“They later formalized it, but the original deal was on the back of a napkin and I’ve never been able to find that napkin,” Shpall says.įreis took the Colorado company to a whole new level, primarily by increasing advertising to boost the store’s visibility.
In 1974, Becker moved the store to its current location in the same shopping center and, six years later, he sold the business to beer, wine, and spirits wholesaler Alan Freis. At some point in the store’s early years, Becker erected the iconic, retro-looking “Applejack Liquor” sign that still stands today and acts as a beacon for people driving on I-70 (which only went as far west as Wadsworth Boulevard when the store first opened, according to Shpall). To name his new store, founder Herb Becker drew inspiration from the shopping center’s name, as well as from a type of brandy made from apples called applejack. “We have a saying, which is, ‘If we don’t have it, you don’t need it,’” says Jim Shpall, Applejack’s CEO.Īpplejack first opened in 1961 in a much smaller building in the Applewood Village Shopping Center. Today, the store stocks more than 15,000 different items (for comparison, other liquor stores typically stock only a few thousand products) and has more than 125 employees on-hand to check customers out, answer questions, offer recommendations, or special-order products. Over the course of the last 60 years, the store has established itself as the place to go for beer, wine, and spirits, especially those that are hard to find or available in super limited quantities. There’s a reason that generations of libations lovers like Cussio regularly make the trek to Applejack from across the Centennial State. I’ll grab a bottle, try something new, see if I like it, and go from there,” says Cussio, a 36-year-old management consultant. Here, you’ve got hundreds of options so I can just play. “When I go there, there’s an entire wall of whiskey, an entire wall of gin-when I go other places, there’s maybe four, five, 10 options. To stock their bar with rare, eclectic, or otherwise noteworthy liquors, they go to Applejack -the iconic, family-owned beer, wine, and spirits store that’s been a Wheat Ridge landmark since 1961. In fact, the gatherings are so popular that Cussio estimates they sample, on average, between 150 and 200 different spirits each year. The couple loves cocktails and socializing and, for the last four or five years, they’ve hosted monthly tastings with friends in their cozy bar.
Most notably, they built a full-scale, Prohibition-era speakeasy in the basement, complete with a fake bookshelf door that requires pulling out a book to get inside. When Brendon Cussio and his wife moved to Colorado in 2015, they went above and beyond the typical new-homeowner renovations and design tweaks to personalize their Highlands Ranch home. The Local newsletter is your free, daily guide to life in Colorado.
0 kommentar(er)
