Local Brewery Hosts Grand Opening
To most of the community, the Kochendorfer Brewing Company’s opening has been a year in the making. Owner Laura Kochendorfer said that the process has been like a roller coaster. “We’ve gotten really excited and then we’ve had one challenge after another that we’ve gone through to get here,” she said. “We’ve done a lot of this ourselves…friends and family helped lay the tile and do the floors. We’ve been trying to develop a family business and we’ve put a lot of blood, sweat, and tears into this year-long process.”
The facility hosted a much-anticipated grand opening last weekend, starting with an invite-only “soft opening” on Friday night and a ribbon cutting on Saturday, followed by a concert by local musician Chance Anderson.
Brewmaster Leonard Cripps says it’s been a much longer process than just the year since the Kochendorfers broke ground last October; he started brewing beer in the mid-1980s. “My wife was stationed in Germany in 1985 and we spent four and a half years there. That’s where I discovered what good beer was all about,” he said.
“We came back to the States, there weren’t any breweries or brewpubs near where we were stationed and I tried to drink American beer and I just couldn’t, so I started making my own.”