Midtown brewers living life to the max

FORT COLLINS — Businesses in cities large and small have embraced “transit-oriented development” over the past few decades, locating trendy retail and residential ventures near stations for fixed-guideway public-transportation. So you’d expect that probably was the motivation for a brewery and taproom to plant itself along the path of Max, Fort Collins’ 5-mile-long bus rapid transit corridor — especially if it called itself Maxline Brewing.

Nope.

“Our goal was to be south of Midtown, and this is just the location we settled on,” said Maxline co-owner Kevin Gearhardt. “We do see the buses go by every day, and we’re convenient for people who do ride, but we’re also on the Mason Street bike trail, and we get more bicyclists than Max riders.”

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If you go

Maxline Brewing

2724 McClelland Drive, Unit 190,
Fort Collins

970-286-2855

maxlinebrewing.com

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Maxline wasn’t even the original name he and his wife, Cathy Morgan, wanted, but after becoming embroiled in a trademark dispute with a Virginia brewery, Gearhardt said, “we kicked around several ideas at a party” and settled on the location-specific moniker.

That’s probably fortunate, since the business could have been called something else. “In the early ‘90s, I started homebrewing with four other guys I worked with,” he said, “and we started selling homebrewing supplies on an online ‘bulletin board.’ When we tried to figure out what to call our company, my 5-year-old son, Mike, said, ‘Hey, Dad, how about Big Butt Beer!’ ”

According to Maxline’s website, “for the next 10 years the Big Butt Brewing crew brewed two or three times per month in Kevin’s garage, and other than an occasional experiment gone wrong they produced some very nice ales that they shared with friends at an occasional big party.”

“We were basically making beer and parties all the time, selling t-shirts, having a lobsterfest at my house,” Gearhardt said. “We never did much with that supply business but it was basically a way for us to get supplies for ourselves wholesale — $5,000 at a time.”

He stopped brewing in 2002 but 10 years later saw a post on Facebook from an old college friend who had built an all-electric homebrewing setup. When Gearhardt told his wife he was itching to get back into homebrewing, she responded, “Why don’t we open a brewery!”

“We were focused on being a neighborhood pub model. That was our goal all along — that and making good beer,” said Gearhardt, a native of Memphis, Tennessee, who moved to Fort Collins in 1983.  “We wanted to serve an underserved area, and at the time we opened there were only three other breweries in that area.”

Maxline opened June 17, 2016, on McClelland Drive, midway between the stations for Drake and Swallow roads on the one-mile stretch that Max buses share with vehicular traffic.

“We started out in a building built in 1980 to be a post office annex, leasing a concrete-walled warehouse space,” Gearhardt said. “We started out with 1,900 square feet, but after six months we started working out a deal with the landlord to expand. In October 2017, we expanded our space by 2,500 square feet, so now we’re at 4,400. That increased our taproom seating capacity from 60 to 160, and we have patio seating for about 90.”

Maxline partners with area food trucks daily, hosts live music and bingo nights, and has a private “Brewers Lounge” area for business meetings and other events. “We can make it visually private if not acoustically private,” Gearhardt said.

Visitors to the pet-friendly space might even meet Maxine, the couple’s golden retriever, who even has an “Ask Maxine” advice column on the brewery’s blog.

Maxline has a 10-barrel brewhouse and a total of 100 barrels of fermentation capacity. The brewery started canning its beers in January and sells them in about 30 liquor stores in Fort Collins, Loveland, Windsor and Berthoud. “We’re totally self-distributing,” Gearhardt said, “so until we get caught up and streamlined, we’re not looking to go further.”

Maxline produces an Irish red, an IPA and a peach mango pale ale, and soon will introduce a coffee porter. “We don’t name our beers,” he said. “We just call them what they are by style. But every now and then we give our beer a cute little name just for fun. ‘Pat’s Porter’ is the base beer for our coffee porter; Pat was a drinking buddy for 20 years who passed away from cancer, and this homebrew recipe was his favorite.”

Maxline currently has 13 people on its payroll. “We’re very much like a family,” Gearhardt said. “I don’t think there’s anybody working for us who’s older than our oldest kid.”

Gearhardt, who also is employed full-time as an engineer, does the maintenance at the brewery. “If something’s broken, I’m usually the one who fixes it — but if it’s got something to do with natural gas, I don’t go anywhere near it.”

Morgan is involved in day-to-day taproom operations and working with salespeople, as well as designing the brewery’s décor. “She’s good at picking colors,” Gearhardt said, “so I just generally nod my head and say, ‘Yeah, that looks good.’ We want our space to be your living room away from home.”

The couple wants to keep growth to a level they can handle, he said. “If we can grow to fill our manufacturing capacity, 2,000 barrels a year, from there, who knows? And I eventually want to get back into brewing. I’ve brewed exactly twice since we opened. There’s a small one-barrel pilot system I’d like to have time go play with.”

They’ve gotten equipment from Old Elk in Fort Collins, Spirit Hound in Lyons and WeldWerks in Greeley. “One thing that’s impressed us the most is how helpful everyone else in the industry is,” he said. “If you need some kind of hop or grain, you can get it — and that includes New Belgium and Odell, which is kind of cool because they’re among the top 25 in the country.

“It’s much more of a collaborative and sharing world than what I’m used to as an engineer,” he said. “I’ve gone through 10 company names without ever changing jobs. Comparatively, the brewing industry is much more stable.”