Denver Beer Co, which opened in August 2011 as one of the pioneers of Denver's third major brewery wave, will take a major step up next year by adding a large new production facility that will immediately make it one of the city's largest breweries.

Owners Patrick Crawford and Charlie Berger announced Wednesday that they are buying a 48,000-square-foot warehouse on three acres of land at 4455 Jason Street the Sunnyside neighborhood where they will install a thirty-barrel brewing system.

See also: Denver Beer Co plans a major expansion and a second tasting room

The new brewery will focus primarily on year-round and seasonal beers that Denver Beer Co will package in bottles and cans and sell to liquor stores and bars. It will include four sixty-barrel fermenters and canning line from Boulder's Wild Goose Engineering.

"People in Denver have been saying they want our beers in bottles and cans," Crawford says. "We're going to keep it really local at first and see where it takes us."

The brew house is scheduled to arrive in April, and cans and bottles could hit store shelves by May or June, Crawford says. Initial capacity will be 5,000 barrels per year, and Denver Beer Co will be hiring at least five new employees to start.

The initial lineup will include canned six-packs of Graham Cracker Porter, Kaffir Lime Wheat and Hey! Pumpkin, along with 22-ounce bomber bottles of seasonal releases. Unleaded Group, a local Denver design firm, will create the packaging and label designs.

Denver Beer Co will keep its current location open, freeing up space there for new and more experimental beers. The brewery was founded on the idea that it would never make the same beer twice. And although Crawford and Berger have changed the strategy as customers asked them to repeat certain beers, like Graham Cracker Porter, the brewery has made more than 250 different recipes over that time.

"I think we've made some good business decisions that have allowed us to expand," Crawford says. "It's great that people like drinking our beer so much that it has enabled us to do this. The last two years especially have been amazing here on on Platte Street."

The new brewery, which will include just a small taproom with five beers on tap, as well as tours, will take up less than one quarter of the building to start with (there are currently two other tenants inside) but could grow into the rest of the space.

Follow

Westword

's Beer Man on Twitter at @ColoBeerMan and on Facebook at Colo BeerMan