Today on my show, I am joined by Dr Rebecca Burden, the co-owner, alongside her husband Nathan, of Vicious Cycle Brewery in Fraser, colorado. Rebecca shares the story behind starting the brewery, why they choose Grand County as their home base, the craft beers that they're known for, their events and this exciting addition of the Wicked Cheesy Food Truck. So sit back, relax and enjoy my conversation with Rebecca. Good morning, rebecca. How are you today? Hi, gaylene, I'm great. How are you? I am good. You sound great. Thank you, I'm feeling pretty good. Good, well, let's talk about the business that you and your husband started here in Grand County Vicious Cycling and I think you have one of the most amazing background. Both you and your husband are your husband are in the medical field. Then you decided to move up to Grand County and start Vicious Cycle Brewery. Tell me a little bit about you guys, what you do, and then how you ended up moving into Grand County and then starting the brewery.

Sure, well, we moved to Colorado in 2011, and that was my first job out of residency. I took a job at a hospital up in Loveland, and my husband is also, like you said, in the medical field. He is in the orthotic and prosthetic world, and we worked for about four years in the Loveland area and both got very burnt out. It's a tough field You're really meeting people at a hard time in their life and so we decided that we needed to take a break from our everyday life, and so we sold our house and we sold our cars and all of our possessions and we traveled the world. We left, got a one-way ticket to Europe and we traveled for about two years and while we were traveling, as you can imagine, we had some time to think and talk, and we decided that when we came back to the United States, that we wanted to do something different, and my husband's goal was to open up a brewery, and so when we moved back to Colorado in 2014, he went to work with educating himself.

He did an internship at Left Hand, he went back to school and got a brewmaster certificate and after a few years of training, he said to me I think I'm ready, and so we started looking for land and the best land that we could made the most sense to us, most economical, biggest growth was Grand County, and we found this piece of land in Fraser that was perfect and met our needs and so we opened up the brewery and the plan was to open up in 2020, which obviously didn't happen because of COVID Right, but we ended up opening up in 2021. And we came up with the name Vicious Cycle Brewing Company because we want to encourage people to break out of their own kind of vicious cycle of life where we get into routine and do the same thing and we don't branch out or try new things. And Nathan and I were really changed by that two-year trip that we took traveling and we were kind of wanting to inspire other people to do similar things. And you guys still love to travel.

Yes, exactly yeah. I make it a plan to at least leave the country, at least once a year.

Yeah, which is? It's good it's, it's. I think traveling is one of those things that really opens up our eyes into different cultures and different experiences, and I know it's enriched my life in so many ways, absolutely so okay. So you open up the brewery and tell us how was the start of that?

Well, we built it from the ground up. We bought the land and we had hired a contractor and it was his first commercial build. He had only been doing residential and so he was in over his head and basically told us I just can't do this. So my husband went down to the town clerk in Frayser and applied to become a general contractor and a signature, and $40 later he was the general contractor. So my husband, myself and his parents, nathan's parents, ruthie and Blair the four of us ended up building the brewery ourselves. All of the things that require a permit, like the electrical, the plumbing, hvac those things, of course we sourced out and we used everybody local that we could. But all of the trim work and the woodworking, yeah, I mean I learned how to tile a bathroom, I learned how to use a drill, I learned how to drywall. It was a labor of love, but it was pretty incredible building it.

How did you guys know like what kind of design and what a good layout would be?

So that was Nathan's, all of his thinking and his brainchild. He got together with an architect and came up with he wanted a really big brew house so he'd have plenty of room for his equipment and to do aged barrel beers and have room for that. But he also wanted a really big tap room where we would have plenty of space for people to sit and hang out drink the beer. And what we never envisioned was that our space was going to become kind of like a community hangout. Sometimes on a Saturday there'll be families there, they'll stay there and they'll play games, and it's really been a nice experience. Again, we didn't anticipate that all of this gathering has happened there.

Yeah, Well, and what's cool is, you guys are right on the Fraser Valley bike path too, yeah that as well, and right behind the brewery there's a lot of trails as well, so we actually are busier in the summer than we are in the winter because of that. We have these big garage doors that we open up and so we bring the outside in and we have lots of bike parking, and so people will spend their day biking and then they come to the brewery after when they're finished for a beer.

Yeah, so tell me about the beer that you guys offer, and how does Nathan, do you change that up? Do you have certain staple beers that that just are always on the menu?

Yeah, we have 12 taps and four of the beers are our signature beers that are always on. One is a red ale, one is a pale ale, one is a New England IPA and the fourth one is a lager that we call the People's Grand Lager. That's our best seller. But, keeping with the theme of vicious cycle brewing and changing things up, nathan does lots of crazy beers and the other thing that he does is he always asks our employees if they want to learn how to brew. So he has brewed with every one of our employees and he's done whatever beer they have wanted. And the most recent one was an employee she's fairly new. She wanted to do a beer with tea, so we made a. It's a, it's a Earl Grey and it's got lavender and vanilla and it's called London Fog, and I guess that's a type of tea drink you can get is a London Fog, and so we just introduced that one a couple of weeks ago and it's been going great.

Wow, that's great. And then, what do you do? As far as like, do you do seasonality beers?

Like every summer, we have three or four beers that we release for one of our events. It's a luau and it's basically our summer kickoff. It's usually the second or third weekend in June and we will. Last year we took the New England IPA and we aged in a rum barrel, so it was kind of like a pina colada. We do a summer ale, um, we always do a Mexican lager, so we definitely have beers that come out every season. We have some winter ales that we do. We always do a, um, a pumpkin beer in uh for Halloween and for those seasons. So, yes, I'm a big proponent of celebrating the seasons and celebrating the holidays, and so we definitely try and decorate the brewery and make beers that are going to complement the seasons. That's great.

When you guys are traveling, do you go and try to go to different breweries and get some?

ideas? Absolutely, we do that locally, we do that across the country and also internationally. When we were in Europe we went to some monasteries, we went to some Belgian breweries, for sure, yeah, it's always fun to try new beers and just to get different ideas. A lot of the stuff in our brewery right now we've like sampled and, you know, taken from other breweries that we've been around and just really loved about.

I would think that would be a fun part of your travels. Yes, rebecca, you were talking about your luau. I know you do other events throughout the year. What are some events that you have coming up?

Every week on Monday we do trivia and it's become crazy busy and it's been really fun. That goes every Monday from six to eight, and then on Thursdays we do Run Club and run club is at 530 and all the participants get a free beer and it's a really nice time to just, you know, relate, relate and meet other people who are like-minded runners in town. There's actually quite a bit of them and we do that all year long, even in the winter.

Wow.

Yep, and it's pretty dark at 530 in the winter, but we put on our headlamps and our little spikes and go, but those are the two that we have every week, okay, and then we will do pop-up things throughout the year, sometimes live music, but usually something like I said, for the seasons. Of course that luau is coming up. We did like pumpkin carving and we did a pet costume contest where people brought their pets dressed up last Halloween. Oh, how fun. Yeah, we've had Santa in to take pictures with Santa. So we definitely try and do fun things. And then just this past week we launched our beer club, and the beer club is $75 for the year and it gets you 13 beers one for every month and one for your birthday, plus 25% off merchandise and 25% off to go beers. Plus, every time you come in, for the price of a 16 ounce pint, you actually get 20 ounces. We have special 20 ounce glasses for the beer club.

So we've got lots going on oh you do, that's fantastic. Well, and then you also brought in gosh. It was a couple months ago, a new food truck.

Yes, we're having some difficulty just keeping somebody permanently at the brewery. So we brought it in for two reasons. Number one is to obviously have food for our patrons, but also, if you in Colorado have I think it's 20% of your sales are food. As a brewery, you can change your license to a brew pub, and so we did that because we wanted to be able to offer people canned wine, canned cider and canned cocktails. So we actually partnered with Idlewild and we purchased their canned cocktails. We sell those out of the brew house and then we found some distributors to get wine. And then Nathan and I went this past summer to Big B's, which is an orchard in Paonia where they have placed a camp and they make their own cider, and so now we sell their cider in the brewery as well. Oh my gosh, that's fantastic, yeah.

And then the food truck itself has been really great. It's gourmet grilled cheeses. It's called Wicked Cheesy I'm from Boston and we say wicked a lot and Nathan, my husband, he's from Wisconsin, so he's a cheese head, so that's kind of where we came up with the name. And it's a gourmet grilled cheese sandwiches, French fries, mac and cheese soup, things like that. And then on Monday through Friday we do a $10, like kind of a local special where it's a $10 sandwich and order of fries. Okay, what a deal.

Yeah Well, rebecca. Where can people find out more information?

Yeah, we're on. We have a website missioncyclebrewingcom. We have an Instagram page, facebook all of those social media platforms.

Okay, perfect. Well, I so appreciate your time today. And yeah, tell Nathan, I really do enjoy the beers there too.

I will Thank you. Thanks for having me. I really appreciate it, you bet.

And we will chat soon. All right, sounds good, okay.