, more country — because it’s Greeley. Because Kyle grew up on a farm. Because we started in a horse barn.”