Ten years ago, craft brewing’s soaring story arc felt rich with the promise of endless sequels and spin-offs.

Skip ahead a chunk of chapters, over boom times and a pandemic plot twist no one saw coming, and the story’s decidedly less rosy. The past few years in Colorado Springs have seen more breweries close than open — for the first time in, well, ever?

While 2024 is poised to buck that brief trend — with Fairplay’s South Park Brewing Co. taking over the former Smiling Toad Brewery in Old Colorado City and Lakewood-based WestFax Brewing Co. finally wrapping construction on its taproom on the far west side — opening and operating a brewery isn’t what it once was in a city that helped put craft beer on the map.

“It has definitely become more difficult; everything has gone up price-wise,” says Kat Hess, head brewer at Phantom Canyon Brewing Co.

Across-the-board price increases, including on ingredients such as grain, have been especially hard on smaller brewing operations that can’t afford, or don’t have the storage space, to buy in bulk, Hess says.

“This really is the first time that the brewing industry has seen a market correction,” she says. “And I think that there will be some more downturn in the industry before we kind of level out and start seeing that growth again.”

The city’s oldest brewery, Phantom Canyon celebrated its 30th anniversary last year. PCBC still doesn’t sell its beer in liquor stores, but it does offer to-go sales from its 10,000-plus-square-foot historic building downtown, with a brewery, full kitchen and restaurant on the ground floor, banquet space on the third, and pool hall in between.

Hess says having those diverse revenue streams — plus filial and financial ties to Denver’s Wynkoop Brewing Co., one of the state’s older and more established craft brewing brands — has helped PCBC ride out the rough patches.

Pete Kilman of Storybook Brewing runs a small enough operation that every bump has brought a jaw-rattling jolt. But he’s managed to hold on.

It helps when your current dream job is underwritten by a prior profession that paid well but failed to inspire. That previous career, as a vice president at a financial company, also taught Kilman some critical lessons that carried over.

“You always have to have a business plan, and you always have to plan on bad times,” he says. “You can’t look at one day like, ‘Oh gosh, no sales today. Big trouble.’ You can’t think that way. You’ve always got to keep looking at the big picture.”

That doesn’t mean he hasn’t had to make some tough decisions about how best to invest in the future. Kilman says he had to dip into a retirement savings account to buy the canning equipment that allowed him to continue selling beer during the pandemic shutdown.

“I was lucky that I was in a place where I could do that,” he says. “Not everybody was as lucky as we were.”

Kilman opened Storybook Brewing in 2014, early on in a decade that saw the Springs’ brewery count more than double. Since then, he’s grown the original 1,700-square-foot space off East Fillmore Street into two adjoining units, tripling what began as a nook into one big enough to host larger gatherings for fundraising events with partner nonprofits as well as public meetings and even occasional performances including live music.

Success might be less about rolling with whatever plot twists are thrown your way than staying true to your original expectations about how the story would play out.

“I don’t need to make a bunch of money so I can retire and move to some place in Florida,” Kilman says. “Our mission statement and our goals were to be part of the community. It’s nice to actually have something to do, and people to know, and we’re going to keep doing it as long as we can.”