USA, CO: Zymos Brewing’s new Littleton location to open this fall

Zymos Brewing will be opening its new brewery in the fall of 2023 — but now in Littleton, the Littleton Independent reported on June 8.

In 2020, they planned to be in the Mission Hill Mall at 88th and Wadsworth as a full brewery with 30 taps. They had to ditch those plans due to some issues they ran into.

Alex Tift, one of the owners, said the first was the zoning for the space. When they signed the lease, they didn’t know it wasn’t zoned for a brewery. It was originally zoned for restaurants and alcohol service.

They fit in a different category as a brewery, so they worked with the landlord and the city’s planning commission to update the zoning.

After, they got as far as submitting building permits and architectural drawings to get the construction process started. That’s when they ran into infrastructure issues.

Since they are an all-electric brewery, they needed to increase the electrical service voltage. They said if they used a natural gas system, it probably would’ve worked, but the upgrade cost was over $100,000 to be electric.

Another need was to upgrade their water service line. Since they are a brewery, they needed a higher water flow rate. That was also over $100,000.

The COVID-19 pandemic also played a role.

“The whole future was uncertain, and it just added a lot of time. Our original opening date was actually like September 2020. But with the zoning issues taking a lot of time, and everything getting shut down, there was a lot of uncertainty,” Tift said. “With that uncertainty, with all of the challenges, with all of the infrastructure issues, it really just made sense for us to step back and regroup.”

Now, they are working on their Littleton location at Bellevue and Lowell. It will be in a strip with seven other businesses and have 4,000 square feet of space.

They will be serving up between 20 and 26 taps with a couple dedicated to hard seltzers or housemade sodas. People will be able to bring food inside and the brewery hopes to partner with the other restaurants in the strip.

“We were excited for (the Westminster) location. We had lots of community support, we had a vision for how it's gonna be, we had the architectural plans drawn up. I could see that brewery, it was really hard to leave,” Tift said.

09 June, 2023