Lakewood brewery takes over Springs space eyed by WeldWerks

COLORADO SPRINGS — Lakewood’s WestFax Brewing Co. is expanding out of the Denver metro area with a taproom in Colorado Springs at a site where Greeley-based WeldWerks Brewing Co. had planned to plant its southern Front Range flag.

WestFax officials told the Colorado Springs Gazette that they will be able to make the project work by drafting off of WeldWerks’ previous design and permitting efforts.

WeldWerks abandoned its Colorado Springs ambition in early 2022, citing rising costs as the primary driver of that decision. 

“We’re obviously disappointed,” WeldWerks co-founder Neil Fisher told BizWest in March. “We’re still very excited about and supportive of the Colorado Springs brewing community. It finally became clear over the past couple weeks that costs were not going to go down in a reasonable timeframe. We decided it was best to take that project off the table and focus all of our resources on the Greeley property.”

WeldWerks originally planned to open a 1,300-square-foot taproom and outdoor beer garden in a renovated historic building in downtown Colorado Springs. Despite permitting delays and rising construction costs, Fisher said he was optimistic as recently as the beginning of the year that the project would still be completed.

After breaking ground on the new brewhouse, that project was also hit by construction delays and rising costs. Then the start of the war in Ukraine made it apparent that costs would not come down anytime soon, forcing WeldWerks to prioritize the brewhouse project.

“With the state of everything right now, it was clear that [the brewhouse] was going to be more costly and take more time,” Fisher said in March. “Resources are limited, and there is not a lot of hope that costs will come down.”

Source: BizWest