Ska Brewing Company, Durango’s own two-tone, counterculture brewery, celebrates its 30th anniversary this year with new owners injecting new vibrancy into the company’s culture.

Ska co-founder Dave Thibodeau, who remains with the brewery after the sale, says the industry has changed considerably from the pre-internet, community-driven, DIY environment that pervaded craft beer in 1995.

“We traveled around and we pieced together equipment. We were buying stainless steel tanks from small dairy farms on the Western Slope — they had closed down or had extra equipment and we were pulling stuff out of fields and then bartering and trading with welders to retrofit it,” he says. “We used to always say, ‘you gotta just do it yourself,’ and that was totally that punk rock ethos. We used to always talk about that and we never had any idea that we would still be here 30 years later.”

Some of that community naturally gets lost when the number of breweries shoots to nearly 10,000, but Thibodeau sees the trade-off as a much-improved customer experience compared to the first batch of beer Ska made — a blonde ale served at Telluride Blues & Brews that wouldn’t pass muster with today’s more discerning beer drinker.

“It wasn’t good. And the people at the festival didn’t know it wasn’t good. We had a lot longer runway in those early years just because the general public was so much less educated,” he says. “The bar has been raised incredibly high. For that many breweries out there, the quality of beer is fantastic.”

The palette that brewers have to paint with has also broadened immensely over the years. Thibodeau says craft brewers in the early years essentially had to hit certain marks: something light, something dark and something in-between. Ska started with a blonde, a red ale, a brown ale and a porter.

“It’s been so fun to watch beer evolve over time and get to where we are today where it’s like there’s just no limit at all,” he says. “There’s just so much good beer and so many good styles.”

Around their 25th anniversary, COVID-19 took some of the wind out of Thibodeau’s sails. The brewery had partnered with Peach Street Distillers in Palisade to open the Ska Street Brewstillery in Boulder in March 2020. He says the ribbon-cutting in Boulder coincided almost exactly with the governor announcing that all bars and restaurants would be closed to slow the pandemic.

“That was an hour and 11 minutes into the grand opening,” he says. “We bought everybody a shot and closed up.”

The experience shook him and his partners at Ska, suddenly making them risk-averse — an uncomfortable and out-of-place experience for an entrepreneur.

“All of a sudden, I didn’t want to put my house on the line for any more money at that particular point in time,” he says. “It’s not in my DNA to avoid risk. It should be, but it isn’t. There have been times that we’ve failed. But overall, taking chances is what got us to where we are.”

To take that weight off, Thibodeau and his partners sold Ska to a pair of local families, the Arianos and the Wests, earlier this year. The West family owns the local A&L Coors Distribution operation, and Bob Ariano and Dave West are long familiar with Ska and friends of Thibodeau’s.

“They have some resources and they’re in it for the long run and they want to make some moves to build out an even stronger foundation,” he says. “Now I can think about things in a completely different way. That’s invigorating. I don’t exactly know what the next big move is going to be — there’s a number of things that we’ve talked about. But now it’s time to move forward, and people are stoked. I’m just really excited for what these next couple years might mean.”

Originally published in the winter 2025-26 issue of Spoke+Blossom.

Ska Brewing: 30 Years, New Owners, New Energy