Incantation Brewing cites rising costs, vagrancy for closing

Sean Guerrero at his Aurora location

Incantation Brewing, which rebranded from Jade Mountain last February in an attempt to reinvigorate the business, has run out of magic.

The brewery which at one point had locations in Aurora and Denver on Saturday will host a final service at its Alameda location at 415 S. Cherokee St, just off South Broadway in Denver.

“If I gave it another couple years, maybe it would succeed, but I’m just broke,” said owner Sean Guerrero, who opened the brewery’s inaugural location in Aurora in 2021. That spot at 4233 S. Buckley Road closed before Christmas.

Guerrero, 37, said even though the turn from making more niche drinks at the Chinese-themed Jade Mountain brought more consistent sales, it was never enough to stay afloat. He opened in Denver in an effort to lure more customers, adding a Mexican-style coffeeshop alongside its lagers.

“I figured this might be an opportunity to go more central because we were so far out in Aurora,” he said. “Nobody wants to drive out there.”

Lowering all his prices by $1 didn’t offset rising costs. 

“Everybody is struggling, and so their solution is just to raise costs on things, and it gets passed on us and it’s very hard to pass that onto the customer,” he said, noting the business was averaging about $100 a day during the last several months.

Vagrancy at his shop didn’t help.

Guerrero said patrons were scared to come in. And some vagrants would angrily come into his shop, he said, noting an incident over a week ago when someone smashed the pastry case after Guerrero didn’t give him hot water.

Guerrero also mentioned a time when police surrounded people outside Incantation who were holding a sword and axe. And before he moved in, he said a “crackhead” threw a rock into his front door, shattering the glass to the tune of $600.

“While there’s way more people here and a lot more eyes on us, we just never really took off because we got tons of homeless sitting outside our door,” he said. “I think we just got cursed with two bad locations.”

The Aurora native opened the original Jade Mountain in China in 2015, where he was teaching English at the time.

“I started making beer out there since there’s no craft beer,” he said. “It gave me the opportunity to learn without anybody judging me.”

He returned to Colorado in 2019 and planned to open a stateside brewery in 2020. But the pandemic delayed those plans a year to May 2021, when he finally opened his doors at the former Pilothouse Brewing joint in Aurora.

But business largely stayed slow throughout, in part because Jade started in the middle of the pandemic, Guerrero said. He also thinks that Jade’s unusual brews, like those with dragonfruit or kumquat, made it harder for people to come in multiple times a week.

“We’d get decently busy for those few days, maybe one a quarter,” he said, noting people would come out for events like Chinese New Year and the Mid-Autumn Festival. “One day we’d kill it and do awesome, and the next we’d do $100.” 

Incantation was an attempt to appeal to a wider audience. He started making more popular Mexican and American lagers.

“Aurora is an old-school beer area. If you see the tap list at other breweries, there are just basic beers,” he said.

But the craft beer market today isn’t the blazing hot industry it was when Guerrero broke into the business.

According to the state Liquor Enforcement Division, 41 breweries closed in Colorado last year and beer sales were down 3.2 percent, more than a percentage point higher than the national average. Guerrero blames fewer younger people drinking.

“I remember in 2014 and 2015, when a new brewery opened everyone was there. I remember waiting in line for all these places,” he said. “I used to drive all over looking for good beer, but those people aren’t around anymore.”

Guerrero still hopes to return to craft brewing and will store his equipment in the meantime. But before then, he will work as a contract plumber with his dad.

“When we closed before Christmas, we were thinking about how to remodel and figure it out,” he said. “But it just came to the point where we’re too deep in the hole.”