Sadboy Creamery opened its first walk-in pint shop at 1201 E. Colfax on Sept. 19, 2026, ending the Monday-morning online scramble for Denver's priciest ice cream.
Nine fifty in the morning. That is when the first person in line showed up outside 1201 E. Colfax Ave., Suite 101, waiting for a scoop of ice cream they could not actually scoop.
Photo: westword.comBy noon, when the doors finally opened on Saturday, Sept. 19, a reporter counted somewhere between 150 and 200 people stretched down the block. For ice cream. In a line. On Colfax.
So here is the thing most people do not realize about Sadboy Creamery. Until this storefront opened, buying a pint was basically a competitive sport. Every Monday at 10 a.m., owner and ice-cream maker Michael Kimball dropped a limited batch online, and the whole city went feral. One summer Monday, more than 1,650 people were sitting on the website at 9:59 a.m., one minute before the drop, and the entire run sold out within minutes. People called it the Monday-morning Hunger Games, and honestly that is not an exaggeration.
Now you can just walk in. Which is dangerous for me.
Photo: kygo.comFrom 14 pints to 700 a week
Let me give you the scale here, because it is wild. Three years ago, Kimball sold 14 pints. Fourteen. By the middle of 2026 he was moving over 700 pints a week out of a 300-square-foot kitchen.
That is the kind of growth that forces your hand. So Kimball, who runs the business with his husband Austin Walker and business partner Adam Yala, took over the old French for Sugar bakery space just off East Colfax, in the Lavender Hill LGBTQ cultural district. Four gelato machines now. The goal is around 1,500 pints a week, roughly double the old output, with about half of that sold right there in the shop.
And the process is not fast. Each pint takes three days from start to finish, with a target of packaging 250 pints a day. This is not a soft-serve lever you pull. It is a slow, deliberate operation that happens to live behind a counter on Colfax.
Photo: coloradosun.comIt is a pint shop, not a scoop shop
This is the part people get tripped up on. You do not walk in and get a cone. Sadboy sells pints, sealed, to take home.
Kimball is particular about why. He says scoop shops keep the ice cream too warm, and all those tubs sitting open next to each other let the flavors bleed into one another. He is not having it. So you buy the pint, you take it home, you eat it cold and clean the way it was built to be eaten.
What is it going to run you? Sixteen bucks a pint, which makes Sadboy the most expensive ice cream in Denver, full stop. The Colorado Sun clocked one pint at
8.95 once you add tax. For ice cream.
And if you think that is steep, go look at the merch shelf. There is a small, unassuming spoon sitting there with a
00 price tag on it. A hundred dollars. For a spoon. I stared at it for a second trying to figure out if it was a joke. It is not.
"This #Denver ice cream shop... OMG." by Flying Photog is licensed under CC BY-ND 2.0.The flavors are the whole point
Business partner Adam Yala sums the brand up better than I could. He calls it "non-pretentious flavors made pretentiously." That is exactly it.
Because the flavor names are doing a lot of work. There is Atlantic Beach Cry, which is salted ricotta with a lemon-lime curd and a toasted Ritz cracker crust. There is Dirty Earl, Earl Grey tea blended with amaretto and Oreos. There is Teary-misu, and there is Cosmic Frownie Batter. The sad-boy bit runs all the way through, and somehow it works instead of feeling cutesy.
New at the shop are sorbet and sherbet push-pops, $6 each or three for
6, with ice cream sandwiches promised soon. So the lineup is growing past the pint, slowly.
Why Colfax, and why it matters
Look, a storefront on this stretch of East Colfax is worth your attention beyond just the dessert. The Lavender Hill cultural district is one of those pockets where foot traffic and small-batch, cult-brand retail are starting to feed each other, and that is the kind of thing that moves a neighborhood. When a brand that used to exist purely online plants a physical flag and draws 200 people to a sidewalk on a Saturday, that is a signal. Commercial corridors live and die on exactly this. A reason to stand in line.
And East Colfax has been grinding through its own slow reinvention for years now, so a line around the block for a
6 pint is not nothing. It is the kind of energy that makes the block next door worth a second look, whether you are renting, buying, or just trying to figure out where Denver is actually heading.
The Monday online drops are still happening, by the way, every week at 10 a.m. for anyone who wants to keep playing the game. But the whole point of the Colfax shop is that you no longer have to.
So if you have been meaning to find out what Hayley and I have been going on about, go stand in that line. Bring patience. Bring
6. Maybe skip the spoon.
Revolutionizing · Modernizing · Simplifying