Wynkoop Brewing Company

On this corner is the Wynkoop Brewing Company, set inside the red-brick warehouse that wholesale grocer John Sidney Brown built in eighteen ninety-nine. The building was designed by the firm Gove and Walsh and served as a mercantile warehouse for most of the twentieth century before the surrounding neighborhood slid into disuse. In nineteen eighty-eight four entrepreneurs, John Hickenlooper, Jerry Williams, Mark Schiffler, and Russell Schehrer, paid nine hundred thirty-five thousand dollars to buy the building.

They opened Colorado's first brewpub here on October eighteenth, nineteen eighty-eight. At the time this stretch of Lower Downtown was considered skid row. Hickenlooper later became mayor of Denver, then governor of Colorado, then a United States senator.

Head brewer Russell Schehrer pushed into unusual territory, producing mead, doppel alt, and cream stout at a time when those were rare. The annual Russell Schehrer Award for Innovation in Brewing, presented at the national Craft Brewers Conference, honors his memory. The founders put twenty-two pool tables on the second floor, and Wynkoop Billiards still operates up there.

The brewpub is widely credited with drawing investment and residents into what became the LoDo historic district.