Over the past decade, Wyoming’s Roadhouse Brewing has built a reputation for dedication to both quality and sustainability—and earlier this year, it acquired neighboring Melvin to form a new group called Pure Madness. Here, the Roadhouse cofounder talks about confident growth, the challenges of integration, and saving green by going green.
CBB // Give me the two-minute history of Roadhouse. What drove you to launch a brewery where you did, making the kinds of beers that you now do?
CC // We started in 2012 as a brewpub. We didn’t get into production brewing until 2018, and we started the brewery mainly out of pure passion. I grew up in the brewing world—worked at Dogfish Head when I was younger, I’m from Delaware—so I kind of saw that progression in the mid-90s, then got way into homebrewing and entering competitions, things like that. So that led to the idea that I wanted to start a brewery. But I didn’t want to do it unless we did it as the brewpub model. That’s how I teamed up with [cofounder] Gavin [Fine]. I actually approached him back in 2011 and said, “Hey, you’ve got an existing restaurant here. It’s a cool concept, but I think if we built a brewery inside the restaurant, you could handle the food, I could handle the beer, and I think it would work well for both of us.” And so that’s kind of the origin story of Roadhouse.