Hogshead Brewery, serving English cask ales, will open in West Highland

Denver's West Highland neighborhood is one of many hip parts of town that has been ripe for a brewery for years. Now that time has come. Hogshead Brewery, serving English-style beers, plans to open in March in a renovated service station at 4430 West 29th Avenue. The four owners, all beer lovers, have been using a one-barrel brewing system to tests their recipes for the past year, but decided -- based on the success of other small breweries that have opened in Denver in the past two years -- that they needed to upgrade.

So Hogshead will start off with a ten-barrel system, says co-owner Mike Manczur, who also owns Kotan, Inc., a development company located next door to where the brewery will be. The other partners are John Cianci, Jeff Kipp and Stephen Kirby, who will be the brewmaster.

"Stephen has been brewing in the UK since he was a teenager," Manczur says, adding that Hogshead will have six beers on tap at all times. Two of them will be cask-conditioned English bitters poured using a traditional hand pump at the bar, rather than a typical CO2 draft system.

A hogshead, incidentally, is a 500-year-old unit of measurement in the UK that is often used to measure liquids like, yes, beer.

Hogshead is the eighth brewery to announce its intentions to open inside Denver city limits in 2012.