Downtown Laramie Breweries: What's Changed at 108 Grand

Grand Avenue between 1st and 2nd Streets holds two addresses that longtime downtown regulars used to treat as one stop. At 110 East Grand, Coal Creek Coffee Co. has poured espresso since 1993. At 108 East Grand, next door, a taproom carried the Coal Creek name too and served the coffee company's own beer. For years you could walk out of one door and into the other without crossing a street or updating your mental map of the block.

That map needs updating now. The city of Laramie's 2026 liquor license renewal list shows Black Tooth Brewing Co. holding the license at 108 East Grand. Coal Creek Coffee Co. is still on the same list, still run by Guerin Enterprises, still at 110 East Grand. Same block, same two storefronts, one new name on the tap side.

What the Filing Actually Shows

Older tourism pages and beer-tour writeups may still describe Coal Creek TAP's patio and its storytelling nights at the taphouse. Those descriptions reflect an earlier version of the block: this year's municipal paperwork shows Black Tooth Brewing Co. holding the license at that address.

The change did not arrive without warning. In January 2024, Oil City News reported that Coal Creek Coffee and TAP posted publicly about financial pressure that had been building since the pandemic. "The pandemic hit us hard, causing shutdowns, slow days, staffing changes, and supply chain disruptions," the business wrote in a post tied to a GoFundMe campaign. The coffee shop and the taproom had operated under one ownership since 1995, when Jodi and John Guerin bought the original 1993 coffee shop and later built the tap room next door. Two years after that public appeal, this year's license records show the coffee side still standing under the Guerin name while the tap side now belongs to Black Tooth Brewing Co.

The Five-Stop Walk, Updated

Downtown Laramie's brewery walk is still five stops long. What's poured at each one, and how long that name has been there, is worth knowing before you plan the route.

Two of these five have been pouring under the same name for well over a decade, and that matters more than it sounds. Altitude Chophouse brews a beer in partnership with Relative Theatrics, donating a dollar from every pint toward the local theater company, and another beer tied to the Gryphon Theatre that helped fund a marquee. The Library's brewpub roots trace back to that 2008 ownership change, meaning the sports bar pouring your beer tonight has outlasted several presidential terms of downtown turnover. Bond's, by contrast, is a newer name built around Jay and Mallory Bond's own recipes and that mural of Laramie's mountain backdrop rather than a franchise concept imported from elsewhere.

Black Tooth is the one stop on this list where the name is new enough that plenty of regulars have not yet caught up. The building did not change. The block did not change. The name over the door at 108 East Grand did.

Why One Storefront Changing Hands Doesn't Reshuffle the Block

Laramie Main Street Alliance is the reason a brewery can change ownership on Grand Avenue without the rest of downtown feeling the tremor. According to a Laramie Boomerang report, the nonprofit runs programming across roughly 28 downtown blocks and about 300 locally owned businesses, and its Facade Grant Program, brought back in 2023, has driven real investment into the buildings themselves rather than into any single tenant. LMSA director Trey Sherwood told the Laramie City Council this year that the matching structure means "for every dollar LMSA has put into this program another $5 is invested through private means" in downtown improvement, a ratio that has already resulted in $300,000 of private dollars going into facades and storefronts.

That is the part that does not show up when you are just tracking who owns the tap handles. The Facade Grant money went into the walls, the awnings, and the windows at 108 East Grand long before Black Tooth ever filed for a license there. When a business closes or changes hands on a block like this one, the storefront itself has usually already been reinforced by a program built to outlast any single owner.

Brewfest is the other piece of that infrastructure, and it is the one event that ties all five breweries together every year. Held at Depot Park, it draws about 3,000 people and functions as Laramie Main Street's primary fundraiser as a registered 501(c)(3), which means the money spent on a Brewfest ticket cycles back into the same facade and downtown vitality work that keeps buildings like 108 East Grand ready for whoever moves in next.

Next Time You're Downtown

None of this changes where the five breweries sit on the map. It changes what you will find when you walk in. If you have not been to 108 East Grand since before 2024, you are not walking into Coal Creek TAP's old menu anymore, you are walking into Black Tooth's. If you have avoided the block because you heard the coffee shop next door was struggling, that struggle was real in 2024, but the Guerin family's coffee business is still the one listed on this year's city paperwork at 110 East Grand.

Downtown Laramie changes in pieces like this more often than a single headline ever captures. A storefront gets a new tenant, a facade grant quietly reinforces the building behind it, and the annual fundraiser at Depot Park keeps the whole system funded. Paying attention to which piece just moved is its own kind of local knowledge, the kind that does not show up on a tourism page until someone updates it.

If you are new to Laramie, or you have lived here long enough to notice when a familiar storefront starts pouring something different, that kind of block-by-block detail is exactly what Kelly Cooksey tracks day to day around town. Let's connect if you ever want to talk about what is actually happening in this neighborhood, one address at a time.