"A family can come in, get a pizza. Mom and dad can have a beer."
That's Kristin Lockhart, describing the plan behind Armillary Brewing Co., the little neighborhood brewery she and her husband Jeff opened this spring at 4810 Old Farm Drive. It sounds like a simple pitch. It's actually a pretty precise description of what changed in Colorado Springs' beer scene over the past year, and where.
The easy story to tell about craft beer right now is decline. Nationally, the Brewers Association counted 268 new brewery openings against 434 closings in 2025, the second year running where closures outpaced new openings. Colorado Springs added its own list to that ledger: Trinity Brewing Co. closed after more than a decade, Rock Bottom Brewery announced its closure after a 20-year run, and FH Beerworks and Metric both closed their doors. If you only read the obituaries, you'd assume the city is drinking less beer and losing its taprooms one by one.
That's not quite what happened. Colorado craft brewers actually increased production by nearly 10% in 2025, even as the national industry slowed by 5.7%. The closures were real, but they weren't spread evenly across the city, and they weren't really about beer at all. They were about rent, and about which parts of Colorado Springs already had too many taprooms and which had none.
The Neighborhood That Never Had One
Old Farm sits tucked between Austin Bluffs Parkway and Powers Boulevard, a quiet residential pocket built mostly in the 1980s, home to Old Farm Park and one of the city's larger community gardens. It's the kind of neighborhood people describe as close-knit and walkable. Until this April, it was also what the Gazette called a "beer desert," a stretch of northeast Colorado Springs where you could walk your dog past a dozen homes and never pass a taproom door.
Jeff Lockhart noticed that gap before anyone opened it. He's spent 15 years in Colorado's brewing industry, helping launch both Ouray Brewing Company and Red Leg Brewing Company before teaming up with the Springs' own Dueces Wild, where his Knuckle Dragger Scotch Ale won gold at the 2019 Great American Beer Festival. When he and Kristin went looking for a place to plant their own flag, they found an end unit in a shopping plaza at Austin Bluffs and Old Farm Drive and realized the neighborhood around it had nowhere close to grab a pint.
Armillary opened quietly in April and held its grand opening in mid-May. What makes the story worth telling isn't just that a new brewery opened. It's that people had been walking by the buildout for months asking when it would be ready, according to reporting in the Gazette. The demand was already there. Nobody had built for it yet.
Meanwhile, On The Westside
A few miles away, near Garden of the Gods, a different kind of change played out. Trinity Brewing Co. was one of the city's original craft standouts, known for Belgian-inspired beers and a serious sour program built over more than a decade. When it closed in late 2025, industry watchers pointed to changing tastes and declining taproom traffic. The space didn't sit empty long. 105 West moved into Trinity's old footprint and reopened it.
That's a different pattern than Old Farm. Nobody discovered an underserved neighborhood near Garden of the Gods. A well-known brewery closed and another brand simply took its lease. The neighborhood's beer access didn't expand or contract. It changed hands.
Downtown told a similar story. Brass Brewing, which had operated in the heart of downtown Colorado Springs for more than seven years, sold its location to Gunslinger Brewing rather than closing outright. And in Knob Hill, a taproom that had served the neighborhood for seven years lost its space entirely, with its owners writing that the closure wasn't their choice and hoping their story wasn't over.
Even Monument, just north of the city, saw consolidation rather than new growth. Goat Patch Brewing Company acquired Pikes Peak Brewing and rebranded the location as Goat Patch Brewing Company-Monument starting January 1, 2026, folding a local name into a larger one rather than adding an independent option to the area.
Where The Map Actually Moved
| Neighborhood | What Changed | What It Means For You |
|---|---|---|
| Old Farm (NE Colorado Springs) | Armillary Brewing Co. opened April 2026, the area's first taproom | A genuine new option where there was none |
| Garden of the Gods / Westside | Trinity Brewing closed; 105 West took over the space | Same address, different brand, no net gain |
| Downtown | Brass Brewing sold to Gunslinger Brewing after 7+ years | The building stayed a brewery, ownership changed |
| Knob Hill | A 7-year taproom closed with no replacement announced | A genuine loss for the neighborhood |
| Monument | Pikes Peak Brewing became Goat Patch Brewing Company-Monument | Consolidation into a larger regional brand |
Laid out this way, the pattern is hard to miss. The only place that gained a truly new, independent taproom this year is the one place that never had one. Everywhere else, the story is either a brand swap or a straightforward loss.
The Number That Explains The Rest
Matt Gacioch, a staff economist with the Boulder-based Brewers Association, has spent the past year explaining why this keeps happening. He describes most of the closures nationally, and locally, as hyper-local economics rather than an industry in retreat. If the rent and labor costs in a particular commercial corridor have climbed past what a small taproom can sustain, that's the business that closes, regardless of how good the beer is.
That framing fits what happened in Colorado Springs almost perfectly. Trinity, Rock Bottom, FH Beerworks, the Knob Hill taproom, and the original Brass Brewing lease all sat in older, established commercial districts where competition and overhead had built up over a decade or more. Armillary opened in a shopping plaza in a neighborhood that had never carried that overhead in the first place, because nobody had tried yet.
Colorado's statewide production growth backs this up. Brewers here aren't losing customers. They're losing specific locations where the math stopped working, while new locations in underserved pockets of the city are proving there's still plenty of demand once someone builds close enough to home.
Where That Leaves Your Weekend
If you live near Old Farm, Austin Bluffs, or the Powers corridor, Armillary Brewing Co. is now the closest taproom to home, with in-house pizza and beer cheese if you want to bring the kids. If you're already a regular near Garden of the Gods, your usual spot has a new name and a new operator in 105 West, though the building and the location haven't moved. Downtown drinkers will find Gunslinger Brewing running the space Brass Brewing built. And if Monument is more your speed, Goat Patch Brewing Company-Monument is worth a visit now that it's folded into a bigger operation with more resources behind it.
None of this required a single new development or a rezoning fight. It required one couple noticing a gap between Austin Bluffs and Old Farm that had been sitting there for years, and a handful of established names deciding where their next chapter would be written. That's usually how a city's map actually changes, one lease at a time, long before anyone writes a headline about it.
If you're curious how neighborhoods like Old Farm, the Westside, or Monument fit into the bigger picture of what makes Colorado Springs work day to day, I write about this kind of thing regularly on the Colorado Springs neighborhoods page, alongside pieces on what's reshaping the restaurant scene and other corners of daily life here. I'm Leslie Neumann, and whether you're a longtime local or just landed in the area, I love talking about what makes each part of this city tick. Let's Connect.
