Credit: Breckenridge Brewery

(Denver, CO) – Breckenridge Brewery Director of Marketing, Todd Thibault, nonchalantly announced some pretty big news on Saturday’s episode of the Colorado Craft Beer Show.

“We are going to need to move out of our Kalamath [Street] location,” says Thibault. “We are going to announce something very soon. There is a smile on my face when I think about this new brewery that we are going to build in Colorado.”

The company has several locations in Colorado with its main brewing facility at Kalamath Street in Denver and a brewpub in Breckenridge. It also runs a few bar/restaurant facilities.

Breckenridge ran into trouble this past spring with restrictions imposed by Colorado liquor law, limiting the brewery, at the time, to 60,000 barrels annually. With brewery production approaching that limit, founder, Ed Cerkovnik, threatened to invest $15 million into moving its manufacturing facility to the East Coast.

Fortunately for Breckenridge, the state didn’t want to lose the tax revenue and found a workaround that would allow the brewery to continue brewing in Colorado, well past the 60,000-barrel mark.

Thibault explains that the company will take advantage of the ‘alternating proprietorship’ federal rule in which one brewery is licensed to go into a second brewery and produce beer on the second brewery’s system. It is different from a traditional contract arrangement in which workers at the second brewery handle the labor. He didn’t go into specifics but noted that they will be able to effectively combine the licenses of their two brewing facilities to double capacity to 120,000 barrels annually (60,000 per facility).

The Breckenridge brewpub is tiny and only produced 1,125 barrels in 2011 though at the company’s current pace of growth, it will need to take advantage of the loophole in 2013.

Breckenridge produced 41,000 barrels at Kalamath St. in 2011 and Thibault estimates that the company hit approximately 53,000 barrels in 2012, an increase of nearly 30%.

The company increased capacity to 75,000 barrels earlier in the year so it has another year of breathing room.

Breckenridge Brewery’s beers are available in 33 states, mainly east of the Rockies, though, according to Thibault, 60% of sales take place in Colorado.