Connect
To Top

Meet Sharon Cating-Murphy and Aaron Murphy of Welcome Home Brewery

Avatar photo

Today we’d like to introduce you to Sharon Cating-Murphy and Aaron Murphy.

Thanks for sharing your story with us Sharon and Aaron. So, let’s start at the beginning and we can move on from there.
Welcome Home Brewery opened its doors in October 2018. Welcome Home strives to be a unique atmosphere that can’t be found at any other brewery or taproom. When you walk in our doors, expect to be greeted by our staff, and find a comfortable and cozy place to sit. Our furniture is a bit of a hodgepodge, meant to invoke feelings of visiting a close friend and sitting around their dining room table. A piano sits in the corner, and you’re welcome to tickle the ivory’s if you’re so inclined. If it’s cold outside, the best seats in the house are next to our gas fireplace. Our large community table seats up to 18 people and is perfect for large groups or to make new friends over a beer. Or, pull a stool up to our bar and enjoy the company of our knowledgeable bartenders. At Welcome Home, we’re family, and you’re a part of ours just by walking in the door.

All our beers are hand-crafted right here in the brewery, and we have an open-concept brewhouse, which allows you to see the equipment. Sometimes you may even catch owner/brewer Aaron working in the brewhouse. We strive to make a variety of high-quality craft beers. Our 12-taps allow us to keep several customer favorites on draught year-round, as well as provide experimental and seasonal rotating beers. Popular favorites include our Parker Sunset Golden Ale, Caramel Corn Cream Ale, and Trend Chaser Juicy IPA. In fitting with our homey concept, we also offer a rotating “pie” series of beers, ranging from Lemon Meringue to Pumpkin to Coconut Cream, and anything in-between. You can almost always expect to find one of these pie beers on tap.

We look forward to having you stop in for a beer with us. Every family has its story… Welcome to ours!

Overall, has it been relatively smooth? If not, what were some of the struggles along the way?
Starting a business, you never expect it to be a totally smooth road, and we had plenty of warnings from other brewery owners turned friends. Even before we opened, construction delays pushed our target grand opening date out from late spring to mid-summer, and then eventually to mid-fall. When we finally hit our grand opening date in October 2018, there was a brief sigh of relief, having revenue coming in, not just expenses going out.

Since opening, we have learned a lot. There were some growing pains with our brewing system and how to put out a product that is of the quality we want. There have been staffing challenges, though we love our current staff and they are fantastic. There’s also been a lot of learning about how to market as a new brewery, how to draw in new customers, and how to reach the elusive “break even” mark month to month. We always knew that owning Welcome Home Brewery would be a lifestyle business, and we never hoped to get rich doing it, but at about 15 months in, we saw our first month where we had a net profit (albeit a small one), and that felt good.

The last thirty days have undoubtedly been the most challenging thing we have experienced so far, with the COVID-19 virus leaving us no choice but to modify our business model to a to-go only model. Financially, it’s been difficult but we are working with all of the Federal programs available to us to make sure we stay open. Finances aside, the biggest challenge has actually been the social distancing piece. Welcome Home Brewery wasn’t ever meant to be a to-go business. It was meant to be a gathering space. We miss seeing our regulars bellied up to the bar for their favorite brew. We miss meeting new faces, new families, new pups, and making those folks into new regulars.

Please tell us about Welcome Home Brewery.
Craft beer is one of the fastest-growing industries in the country right now, and we knew that in order to stand out, we had to offer something different. We figured there are two ways to do that – first, through the beer, and second, through the atmosphere of our tap-room.

On the brewing side of the business, we offer a little something for everyone. If Aaron were to say he has a brewing specialty, it would be “beer-flavored beer”. He prefers to brew traditional styles – blondes, IPAs, browns, ambers, reds, and stouts. Conversely, his assistant brewer Devon inspires Welcome Home’s high-gravity and “funky” beers like imperial stouts, double IPAs, and sours. Sharon fills out the balance of our 12-taps with some really unique ideas, like our series of “pie” beers ranging from fruit pies like lemon meringue or mixed berry, to cream pies like coconut cream and peanut buttercream, just to name a few. She and the ladies of Welcome Home were also the masterminds behind the “Haute Mama’s Chocolate Chile Stout” that won our inaugural battle of the sexes beer competition at our first-anniversary celebration.

The tap-room is really what sets Welcome Home Brewery apart. So many breweries right now have an industrial feel, with hard metal bar stools and pipe and wood tables. We wanted to create an atmosphere that feels like you’re having a few beers at a friend’s house. A gas fireplace sits in the center of the room, inviting everyone in as they come through our doors. Our tables and chairs are all mismatched dining sets that we picked up at garage sales and through Facebook marketplace. We have folks tell us at least once a week, “we have that table at home in our dining room!” We also have several soft, plush easy chairs around coffee tables, and our bar tops and 18-seat community table are made from antique doors. If we had to give our tap-room character a name, “rustic farmhouse” would probably be most accurate, but it’s something you really have to come see and experience for yourself.

One of the most important things for us as business owners is community involvement. We have partnered with a number of non-profits to help raise funds for their causes, including local dog rescues, the St. Baldrick’s Foundation for Childhood Cancers, and Humanize the Badge: Call for Backup. We are proud to be woman-owned and first-responder owned (Aaron is a Sheriff’s Sergeant for the Arapahoe County Sheriff’s Office).

If you had to go back in time and start over, would you have done anything differently?
We would have taken a little more time researching things that we REALLY wanted that would have been manageable up-front, but modifying now that we’re open will present significantly bigger challenges. To put it simply, if there is something you think you’re going to want (like a rollup bay door to the outside, or a sloped floor drain in your brewhouse, for example), then you are better off spending a little more up-front on it than trying to figure out how to add it later.

If we could go back and talk to ourselves during the first six months, we were open. We’d also encourage us to manage expenses much more conservatively early on. There will be money for that project later on if it isn’t absolutely necessary to get the doors open and generate revenue. Just give it six months.

Pricing:

  • Pints are $6-$7, depending on the beer
  • 25.4oz Cans to-go are $10 or 2/$18
  • Growler fills are $22

Contact Info:

Suggest a story: VoyageDenver is built on recommendations from the community; it’s how we uncover hidden gems, so if you or someone you know deserves recognition please let us know here.

Related Items

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

More in