Colorado Real Estate Journal - September 16, 2015
The much-anticipated Breckenridge Brewery is complete – a $35 million campus that required highly detailed coordination to put the project on tap. The 12-acre campus along the South Platte River in Littleton comprises three buildings and provides much-needed space for Colorado’s fifth-largest brewer. Coburn designed the campus, which was built by Hyder Construction and for which RMH Group served as the project’s mechanical and electrical engineer. Additional project members included Krones, the process engineer, KL&A, the structural engineer, and CVL Consultants, the civil engineer. The destination brewery includes a 21,000-square-foot Brew House, where the beer is brewed, a 50,000-sf production building that is home to the fermentation tanks, packaging, bottling, canning and dry and cold storage, and The Farm House Restaurant, a 9,200-sf, 300-seat restaurant, all of which were designed to look like a farmstead. “The site allowed us to spread uses into three buildings rather than a single structure,” explained Principal Peter Weber, AIA, LEED AP, of Coburn. “The Brew House and production buildings are reminiscent of barns you might find around Colorado while the restaurant is in a smaller building designed to be like a farmhouse. The buildings were placed to take advantage of the site along the Platte River with the restaurant porches opening up onto a beer garden and lawn facing the river and the mountains to the west.” And bringing it all together required highly comprehensive organization, according to the project’s partners. “Few construction projects this year garnered more excitement from the general public than the opening of Breckenridge Brewery’s Littleton campus,” explained Hyder Construction, adding the project was designed as a destination brewery and already is attracting locals and out-of-towners alike. “With such a public focus on one project, what is truly incredible are the challenges the team successfully overcame to deliver such a dynamic project. The project team seamlessly integrated work on three different building types, overcame the West Coast labor strike, coordinated brewery equipment from Germany arriving in one shipment of 40 containers, safely installed this very expensive equipment and mediated water during one of the wettest construction seasons on record on a 12-acre site adjacent to the Platte River.” “From a design standpoint, the project was extremely complicated because it involved a multi-building brewery and restaurant complex with ambitious performance/safety/sustainability goals and many stakeholders and design team partners. Even with these inherent complexities, RMH was able to design systems that met all functional parameters while significantly reducing energy and water consumption and preserving building aesthetics, added Anthony A. Lott, PE, PMP, LEED AP BD+C, chief engineer for industrial projects at RMH. Coordination included working to impact the brew vessels as minimally as possible by installing them after the structural steel and consequently dropping them in through the open roof with a crane much like threading a needle. The team worked together to schedule the deliveries of each vessel, to constantly monitor the installation crew to ensure the vessels were installed properly and to train crews working after installation to keep the tanks in pristine condition. However, the West Coast labor strike delayed the delivery of some of the equipment, forcing the team to re-sequence the work to avoid impacting the schedule. The project team also endured working with three building types – metal building, stick frame and structural steel – and an owner’s timeline that forced construction to start before design was completed in order for the owner to be out of its original brewing facility and into the new one within a strict timeline.