Paige Schuster (BS ’08) and her husband, Marcus Christianson (BS ’08), opened Two22 Brew with the intent of giving back to the community. Photo: Wayne Armstrong
More than 125 Colorado breweries are taking part in the 2014 Great American Beer Festival, running Oct. 2–4 at the Colorado Convention Center. Among them is Centennial-based Two22 Brew, owned by University of Denver alumni Paige Schuster (BS ’08) and her husband, Marcus Christianson (BS ’08). The couple — former Pioneers athletes who majored in chemistry and biology at DU — started the business with the intent of giving back to the community, and $2.22 out of every $10 the brewery makes is donated to Colorado nonprofits.
In advance of the GABF, we talked with Schuster about her business and her thoughts on the festival.
Q: You have been open since February — how are things going?
A: Things have been going really good. It’s been interesting finding out what the trends of the brewery are and what the trends of our area are. We’re not downtown, so we really do have that super-neighborhood clientele. We have a lot of regulars, and we’ve started to develop a rapport with the neighborhood. So that’s been really fun to see where that takes us, but it’s also different because we don’t have that revolving clientele that a brewery downtown would have.
Q: Are you on tap at any local restaurants?
A: We’re on tap at two restaurants, just to see how that goes and what the response was — we’re at Ernie’s Pizza in the Highlands and Cedar Creek pub behind the Anschutz Medical Center. Within the next few months, we would like to get on tap at a couple more local places closer to the brewery, just to kind of spread our name and spread the word.
Q: Let’s talk about the Great American Beer Festival. I assume this is your first year there?
A: This is the first year that we’re going. I think it’s pretty cool that it’s a Colorado-based festival, because if it were out of state, we’d have to travel and send people. It’s nice for a new brewery like us that it is local and that we get the opportunity to showcase our beer at such a big event, being less than a year old
Q: What is the reason for going? Is it about exposure, marketing, or something else?
A: It’s such a great opportunity for us to showcase in our home state and get our name out there. It’s kind of a nerve-racking experience — you’re there with 800 other breweries and you’re putting your beer out there against all other beer. But it’s a great networking opportunity for us, and it’s really fun just to talk to all the other brewers and people within the industry and see what’s happening elsewhere. We’ve been open for seven months, but that also means that we don’t get out a whole lot anymore. It will be nice to talk to some of the other new breweries that we haven’t had a chance to get to.
Q: Do you think you’ll see a side benefit of people coming to check out the brewery during GABF week?
A: We get calls to the brewery almost every day now, like, ‘Hey, I’m coming into town for GABF, and I want to come to your brewery.’ A lot of people come for the Great American Beer Festival, and they plan it as a whole beer trip. They say, ‘If I were to come to your brewery, where else can I go, what breweries would you recommend?’ We have people from out of town who are looking to come to Two22. Without even being at GABF yet, our name has been out there. That’s really fun to see.
Read the story on Two22 from the fall 2014 University of Magazine