Is a brewery’s tap room the same as a bar? How much beer does it take to blur that line?
Aspen City Council will attempt to answer those questions tonight when it rules in a dispute between the soon-to-be-opened Aspen Brewing Company and the city’s community development department. The latter recently issued a “land use code interpretation” stating that visitors to the brewery should be limited to one beer when they visit the brewery’s tasting area. The ruling also “asks” that the brewery not show sporting events on its televisions if televisions are installed in the tap room.
The ruling has created a conflict because the Aspen Brewing Company’s North Mill Street location is within the service/commercial/industrial zone district, which exists as a place for types of businesses that cannot afford the commercial lease rates of downtown Aspen. While you will find a vacuum repair shop and a video rental store in the SCI, you will not find high-end retail. Restaurants and bars are not allowed in the SCI.
The dispute between the city and Duncan Clauss and Brad Veltman, co-owners of the first brewing operation to come to Aspen since Flying Dog left town, arose when a family member of a staffer in the community development department saw a newspaper article in the Summit (County) Daily News (which had reprinted an Aspen Times piece). The article quoted Clauss saying, “Ideally, it will be a locals’ hangout and people flock to where the locals are.”
Suspicions were further piqued when city officials found that the brewery’s plans for the tap room resemble a bar room. Community Development director Chris Bendon became worried that the brewery’s tap room would violate the intent of the service/commercial/industrial zone.
A “tap room” is a common feature in a brewery where visitors are offered a chance to sample the goods, meet the brewers and buy beer to take home, usually in half-gallon refillable glass jugs called “growlers.” The city’s definition of a brewery, a use that is specifically allowed in the SCI, is “a facility for the production and packaging of alcoholic malt beverages for distribution which does not generally receive the public or engage in retail sales.”
Bendon notes that the definition could be interpreted as banning tasting outright.
The brewers are proposing to close the tap room by 9 p.m. Monday through Saturday, and by 6 p.m. on Sunday.
To preserve the integrity of the city’s zoning regulations, Bendon said it is important for there to be a distinction in the public’s mind between the brewery’s tap room and a bar. His ruling seeks only to do that, he said.
Bendon said the issue is particularly difficult because he “fought hard” to have a brewery included as an allowed use in the SCI when it was added 10 years ago. He described the idea of having a brewery in Aspen and in the SCI as “a breath of fresh air.”
Aspen Brewing’s founders, along with Chris Bryan, an attorney who is helping them make their argument before the city, find the attempted restriction ridiculous.
“The heat of our argument is that a tasting room is a part of every brewery,” said Clauss, who referred to the conflict as “frustrating,” and said he can think of no other brewery that faces such strict rules on its tasting room.
In an eight-page letter to the city, Bryan, who works at the Garfield and Hecht law firm in Aspen, calls the prescribed one-pint limit a “regulation that will sharply curtail the brewery’s business, its on-site sales, and the broader market of vendors that will hopefully carry and sell the beer in Colorado and throughout the United States.”
Starting a business in Aspen in hard enough without the added hurdle, Clauss noted.
“The reason we’re in Aspen is for that exposure and for the tasting room to be accessible for everybody,” Clauss said, adding that the brewers will be on hand to talk beer with interested drinkers. “We are the Aspen Brewing Company. We don’t want to have our facilities in Basalt.”
The owners argue that the brewery’s hours and the fact that it won’t have pool tables, dancing, DJs and the other trappings of a typical bar room should make it clear in the public’s mind that the 500-square-foot tasting room near the Roaring Fork River is not a bar. They also point out that they have no desire to compete with other bars in Aspen, as they hope to make customers of Aspen’s bars and restaurants.
The proposed restriction on televisions is “non-sensical and impractical,” Bryan’s letter says.
“It would be unfortunate if the city were now to use the machinery of government to bollix a new small business such as the Aspen Brewing Company by not letting it effectively market and (sell) its sole product,” the letter said.
To overturn Bendon’s decision, a majority of the council must find that the community development director denied the brewers their due process, exceeded his jurisdiction or abused his discretion.
curtis@aspendailynews.com
