Drinking Wyoming: Melvin Brewing, State’s Largest Brewery, Is About To Get Bigger

ALPINE — Empty beer cans waiting to be filled with liquid gold climb to the ceiling at Melvin Brewing in Alpine, inside a building its workers affectionately call the Mother Ship.

The nickname is appropriate. It’s another world inside Wyoming’s largest brewery. Deck after deck of shiny tanks that look like rocket ships create a sort of maze inside. Behind them, rivers of cans flow on a conveyor belt toward their final destiny. Workers float between the different sections of the brewery, helping each other with the tasks that make the brewery tick.

They have their own lingo, as well as their own lore, dating back to the startup’s rough and tumble beginning as a tiny three-barrel microbrewery inside the Thai Me Up restaurant in 2009.

The owner at the time, Jeremy Tofte, had a vision: Bringing the beers of the future to Jackson, Wyoming.

His popular beer quickly outgrew the tiny Thai restaurant where it was born, and so he landed his brand-new mothership brewery in Alpine after winning Best Small Brewpub of the Year at the Great American Beer Festival in 2015.

Initially, the facility was just supposed to be a production facility.

But fans of the beer had an entirely different idea.

“People just started just showing up and asking to get beer,” long-time Melvin Brewing employee Darrin Bowers recalled. “So, we’re like, we’ve got to figure out something.”

They purchased some used racks and display cases from a Jackson business that was selling out, and tossed their break room kegerator, which had just four working heads out of eight, into a small tasting room at the front of the facility.

“The kegerator had mostly been for the employees after we got done with work,” Bowers recalled. “We’d have a couple of beers and talk about the day and what’s going on the whole week.”

The fans weren’t done yet pushing for a transformation though. Good strong beer requires good food to truly enjoy the experience.

“We still have some of that old stuff,” Bowers said. “And we still have the original food truck we purchased for $26,000.”

Still With The Fun Vibe

Melvin Brewing also still has all the fun characters that artist Kelly Halpin dreamed up for the brand. Melvin Man. Killer Bees. Two-by-four Man. Nurse’s Clinic. And good old Hubert.

They walk in a fantasy landscape that decorate the walls of the taproom, blending artistic imagination with legendary brewery history.

Like the time so much snow built up on the roof of the brewery’s new home in Alpine that it ripped some of the stacks out of their tanks, a catastrophe that is reflected in one of the murals.

“We couldn’t brew for two weeks,” Bowers said. “Which at that time was a pretty big deal. So that’s why that’s in there.”

The murals are whimsical and compelling all at once. And they give the small tasting room a big, one-of-a-kind character, which fits well under the Pure Madness brand that the business now lives under.

Melvin’s was bought out by Roadhouse partner Colton Cox in 2022, who is now its owner, along with Gavin Fine, who also owns the Fine Dining Group. Pure Madness, though, is not part of the Fine Dining Group. It is, just as the name would imply, its own special thing.

“The first thing we had to do was get the company reorganized and right-sized,” Cox said. “They had a great brand, great products, great customer loyalty. All that was pretty strong.”

And now that he feels everything is right-sized, Cox has begun making some moves that’s going to scale the brand up. Way up.

That includes a new canning line that has more than doubled their canning capacity.

“We went from producing 65 cans a minute to 300 cans a minute,” Bowers said. “So, it greatly improves how much we can do.”

Rapid Growth Fueled Roadhouse Merger

Behind the scenes, the Melvin Mothership in Alpine reflects the craft brewery’s history as one of America’s fastest growing brewpubs. The brewery in Alpine began with just 10, 60-barrel beer-brewing vats.

“The first beer we ever brewed here was Killer Bees,” Bowers recalled. “And we didn’t have enough money to get the cans that were painted and labeled. So, we did like a run of 300 cases, all silver cans, and we just took them around town to different spots and handed them out to people because we couldn’t sell them.”

People in Alpine liked the beer, though, and it wasn’t long before the brewery had to bring in a second deck of bigger tanks. This time, tanks that could hold 120 barrels of beer.

That was soon followed by another deck of new tanks that could hold 240 barrels of beer.

Bowers said the popularity of the brewery, ultimately, is what made the merger with Roadhouse necessary.

“Things snuck up on everybody in the brewery,” he said. ‘We didn’t know how serious it was on cash flow. We were kind of the last ones to know.”

Tofte had a consultant team come in to look at the brewery and help get it ready to sell, so that it could keep growing, with the aim of keeping it local if he could.

“We had two or three bids,” Bowers said. “And two of the bids were sizable, but the group, the consultants, and Jeremy agreed to stay with a local craft brewery, which is Roadhouse.”

The Next Dimension Of Melvin Beer

The merger has been a good thing so far, Bowers said. And it brought some of Melvin’s old employees back to Alpine again, which made it feel a bit like a family reunion for the employees.

Cox said he’s now looking into new products for Melvin’s lineup to take advantage of new trends on the craft beer scene.

“We’re pretty well diversified when it comes to the beer we make,” he said. “Between the two breweries, we make 21 different core products.”

Beer consumption as a whole has been down, Cox added, though Melvin is up 7% year over year, beating the national trend.

“The market’s down 5.6% right now, so we’re beating the trends significantly,” he said. “But with the new canning line, which has allowed us to increase our capacity from roughly 35,000 barrels to 85,000 barrels, we’ve now got the ability to look at other opportunities.”

Over the next 12 to 18 months, Cox said the company is likely to bring in a brewery from outside Wyoming under the Pure Madness umbrella. Production will still happen in Alpine, but the right acquisition would allow them to get some of the action for non-alcoholic and alternative beverages.

“Spiked kombucha, spiked seltzers, spiked teas, canned cocktails and all that stuff,” he said. “But the non-alcoholic segment is one that’s grown significantly, like double digits nationwide.”

Non-alcoholic beer is a difficult segment to get into though.

“The most sensible way to get into the industry, if you’re going to invest in the infrastructure, which is typically a minimum of three to three and a half million dollars, is to purchase an existing brand that already has consumer demand,” Cox said.

That doesn’t mean that Melvin will forget its Wyoming roots, though, he added.

“Alpine is where we see the future for us, and we have significant capacity there,” he said. “We’re only occupying about 40% of the property there right now. So, we want to build a warehouse there in the next 24 months, to put all of our distribution in one place.”

The new warehouse will be roughly four times the size of the existing warehouse space that Melvin leases in Evanston. Which will mean hiring around 30 more people, in addition to the 60 or so Melvin already employs, Cox added.

“I think the future of Alpine is a better place for us to grow as the town continues to grow,” he said. “And especially if the town can afford the necessary infrastructure for people to be able to live and work in Alpine.”

Contact Renee Jean at renee@cowboystatedaily.com

Renée Jean can be reached at renee@cowboystatedaily.com.