Crooked Stave stakes future on elite brands
Take one look at the colorful tap handles and bottle shop shelves in Colorado and it becomes obvious.
The craft beer available in Colorado is experiencing a renaissance with the addition of dozens of elite brands from across the globe. The new offerings include white whales that craft enthusiasts spend years chasing, top- of- their- class niche beers and three gold medal India pale ales.
And it’s all thanks to a counterintuitive source: a Colorado brewer.
Chad Yakobson, the owner of Crooked Stave Artisan Beer Project, the Denver- based sour brew master, is the driving force behind the movement.
The brewery’s sister distribution company, Crooked Stave Artisans, experienced a massive expansion in the past year or so — moving from a space measuring less than 2,000 square feet to a 20,000- square- foot warehouse, tripling the number of vehicles in its fleet and more than doubling the number of employees.
Known as CSA, the distributor now represents roughly 100 craft beer brands, including top imports Evil Twin from Twelve Percent and Mikkeller from Shelton Brothers, as well as coveted American breweries Hill Farmstead, Melvin, Almanac, Fremont
andWestbrook.
It’s one of the only distribution operations in the nation run by the owners of a brewery. But Yakobson said he doesn’t consider it competition for Crooked Stave.
“I just don’t see it that way,” he said. “I see it as education, letting people drink what they want to drink and celebrating innovation. We probably have more sour breweries than any distributor in the country in our portfolio. But I’m also a beer drinker, and I want to see more great beer in Colorado.”
Yakobson said the expansion is a natural progression of Crooked Stave’s origins, when it self- distributed and collaborated to brew at other breweries.
As the brewery expanded ahead of its five- year anniversary in December, he said he didn’t find a distributor that he believed could properly represent his brand. So he created his own.
“I realized that it wasn’t just an opportunity for us, but all of our friends out there as well,” he said. “They deserve the same kind of representation.”
The model offers a counter to industry trends, in which beer conglomerates are moving into the distribution industry and buying craft breweries. CSA carries only two Colorado breweries— Crooked Stave and Copper Kettle— but specializes in finding boutique breweries with a cachet ( and often higher price point).
What Crooked Stave emphasizes in the select brands it sells