The Crested Butte News Serving the Gunnison Valley since 1999
Denver’s Zuni Street Brewery adding a new location
[ By Katherine Nettles ]
A new brewery is preparing to break ground in Crested Butte South this summer, and may be serving cold brews on its outdoor decks by the spring or summer of 2022 if the construction process goes as hoped. Zuni Street Brewery received approval on its 8,251 square foot, two-story brewery, tap room and commercial kitchen project last week, and will be located on Elcho Avenue within CB South’s growing commercial district.
The CB South Property Owners Association (POA) architectural design review committee held a hearing on March 18, following a 14-day public comment period, and POA association manager Dom Eymere said the public did not submit any comments or concerns. “We had a fairly robust conversation,” said Eymere of the Zoom hearing that included owner Willy Truettner and project architect Andrew Hadley. “But we have been working with Hadley and the owner closely on this for quite some time.”
Truettner is no stranger to Crested Butte, where he lived in the early 2000s. He graduated from Crested Butte High School and later married his high school sweetheart, Crested Butte native Theresa Truettner, in 2016.
Truettner opened up the original Zuni Street Brewery in Denver in 2017, after extensive brewing experience that included work at Bells Brewery in Michigan, New Belgium Brewery in Fort Collins and studying German brewing in Munich. He says once the brewery in Denver felt established the vision was always to return west.
“We’ve always wanted to open something in the mountains, and it turned out Crested Butte was the right place to go. CB South we liked a lot; I think it has a lot of potential to become something really cool, and with an increasing population… I think it’s good to give people a place to go close to home. And Zuni Street Brewery itself is ready to grow and to expand,” he said while speaking with the Crested Butte News on Tuesday after the POA’s unanimous design review approval.
The plan is to break ground in mid-May, get the structure completed this summer and fall and then take the winter to finish the inside work with fermentation tanks installed, the first batches of beer brewing and an opening by spring or early summer 2022.
Eymere said parking was the biggest hurdle for the project to fine tune in the design review process, with two separate commercial requirements at play. “The tap room aspects of the building would require one parking spot per 300 square feet,” said Eymere. But other aspects of the project apply to the general commercial requirements in the area of one parking spot per 1,000 square feet. Combining the two requirements, all parties agreed to around 19 parking spaces, and of course bike racks on the premises as well.
“They’ve made some great additions to the plan, paving a sidewalk, and increasing the sidewalk size,” said Eymere.
If social media is any indication, the Facebook Crested Butte Community Forum had only positive comments and “likes” to the news of Zuni Street Brewery’s pending arrival. The lack of any controversy may be a good omen for Truettner, who plans to move back to the valley with his wife in the next year. The Truettners’ wedding photo was captioned by the Crested Butte News on December 2, 2016: “The ceremony was followed by possibly the largest townie takeover in recent memory, where the wedding party and guests biked through town to party down at the Town Ranch.”
Seems like a good match for the North Valley.
