After a decade of pouring house-brewed beer beneath its rooftop patio in Jefferson Park, Briar Common Brewery + Eatery is shutting down. Owner Kent Dawson says the restaurant’s last day will be November 22, and he’s pointing to a familiar culprit for Denver’s restaurant scene: a lease that’s run its course and a business climate that no longer makes renewing one worth the risk.
Dawson said the lease on the Clay Street space is ending, according to BusinessDen, which first reported the closure. “Given the current economic climate, combined with the challenges of operating a full-service restaurant in Denver, we couldn’t justify signing a new lease,” Dawson said, per the outlet’s report.
Briar Common opened at 2298 Clay Street with a build-out that, at the time, signaled serious ambition for the Jefferson Park corridor. The spot featured a seven-barrel brewhouse, a state-of-the-art kitchen and a rooftop bar and patio, according to an earlier account from Westword. That combination of in-house brewing and full dining service helped define the brewpub’s identity in the neighborhood for the past ten years.
A Tougher Runway Than a Decade Ago
Dawson has described the economics of running a Denver restaurant today as fundamentally different from when Briar Common first opened. After closing Briar Patch, the Congress Park sister restaurant, after just 14 months, he said low traffic and a high cost of doing business made that spot unsustainable — the same report noted his broader reflection on how much the landscape has shifted. “Ten years ago when we opened Briar Common, the cost of doing business was a lot lower and the runway was a lot longer,” Dawson said, per the same BusinessDen account of the Congress Park closure.
That dynamic isn’t unique to Briar Common. Denver’s full-service restaurant count climbed back to 910 in early 2023 before sliding to 827 by the third quarter of 2024, per data reported by The Colorado Sun. The city’s Excise and Licenses department has cautioned, however, that its licensing figures don’t reliably show whether a given business is actually thriving, struggling, or even still open — a caveat that applies to raw counts like the drop from 2,356 active retail-food licenses in July 2023 to 1,780 more recently.
Brewpubs Across Denver Feel the Squeeze
Briar Common’s closure arrives alongside a string of brewpub exits across the metro area this year. Rock Bottom Restaurant & Brewery closed its Centennial and Highlands Ranch locations in the weeks before mid-August, and the Centennial outpost had been serving customers for nearly 30 years after opening in 1997, according to The Denver Post. The chain’s original downtown Denver location, on the ground floor of Independence Plaza, closed in June, following an April closure of a Colorado Springs site.
For Jefferson Park regulars, the loss of Briar Common removes one of the neighborhood’s longer-standing anchors for house-brewed beer and rooftop dining. With the lease ending and November 22 set as the last day, Dawson’s explanation leaves little ambiguity about the forces at play — even if the city’s own data makes it hard to say just how many other Denver kitchens are quietly facing the same math.
