Small one-barrel brewery hosts live music, makes creative beer

By the Thirst Team

The western Colorado town of Ridgway has a new nanobrewery, The Floating Lotus. Owner and brewer Kenny Conley makes all the beer with a small system and uniquely altered water.

Class of 2024
We are closing out 2024 with profiles of a few new breweries that opened this year.

His brewery hosts yoga, live music, open mic nights, food trucks and more. After a couple of months in business, we asked Conley some questions about his brewery.

Why did you start your brewery?

I wanted to pursue a career I was passionate about. Brewing is an expensive hobby, so I decided to go pro.

What makes your beer unique?

We currently brew on a one-barrel system. There are a lot of disadvantages to brewing on such a small scale, but we feel that it has its advantages as well. For example, all our brewing water is filtered using a Reverse Osmosis purification system. Minerals are then added according to the style of the beer to achieve the ideal brewing water for each style. German beers may be brewed using a water profile that mimics that found in Munich, while for pilsners, we can use water resembling what you might brew with in Czechia.

Another advantage is that we can source our yeast for each batch directly from specialized yeast labs. This of course adds to the cost of production, but it also allows for consistency in yeast viability, pitch rates, and strain purity. Higher volume breweries generally find the cost of supplying batch yeasts in this manner to be unacceptably cost ineffective, and resort to repitching yeast across different styles and using fewer yeast strains, which diminishes the diversity of flavors you can produce across the taps.

What are you pouring?

We opened with seven different styles. These recipes were developed over the course of two years and over 100 total batches, and include the Teocali Mexican Lager, the Bluebird Sky Cream Ale, Holy Grail Pale Ale, Blastoplast NEIPA, Morning Dew Blueberry Wheat Ale, Red Mountain Amber Ale, and the Seven Below American Porter.

The most popular of these is the Blastoplast IPA, followed closely by the Teocali Mexican Lager. New recipes on rotation generally will not go through such a painstaking degree of development, and may even be rolled out prior to trial batching, as was the case with our 2024 Oktoberfest, Vienna-style marzen.

What has been the biggest surprise of your first months in business?

The most pleasant surprise is how well our beer has been received. Our customer base is unusually knowledgeable about craft beer and has a seemingly very high standard. Despite that, we are getting very positive feedback on the quality of our beer.

When scaling directly from homebrewing to a commercial brew setting as we did, the biggest and most anxiety-inducing unknowns are “can I consistently reproduce what I’m doing at home, and will my customers like the beer as much as I do?” So to hear first-time visitors rave about the beer never gets old.

Any plans for 2025?

We’re currently working on building our reputation in the brewing community, and having a lot of fun in the process. So our plan for 2025 is: keep doing what we’re doing, don’t scale too fast, and never cut corners in the brew house.