Discovering Mountain Life at Outer Range Brewing Co.

Editor’s Note: This piece was originally published in July 2018. We recently visited Outer Range’s new location in the French Alps, so we thought it would be fun to pull this one out of the vault. Enjoy! And find our new piece on Outer Range in the French Alps here.

A face stared at me from the right of the bar. Chiseled cheekbones highlighted weathered eyes that peered out steadfastly across the whole room. Frizzy white hair crowned his head and flustered about wildly, untamed like a blustery winter wind. The life-size likeness of Jim Pasholka, aka Snow Cap, watched faithfully over the interior of Outer Range Brewery. His face plastered against the black wall reminded all drinkers who passed beneath his gaze that if they only turned around and peeked outside the doors, the peaks of the mountains called, beckoning for an answer.

“I stare at him because I feel like you can see the track of someone’s life in their face, especially in Snow Cap’s. He has the tracks of a hardened mountain life,” said Emily Cleghorn, the co-founder of Outer Range Brewing Co. in Frisco, CO, who chose the picture almost as a talisman for the brewery.

As we plopped down outside on picnic tables in front of the 15-bbl brewhouse, I could see why.

To my left: Mountains.
To my right: Mountains.
In front of me: Mountains.
Behind me: Mountains.

“It’s not bad mashing in at the crack of dawn and seeing the sunrise over the Continental Divide,” said Lee Cleghorn, the head brewer and the other half of Outer Range, as he joined us at the table.

Nestled into the Rocky Mountains of Summit County, CO, Outer Range sits at approximately 9,100 ft in elevation. Getting to this town is no joke. As my car rental associate proclaimed to me at the counter in the Denver International Airport, “Altitude sickness is real. You’re going from 5,000 ft to almost 10,000.” He promptly upgraded the tiny four-door, four-cylinder compact car I’d rented to a V6 Kia Sorento.

I silently thanked his generosity as my partner and I had wound our way up and down I-70 that morning. We climbed past cliffs brimming with Evergreen trees and snow-capped peaks. We drove next to runaway truck lanes that careened steeply upwards off the highway near a few particularly nasty curves. As we vacillated in and out of cell service, we felt the incessant buzz of New York City fade behind us like the intermittent crackle of the now-useless radio.

With no phones, no Spotify, and depleted oxygen, the mountains enveloped us on all sides like a bear hug.

“Everyone comes up here chasing a spirit,” said Lee. “That is what we wanted the brewery to perpetuate.” Dedicated to creating a sanctuary from the clutter, confusion, and traffic of big cities, Outer Range evokes a sense of peacefulness and return to nature. Hence the name Outer Range, which Lee and Emily borrowed from a few lines in their favorite Rudyard Kipling poem, “The Explorer.”

“Something hidden. Go and find it. Go and look behind the Ranges–
Something lost behind the Ranges. Lost and waiting for you. Go!”

The mountain theme runs through Outer Range like a river at every turn. “I always think, ‘What would a mountain man say?’” Emily shared, pointing to Outer Range’s motto, “Leave the Life Below,” as the prime example.

Those four little words that have built the brewery’s foundation came from one of Emily’s favorite movies, Jeremiah Johnson. “It’s Robert Redford in his prime,” said Emily. As the film opens, the narrator explains that Robert Redford’s eponymous character has chosen to leave the life below for the outdoor life in the mountains. “He gave up his comfortable city life to come embrace the mountain culture,” said Emily.

Similarly, Emily and Lee chose to leave behind urbanity to live their dream. But, like a Colorado winter, the journey to open Outer Range has been long and at times harsh, but ultimately beautiful.

Bars of Belgium, Mountains of Colorado

The Cleghorns’ love of beer really began with Lee, who started drinking beer at an early age. Born in Germany, Lee moved to Brussels as a teenager after his dad received a station assignment in Belgium. “I was sixteen years old, drinking Chimay Blue at bars downtown,” said Lee. Attending college in the United States, he never developed a taste for light beer because it simply didn’t taste as good as “some of the best beers in the world he drank at sixteen,” joked Emily.

While in college, Lee began brewing on the weekends, a hobby he would carry with him into the army. “Homebrewing was always Lee’s outlet from the stress of army life,” said Emily.

Both army veterans, Lee and Emily, met while serving in Colorado in the quirky town of Manitou Springs, CO. Emily’s friend invited her to a homebrew party. “This is a hippie town, so I was expecting someone with dreadlocks, and instead it was Lee. Then, I got really interested,” said Emily.

“I had her cleaning bottles on our first date,” laughed Lee. Four months later, the two married. Both still on active duty, they bounced around from Tennessee to New York, but continued to carry a passion for Colorado on their backs like a pair of seasoned hikers.

In the meantime, Lee dedicated himself to homebrewing, gathering friends to brew when he wasn’t deployed or in the field. Once, hobbled by hip surgery, Lee remained undeterred, rigging a plywood contraption to help him brew during his recovery. While transferring the wort, the ladder broke, spilling hot liquid all over Emily’s arm. She ran inside to pour cold water on the burn while Lee continued to crutch around outside. Several minutes later, he shouted, “Is the beer ruined?”

“My arm was all bubbled up, nasty, and he chose to save the beer,” said Emily.

Such has been Lee’s tenacity in his craft. “I always put a bug in his ear to open a brewery, but we thought it was an impossible task,” Emily shared.

After Lee returned from his fourth deployment, the two decided it was time to leave the army. Lee had left shortly after their daughter Madeline was born. “He missed her first words, her first steps, her first birthday,” said Emily. “When he got back, we said, ‘Let’s do it. Let’s live our dream and open a brewery.’”

The pair spent two years planning Outer Range, living on the East Coast while Lee went to brewing school in Vermont at the American Brewers Guild and later interned at Other Half with Jesse Ferguson. “I washed about five thousand kegs for those guys,” Lee chuckled. “I got my start by asking Jesse thousands of questions.”

When it came time to open their own place, Lee and Emily used the brewery as an opportunity to move back to Colorado.

“This is our happy place,” said Emily. “No one lives here on accident. The winters are hard. It’s pretty remote. You have to have that spirit of loving the outdoors. We want to encourage people to embrace what the mountains have to offer and escape that corporate city life when they get burnt out.”

Frisco became that place of solitude. Located right off major highway I-70, Outer Range sits in the middle of seven popular ski resorts. On the property itself, the patio provides 360-degree views of the mountains (plus Emily loves drinking beer outside and, oh by the way, in the winter the Cleghorns install a temporary yurt) while the proximity to Whole Foods attracts a craft-loving customer. “The rent is actually as high as we would pay in Brooklyn,” joked Emily (perhaps, a small reminder of the big city). “We did this all on our life savings and a small business loan.”

With a limited budget, the couple has been forced to get creative, erecting the cold box themselves along with a new extension. “Someone handed me a saw and asked me to cut out part of the back door,” said Emily, “I told him I’d never done it before, but said okay and went to work.”

But the investment has paid off.

The 15-bbl brewhouse chugged out 800 bbls in 2017, and Lee expects them to push north of 2,000 this year. Since opening on Christmas Day in 2016, Outer Range has garnered national attention, being named to Craft & Beer Brewing magazine’s critics’ list of best new breweries in 2017 and earning best new brewery accolades from BeerAdvocate and USA Today.

And they’ve done it all by brewing only two styles of beer.*

Only Belgians and IPAs

*Editor’s Note: While in 2018, Outer Range focused primarily on two styles of beer, the brewery has since expanded to brewing other styles. We’re keeping this section in its entirety to give you perspective on the Colorado brewery, as we visited it seven years ago.

When you wander into Outer Range and take a gander at the menu board, you’ll notice one thing right away: the absence of ambers, stouts, pilsners, etc. Outer Range sticks to two styles of beer and two styles only: Belgians and IPAs.

“The world’s best breweries brew only three or four beers,” said Lee. “That’s the traditional way a brewery would operate, and that’s how they survived for hundreds of years. We wanted to bring that focus to our brewery. By focusing on those two styles, we can iterate on them and force ourselves to be creative within those boxes.”

Initially, the Cleghorns’ strategy elicited pushback.

“One guy threw his stool and stormed out,” said Emily.

But over time, the brewery gained the notoriety and respect that two beer styles brewed to perfection deserved.

“I admire what they do. If you go to any other brewer, it will be the whole thing—a lager, a brown ale, an IPA, a wheat beer, a porter, a stout, and none of them are that great,” said Chris Schmidt, the co-owner and head chef at Craftsman Brew Co., a contemporary restaurant in Vail, CO. “For them to focus on one thing and do it better than anybody else takes a lot of courage. They could have caved, but they didn’t. [Emily and Lee] put their foot down. It’s important to have a vision, focus on it, and do it well.”

Unsurprisingly, the Cleghorns remain as humble and eager to communicate their passion for life in the great outdoors.

Like their nature-related can release, Trail No. 1. Part of a series of five can releases, the IPA uses Cashmere hops for an intense aroma of mango. But it’s what’s on the outside of this can that really surprises. A detachable label (that Emily hand-wrapped herself on each can until 4:30 a.m. after the label machine broke) features a trail map taking adventurous beer drinkers on a three-mile hike around Lily Pad Lake. With points of interest included, Trail No. 1 shares the Cleghorn’s love of the mountains with people in an active way.

“We do this trail with our daughter, Madeleine, all the time,” said Emily. “The trailhead is right across the street.”

“We want to share our love of this area with everybody, so hopefully this will encourage people to hike the trails,” says Emily.

Mountain Women

As a woman working in the industry, Emily has experienced her share of ups and downs (but fittingly, mostly ups).

“When we first opened the brewery together,” Emily shared, “I can’t tell you how many people asked me, ‘Oh sweetie, do you do the books?’ I was like, ‘Is this the 1950s?’”

An eight-year army veteran, Emily has been no stranger to serving in male-dominated fields. As one of two women out of eight hundred in her unit, Emily has always been surrounded by men. In craft beer, though, “It’s not just men. It’s men with huge beards,” laughed Emily. “It’s like, ‘Settle down with the masculinity guys.’” All joking aside, Emily emphasized that, compared to other industries, craft beer has a welcoming culture, making the strongly ingrained image of manliness somewhat of an inconsistency.

Lee agrees that the whole machismo element seems to contradict the heart of craft beer.

“I’m so tired of all these dudes in bad leather shoes at beer events walking around getting slammed. That’s not the reality of the industry,” said Lee.

Technically, Emily isn’t the only woman working at Outer Range. The couple’s daughter, Madeleine, who calls the brewery, “the burry” also helps out. “We had her painting things the night before we opened,” said Emily, who recounted a time when they asked Madeleine what job she wanted at Outer Range when she grew up. “We asked her if she wanted to do science like Dada or marketing like Mama,” said Emily. “She knew science, but asked about marketing, so we told her, ‘What would you tell people to get them to come to Outer Range?’ She responded, ‘Oh, I would tell them we make the best IPAs!’”

As for the towering likeness of Outer Range’s omnipotent mascot, Snow Cap, what would he say? According to Emily, his response would be simple, “Yeah, so what? Of course, women are running shit.”

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