Drinking Wyoming: Speed Goat Put Ten Sleep Brewing Co. On The Map

Cowboy State Daily’s 'Drinking Wyoming' is presented by Pine Bluffs Distilling.

TEN SLEEP — Western fairy tales can be real, especially if you’re drinking a cold one at the Ten Sleep Brewing Co.

That’s because the brewery has a stunning backdrop of red rock against a bluebird sky that frames its outdoor beer garden. It’s the kind of view more often seen in paintings than real life.

And when evening rolls around, the air tends to get a bit misty. That renders all the red-colored hills in painterly strokes of muted sunlight, and then time just feels as if it has suspended itself all for you.

It’s your own happily-ever-after moment, and it can last as long as you choose to sit still and enjoy it.

Wait until the sun disappears over the horizon if you want, no one will mind.

It’s a choose-your-own adventure at this brewery that has become a legendary gathering spot for all walks of Wyoming life — hunters, hippies, cowboys and climbers. All of them have been known to flock to this brewery, particularly when there’s a musical concert afoot.

Climbers are probably the most prevalent. Ten Sleep Canyon is known for world-class climbing and quirky fun routes: Aunt Jemima’s Bisquick Thunderdome, for example, the Wagon Wheel of Death, or Bikini Girls with Machine Guns.

Who doesn’t like a bikini girl with a machine gun — and is brave enough to say so?

The Secret Ingredient

The beers at Ten Sleep Brewing Co. can be found across Wyoming and have become pretty popular, particularly Speed Goat, which is one of the brewery’s first beers.

It has a secret ingredient that is 100% Wyoming sunshine. The beer is made with honey from the Bryant family in Worland, one of Wyoming’s oldest businesses.

This beer has a clean, crisp taste that goes with just about anything, whether it’s an elevated fish taco or a juicy hamburger and French fries. You just can’t go wrong with the Speed Goat.

Ten Sleep Brewery has won a pack of awards for its other brews, too, and they’re well worth trying. It took home a first place for Pale Rider Ale at Lander Brewfest in 2021 and second place in classic dark styles for its Mastodon Baltic Porter. It won Best Amber at the Yellowstone Brewfest in Cody in 2019 and best wheat beer in 2017 from Lander Brewfest, among many other awards since opening in 2013.

The brewery’s master brewer has recently added a fresh hop beer to the lineup called Ten in One. That’s a limited selection that can only be brewed at certain times of the year, and so is only available onsite at the Ten Sleep Brewery.

They’re also experimenting with small-batch brews that have been aged in Wyoming Whiskey barrels. These are first-rate beers with an added whiskey flavor kick. And they, too, are only available at the brewery itself.

Speed Goat is the most well-traveled Ten Sleep Brewery beer, though, making it to taprooms across the state from The Brewery in Green River to Accomplice in Cheyenne and lots of places in between and beyond.

The beer is so popular, in fact, the brewery is still trying to meet all the Cowboy State demand. That’s meant building a much larger brewing facility in Worland, which has recently expanded its capacity by another 25% or so.

The tasting room, however, will always remain in Ten Sleep, where it’s become a vital part of the tiny town’s economy.

“Eventually we need to get into more packaging,” co-founder Justin Smith told Cowboy State Daily. “Right now, it’s so brutally seasonal. Everything is a giant up and down. So, the goal is to take care of draft beer in Wyoming and then move into canning.”

That’s, undoubtedly, going to take more expansion in Worland at some point, Smith said.

About That Knife Fight

Ten Sleep Brewing Co. easily catches the eye of passersby on the scenic U.S. Highway 16, thanks to its stunning location. The barn-turned-brewery is snugged up against the base of Signal Cliff, a big, beautiful red tower of rock set against blue sky.

It couldn’t be more picture perfect. But for the brewery’s founders, getting to this happily-ever-after dream was something of a “knife fight” from start to finish.

“My dad was a developer who built airplane hangars and buildings on airports around the United States,” Smith said. “He got in trouble during the big economic crash of 2008, 2009, and so he was sitting here on this property wondering what the heck to do.”

That’s when he remembered a brewery that some relatives had started in a barn in Washington. They’d gotten so busy so fast, they ultimately shut their operation down. They didn’t want to quit their day jobs, and the brewery was just too much work to do both.

“So, my dad said, ‘Well heck, I’ve got a barn, and if those guys can do it, I can do it,’” Smith recalled. “And we had a connection to Jeremy Tofte, who started Melvin Brewing in Alpine.”

Smith is a mechanical engineer and was brewing beer at home as a hobby, even taking some classes at Central Oregon Community College. The idea of coming to Ten Sleep to help his dad start a brewery wasn’t that tough of a sell.

“So, I left my fancy engineering job to come out here, back to Ten Sleep, population 260 or whatever it was at the time, and drug my family out here with me,” Smith said. “And then I went to Jackson for a kind of crash apprenticeship with Jeremy and Kirk McHale at the time. They were brewing in the back of the (Thai Me Up) restaurant, and it was like being in a submarine.”

During that one-week crash course with the self-described “mad scientists” of beer, Smith slept in a converted Border Patrol bus, which later became known as the Melvin bus.

Bumping Into The Money Ceiling

In the meantime, his dad and his brother were remodeling the barn, and trying to source a brewery they could afford with limited funds.

That was a big problem. They had about $55,000. Most systems, however, ran upward of $120,000. That’s on the cheap side.

“They had kind of run into a plateau of funding,” Smith said. “But they had managed to find this guy in Colorado, who said he would build them a brewery they could afford.”

Unfortunately, this turned out to be too good to be true.

“I spent about a week or so in Jackson and had literally just gotten back to Ten Sleep when I had a phone call from the fabricator saying that he was going out of business, and the bank was locking his doors,” Smith recalled. “And I’m like, ‘Wait a minute, we sent you a bunch of money and I just moved my family out here, what’s going on?’”

It was early 2013 at this point, and the Smiths were working on a desperately hasty timeframe, aiming to be open that summer.

“If you miss summer here in Ten Sleep, you miss all the revenue, right? So, July came and went, and this guy was making promises, but pretty soon August was coming, and we still didn’t have this brewery system,” Smith said.

So, Smith took a drive down to Colorado, where the guy’s business was located, to just “sit on the guy’s doorstep” until the man either returned the Smith family’s money or gave them the promised system.

“I got down there on like a Tuesday and called him,” Smith said. “And he said, ‘The bank locked my door on Monday. But I’ve got a mash dome and a kettle out the door to you.’”

More Delays

That was really only half the fledgling brewery’s order, but there was little Smith could do at that point but return home to Ten Sleep to await the brewery parts that were “in the mail.”

“The mash dome finally did show up,” Smith said. “It was all smashed in on one side.”

The kettle — a 1,000-pound, 6-foot-high by 5-foot-wide container — somehow, someway got lost.

“The shipping company finally found it,” Smith said. “It had been sitting in some back lot in Jackson. They were like, ‘Well we saw it was brewing equipment and all that goes to Jackson, so we just sent it there.’”

Then they told Smith that the kettle was “kind of smashed up.”

“I tell you what, when a shipping company tells you something’s ‘kind of smashed up’ it means it’s really smashed up,” Smith said. “This guy in Colorado had, I think, literally gone out to his backlot and found a couple of things that were close to what we actually ordered, stuck them on a truck without packaging them at all.”

The shipping company had to move the kettle around with a forklift. The tines had gone completely through the bottom of the kettle. It was a brewing system with some holes in it, right out of its nonexistent box.

“So, at the end of the day we had these two giant pieces of steel laying out in the dirt in our parking lot that were smashed up,” Smith said. “And I could also see that the shipping company had run over the ladder on the platform.”

That was in late August and Smith was wondering what he’d gotten himself into, and why he’d agreed to this scheme at all.

“It was quite a knife fight,” he said. “I mean, we were going to run out of money if we didn’t get this system going.”

The family put up an online Indiegogo campaign — similar to GoFundMe — to raise about $10,000 to build their own brewery system out of these two smashed pieces. That was their only hope.

But what really saved them was an angel investor whose wife told them about what they were trying to do and decided he wanted to help them out.

“He was just a random guy from Texas who had a little condo or something in Jackson,” Smith said. “And they were big fans of Wyoming”

So, the family got a life-saving $100,000 to work with — far more than what they’d asked for, but exactly what they really needed. It was a bit like the blue fairy coming along and waving her wand, except in this case, nothing was going to disappear at midnight.

Thanks to Smith’s background as a mechanical engineer, he was able to piece everything together, and the first brew rolled out Oct. 2, 2013.

“We didn’t have any of the steam vents or anything because all of that stuff had disappeared,” Smith said. “So, we literally opened the doors of the barn and brewed, with Jeremy’s help, and the whole place would fill with steam.”

This was a huge problem as the winter came on and things got colder.

“We had no heat in there, so, the whole brewhouse would flash freeze if it was 10 below zero outside,” Smith said. “There was ice on everything. We were breaking ice in the toilets. It was wild.”

Locals Keep Them Afloat

The barn doors opened for guests just two weeks after the first brew was ready. That was opening day of hunting season. Hunters and locals were what kept them alive during that first terrible year.

“The fact that we were just, we weren’t pretentious,” Smith said. “We were in a barn, and we didn’t try to go crazy with the beer. We kind of recognized what our local market was.”

Locals really appreciated the effort, and returned it 10-fold, Smith said. People in town made it a point to come down to the brewery, to support what was trying to grow in the winter in their backyard.

Smith looks back on all of that now, and realizes how amazing all of it really was. In the end it was an entire community that helped create a fairy tale ending for a business that had, at first, seemed cursed.

“It was pretty amazing,” Smith said. “And we have got a pretty neat little vibe here now. You can end up with locals sitting around, people traveling from the Black Hills and Yellowstone, with rock climbers — and it just kind of works for everyone.”

Renée Jean can be reached at renee@cowboystatedaily.com.