Denver’s LowDown Brewery closing after a successful 9-year run

When Scott O’Hearn and Philip Phifer opened LowDown Brewery + Kitchen in 2014, it was on their own terms: a brewery with food — unusual at the time — on an underused corner in Denver’s urban core, and serving straightforward beers rather than trendy styles.

On Sept. 30, O’Hearn will close the brewery for good, but once again it is on his own terms, for the most part, which is a rare achievement for craft breweries in Colorado.

“It was a really good run. We had a great staff culture and customer culture … and we were extremely profitable, even through Covid,” he said.

But about a year ago, LowDown’s landlord began asking whether the brewery wanted to renew its lease at 800 Lincoln St. because he’d received an offer from a developer who wanted to buy the building. At first, O’Hearn and Phifer (who moved to Oregon a few years ago and backed away from day-to-day operations) rejected the notion of closing. But then O’Hearn said he began to think about it more.

“We looked at a number of things,” he said, including the ways the beer industry has changed and the way that the downtown area has changed since the pandemic — with more people working from home. And they realized that they weren’t confident about whether LowDown would continue to be as profitable. “We just weren’t sure about signing on for another five years.”

In the end, they negotiated a buyout of their lease that O’Hearn said made financial sense for them, for their landlord and for Trailridge Partners, the developer who bought the property for $12 million. Trailridge plans to build an 18-story, 330-apartment tower on the site, which is on the northeast corner of 8th Avenue and Lincoln. Demolition of the building will probably start sometime in 2024.

With other small breweries having closed in recent years because of rising rents, rising costs, declining sales, fatigue and the lingering effects of the pandemic, O’Hearn said it made sense to go out on top.

O’Hearn and Phifer first met in 2008 at Rock Bottom Restaurant & Brewery, the Boulder-founded national brewpub chain. O’Hearn was the brewmaster at the now-closed Westminster location, but he had already spent 15 years with the company and was a trainer for other brewers. Phifer, one of the brewers he trained, was the brewmaster at the Park Meadows location.

When they left to form LowDown, their goal was to pour that experience and know-how into their own thing. At the time, most of the breweries that were opening in Colorado didn’t serve food or package their beer — the opposite of what breweries had done in the decades before that. But O’Hearn and Phifer liked the pub model they’d been a part of at Rock Bottom.