Epic Brewing is a food and drink brand founded in Salt Lake City, Utah, in 2008.
Before Epic Brewing made beer, its founders sold brine shrimp eggs. Dave Cole and Peter Erickson met in aquaculture and, in the early 1990s, weighed a microbrewery against the shrimp. The shrimp won. Their company, Salt Creek, sold Great Salt Lake brine shrimp eggs to fish and shrimp farms around the world until 2002. In 2008 they started a brewery in Salt Lake City. "We're back to beer," Cole told CompanyWeek.
The plan rode on a Utah law, in effect by 2009, letting breweries sell strong beer from their own stores. "We thought, 'That's weird.' Nobody was doing it," Cole said. The state wouldn't issue a brewer's license until the whole brewery was built, so the first bombers didn't go on sale until March 2010.
Epic's seasonal Exponential series usually runs about 10 percent alcohol, and Cole's advice on it is "You've gotta be careful with it." In late 2022 Epic said it would close its Denver brewery and move all production back to Utah. Cole and Erickson still own Epic.
The State Street taproom keeps more than 50 beers in the fridge and will pour a 2-ounce taster of any of them. The founders' last product was fish food.
Epic also makes a coconut water, Clearly Coconut, from USDA organic coconut, and the company describes it as "brewed, not squeezed."
