Great Storm Brewing's successful first year, thoughts on expansion, philosophy of the nano brewer

It's been a while since we fully caught up with Colorado Springs' smallest brewery, Great Storm Brewing, and now they've been in operation for just over a full year. Great Storm is a nano-brewery, making about 1 barrel of beer each time they brew, which is about two full kegs of beer. In the beer world, that's not very much, consider that Trinity has a twelve barrel brew house, Bristol's is about fifteen, and both of these breweries are relatively small as well.

Over their initial year we've heard more and more people talking about Great Storm and we've noticed a bit of a cult following. So, we decided we better catch up with brewer Jeff Jacobs.

We also thought this would be good timing because this week on the New School Beer Blog an article was posted that took issue with the amount of nano-breweries opening in Oregon. The author is certainly writing in a tongue-in-cheek manner but when we posted this to our Facebook page many of our reader's didn't appreciate some of the things written in the article. I'd like to direct your attention to that article for a moment but I'll also mention a couple things here. In part the author questions the business savvy of nano-brewery owners and suggests that from a beer geek standpoint it isn't always worth the time and effort of seeking all the newest breweries if they aren't offering something wholly unique. In the author's scene the beers can be hit or miss, but show up so infrequently that if he happens to see them on tap at two different times, and both are bad, he will probably be unwilling to give the brewery another shot if and when he sees it on tap again.

While I might agree about the impossibility of keeping up with all the new breweries (I'm also totally happy with this impossibility), there were a number of questions I had about this article, while also keeping in mind the author's tone where we know he's not being fully serious. Considering that Great Storm has developed a large reputation in town, and the couple beers I've had from them recently were really tasty, I decided to ask Jeff his thoughts on the topic. While I was at it, I also sent him a few additional questions to see if he's growing and has new plans. He does! Check it out:

You've only been open a year and you have a strong following here in Colorado Springs, did you expect this sort of success?

We no doubt expected success, or we would not have ventured into this. But, no, we thought we would have had a much more modest success our first year. We thought things would calm down after a few months when everyone who was interested had a chance to come check us out, but it’s never really let up. We ended our first year beating our most optimistic financial projections by about 50%, and that took us all by surprise.