Brewing up a new business

Pat and Amanda Weakland started brewing their own beer more than a decade ago, long before the hobby became trendy in the U.S. For the garden center owners, the draw was simple: they wanted to drink better beer than what stores offered.

Then in 2007, there was a worldwide hop shortage due to bad weather in Europe and a drop in production in the U.S. Home, micro and craft brewers, who don’t have the big contracts that Budweiser and other massive beer makers have with growers, were hit hardest.

The Weaklands, who own The Windsor Gardener in Windsor, Colo., saw a business opportunity. They could grow and sell their own Humulus lupulus plants to other home brewers (and keep their own hobby going).

“I started accumulating as many different hop varieties as I could, and we started growing them in 2007,” Pat says. “As of now we have 54 different hop varieties that we grow on 2.5 acres. We sell [the plants] nationwide on the internet.”

What started as a small side business began to evolve, and soon Amanda and Pat realized these home brew enthusiasts needed equipment to create their beers. In 2010, Pat and Amanda started selling beer-making supplies in what's now called the High Hops Home Brew Shop, a 1,000-square-foot shed-like structure inside of The Windsor Gardener retail greenhouse. The area now spills out into the gift area and accounts for 30 percent of the gifts category and 15 percent of overall sales.

“We kind of jumped in and said, let’s just go for it,” says Amanda. “We outgrew the home brew shop really quickly, and we added a lot more area within the greenhouse to carry all of the supplies.”

The Windsor Gardener’s website advertises hop plants and home brew supplies just below annuals and perennials, vegetables and herbs. It has become a major category for the 13-year-old store.

Like many business owners can attest, Amanda says, it was a “your customers will tell you what you need” situation.

For example, customers wanted help making their own beer, which led to the Weaklands next business venture. On Sunday afternoons, Amanda, Pat and their son, Zach, started offering home brew classes at the garden center, and they created delicious concoctions that received rave reviews.

“We came up with some awesome recipes,” Pat says. “On the west side of the greenhouse, we have this beautiful view of the mountains, and it overlooks our hop field. While making beer one day, we thought, wouldn’t this be a great place for a tasting room and to have our own brewery here?”

Colorado is a mecca for craft and microbreweries, boasting more than 200, which means 10 percent of all breweries in the country are in the state. But Windsor, which is 60 miles north of Denver and has about 20,000 residents, didn’t have its own local establishment yet. The Weaklands filled that void and launched High Hops Brewery, which consists of a separate production facility on the 16-acre garden center property, and a tasting room known as the "Hop Hut" within the garden center. Zach, who was just a preschooler when the Weaklands opened their first garden center, Plant-A-Scape, is now the head brewer.

“It’s nice in those dead months when garden centers are running negative because it’s helped bring people in,” Pat says. “We have all of these people and all of this noise, and it’s kind of like a party going on. People are drinking beer and the parking lot is full but,” Amanda chimes in here, as she often does: “There is nobody in the garden center,” she says, laughing.

“But we open up the back where we grow plants as an indoor beer garden so people can sit in the sun in the greenhouse and drink beer all winter,” she says. “It can be 0 degrees outside during the day, and it’s like summertime in here.”

The tasting room can sit about 40 people, and the patio adds another 60 spaces in the summer. The greenhouse adds another 60 in the winter. The tasting room attracts new families, younger residents and people who already shop at the garden center. There is plenty of outdoor space for kids to play, so many parents bring their little ones. Food trucks park outside Thursday through Sunday.

“We’re a brewery, not a bar, so we close early, and you don’t get the people who just want to party,” Amanda says.

The tasting room has 16 taps, nine of which are dedicated to their year-round brews. Pat is also a dentist three days a week, so “Dr. Pat’s Double IPA” is in honor of him, complete with a logo of a dentist inspecting the mouth of a hop flower.

A year after High Hops opened, they began bottling and distributing their beer in Colorado, and are looking for other opportunities.

“It helps us be more of a destination because we’re not in a shopping center where there are other stores to help draw customers,” Amanda says. “So we have to have some kind of unique (aspect) to make people want to stop.”

The labor-intensive hop field doesn't bring in much money, they say, but it helps support business, and with so many different varieties, the field itself is a draw. Though the endeavor has mostly been successful, hop yields have decreased since they started growing the plants. A few years ago, they produced over 500 pounds of hops. This year, they only harvested 250 pounds. But they’ve come up with innovative ways to get cheap labor.

“We have a hop harvest festival and invite volunteers to come help pick our hops every year,” Pat says. “We have food, beer and music and a contest to see who can pick the most weight of hops. Just last year we picked over 250 pounds of hops in a little over two hours.”

They also offer novelties like the hop shot. They press dry whole hops using a coffee press, and infuse that nectar into beer. That creates a potent, more aromatic beverage that sets them apart from other garden centers, and breweries, in the area.

“It hit the nerd in us,” says Amanda, who majored in biology and chemistry. “There is something special about drinking your own beer. It’s something you can share with others.”