Rock Bottom Is Down to One Colorado Brewpub, and It Is in Loveland

A typed notice taped to a door on the 16th Street Mall this past June. That is how it ended for the original Rock Bottom Brewery, the one that started all of this back in 1991. The note read, "Unfortunately, we have permanently closed. Thank you for allowing us to serve the downtown Denver community." Thirty five years, and it goes out on a piece of paper and some tape.

And now here we are in August 2026, and the math is brutal. Westword reported on August 15 that the Centennial location at 9627 E. County Line Road has closed. Highlands Ranch at 1505 Park Central Drive went in the same wave. The Colorado Springs spot at First & Main Town Center shut its doors back on April 9. So a brand that was born in Denver, a brand that helped build Colorado craft beer into what it is today, is down to exactly one location in the whole state. That one is in Loveland. That is it.

Most people do not realize how big this thing got. So let me back you up.

The Boulder guy who started it all

Frank Day was a Boulder restaurateur, and in 1990 he opened the Walnut Brewery, the first brewpub in Boulder. That place was the blueprint. A year later, in 1991, he took the idea to downtown Denver and put Rock Bottom on the ground floor of what was then the Prudential Building at 16th and Curtis.

Here is the part I love. The name was a joke. Prudential's whole thing was "Get a piece of the rock," the Rock of Gibraltar logo, all that. Frank Day put a brewpub in the bottom of their building and called it Rock Bottom. Get it. Rock. Bottom. That is the kind of move you make when you are having fun.

And keep in mind the timing here. This is early Denver craft beer, the real ground floor. John Hickenlooper had opened Wynkoop Brewing Co. in 1988, and Rock Bottom became one of the early rivals to it. Before Hickenlooper was the mayor, before he was the governor, before he was a U.S. senator, he was just a brewpub guy trying to keep the taps flowing while Frank Day set up shop a few blocks away. That is the Denver most people forget existed.

From one brewpub to almost 200

Now here is where it gets wild. In 1994 Rock Bottom Restaurants Inc. went public. First publicly traded restaurant brewery in the country. Nobody had done that. And it worked. The chain expanded to nearly 200 locations. In 2001 it moved more than 39,000 barrels of beer and was the top selling brewpub chain in America, run out of a headquarters in Louisville, Colorado.

Think about that. A Denver brewpub named after an insurance company's slogan became the biggest brewpub chain in the country. That does not happen by accident.

But then the corporate hands start passing it around, and this is where the story stops being about beer and starts being about balance sheets. In 2010 Rock Bottom merged with Tennessee based Gordon Biersch to form a company called Craftworks, backed by a

50 million investment led by Centerbridge Capital Partners. From there the brand kept moving. It ended up under Houston based SPB Hospitality, and then in December 2024 it got sold again, this time to the California based Kelly Companies out of San Diego.

So a Colorado original, born at 16th and Curtis, is now owned by a company in San Diego. And the company's website today lists only a handful of Rock Bottoms nationwide. Loveland is the last one standing in the state that made it.

Frank Day did not live to see the last of it

Frank Day died in August 2025 at 93. He did not just start Rock Bottom. This guy also founded Old Chicago and the Denver ChopHouse, and he owned the Hotel Boulderado up in Boulder. His wife, Gina, was the longtime owner of Boulder Beer Company, whose pub closed in early 2020. So the Day family was basically a one household craft beer empire on the Front Range, and one by one those pieces have been going quiet.

Here is the real story on why any of this matters, even if you never once ordered a beer at a Rock Bottom.

What this actually says about downtown

Watch where the closures landed. The 16th Street Mall. Highlands Ranch. Centennial. Colorado Springs. These are not random. A restaurant survives on foot traffic and a reason for people to be nearby, and a 35 year old flagship on the 16th Street Mall closing on you tells you something about what downtown Denver retail and office demand look like right now. When the anchor tenant on the ground floor of a landmark building packs it in, that is a signal, if you ask me. Landlords watch it. So do the people buying and selling property nearby.

I am not going to sit here and tell you Rock Bottom was the best beer in Colorado in 2026. It had not been the local darling in a long time. But it was first. It was ours. It went public before anybody else dared to. And now if you want to raise a glass at the last one in the state, you drive to Loveland.

Thirty five years, from a slogan joke at 16th and Curtis to a single table up north. That is the whole arc.