Fenberg wants his bar to bring community together, draw outsiders over craft cocktails

Glancing up the steep hillside toward the old mine, Stephen Fenberg smiles as he recounts how a granite monument wound up there, representing the collision of hardscrabble reality and whimsy that marks this town.

He’s telling the story of Clifford Griffin, an easterner who journeyed to Silver Plume during the gold rush to start his life anew after his beloved fiancée died on the night before their wedding.

Griffin managed the 7:30 Mine, Fenberg says. “There’s a few of them around the state called that. What it means is, the owner let the workers come in an hour later than at the other mines, which started work at 6:30 in the morning. Every night, as the town was going to bed, he stood up on the top of the cliff – where he’s buried now – and he played the violin for the town as it went to sleep.”

Fenberg cocks his head, listening for a just a moment. On the sunny October day as colorful aspens coat the hillsides, the Clear Creek Valley is peaceful, only the hum of passing traffic on Interstate 70 competing with the bluegrass music playing on the speakers and some laughter from a table a few feet away on the deck.

“One night, everyone was falling asleep, listening to his violin, and the song ended, and they heard a gunshot. They went up there and found that he’d prepared himself a grave and left a note saying, ‘This is the happiest place I’ve been since my wife died,’ so they buried him there and put up a monument – you can hike up to it,” he says. “So we named what we thought was our most interesting drink for him.”

That would be the Clifford Griffin, an herbaceous, tart whiskey-based cocktail, one of five signature drinks the staff at Denver’s The Way Back designed for Bread Bar, the bar Fenberg and three friends bought in the spring and opened at the end of July in Silver Plume. (See recipe below)

“Our drinks are meant to be well-done cocktails with really high quality, with mostly local spirits, but in a way that’s accessible for people,” Fenberg says. “We intentionally don’t allow our bartenders to wear vests – it’s a rule we have,” he adds with a grin. “We want to be sure this is a place that isn’t taking itself too seriously but provides good local spirits, local beer. It’s important for us to walk that line between high-end cocktails and something that’s approachable for people.”

And by the looks of things on a recent Saturday, nearly every seat on the deck filled and several customers enjoying themselves inside, the owners of Bread Bar are succeeding.

At a nearby table, Becky Creighton and Kevin Rosen, who’d heard about Bread Bar and decided to stop in for a cocktail after lunch in Idaho Springs, are trading a Clifford Griffin and Baby Doe Tabor – a citrusy vodka cocktail mixed with blackberry jam that’s been infused with sage – and pronounce both drinks well balanced, refreshing and delicious.

“It is an odd little place,” Creighton says, taking in the nearly overwhelming view. “It is an odd little town, Silver Plume – gravel roads, you pull up and it’s almost like a ghost town a little bit. But it’s away from Denver, we’re sitting here listening to some good music, I’m here with a good friend. I could see sitting out here on the patio in the winter as well.”

Fenberg and his partners – Rob DuRay, Casey Berry and Sam Alviani – purchased the historic building in May from the owners of Dram Apothecary, a Silver Plume business that makes teas, bitters and syrups, often with flora foraged from the surrounding forests. Dram had been using it as a tasting room for the past four years. Built in the 1890s, the building, at 1010 Main St., was originally a grain and feed shop but had been home to the Sopp & Truscott Bakery for nearly a century.

The bar is open Friday evenings and Saturday from mid afternoon until late at night, but Fenberg notes that it’ll soon add Sunday hours, to take advantage of ski traffic and give the thousands of travelers driving past a reason to pull off in the small town before they hit the crowded stretch to Denver.

“People are going to get sick of sitting in traffic, so they’ll pull off for a drink or some soup,” he says, adding that he and his partners are planning to add some food to the menu, maybe put together an outdoor oven, in part as an homage to the building’s storied past as the town bakery. “And, while we’re not banking on it, we might get some traffic from people going west,” Fenberg says. “If Eisenhower Tunnel shuts down, this is where they’ll sit, this is the last exit for the tunnel.”

Fenberg, 32, founded New Era Colorado, an organization dedicated to encouraging youth to participate in the democratic process, a decade ago. This year on Election Day, he was elected to represent Senate District 18 with nearly 80 percent of the vote. The district includes Boulder and Jamestown, Gold Hill and Nederland – “I have Boulder and the places that are even more like Boulder than Boulder is,” Fenberg, a Democrat, says – and has been represented by term-limited state Sen. Rollie Heath.

“Everybody finds their way here in a different way,” Fenberg says. “With four owners, we all have a different network.” (Fenberg has known DuRay for nearly a decade, since he ran New Era’s Denver office, and their partners work in event planning and public relations.)

“I’ve always wanted to own a bar,” Fenberg says. “But opening a bar in Denver is obviously a very competitive thing. We were attracted to the idea of opening up a small-town bar and having it be a destination for people from Denver. We sat down and had some whiskey and some tea and talked about it. We came up here thinking it wasn’t going to be a viable idea, but we walked out of here thinking, ‘Wow!’ There’s a weird little magnetic draw about this place.”

Owning Bread Bar is a “passion project,” Fenberg says, noting that all four owners have day jobs. “We did most of the remodeling ourselves, including putting in the deck ourselves in just two days.”

Since buying the place in May, along with the help of some friends, the four “did a pretty serious and thorough remodel, took everything down to the bones and cleaned it up” in less than two months. “We don’t actually know how to do any of this stuff, we just learn as we go,” Fenberg says, smiling. “YouTube is a valuable resource.”

“There’s a term up here called ‘mountain perfect’ – when anyone remodels anything, they use old stuff they found. There’s no hardware store – everything was cobbled together. As long as it works, it’s mountain perfect,” he adds.

After some vigorous shakes, guest bartender Brittany Wangsness, who works regularly at B&GC, a new speakeasy cocktail bar inside the Halcyon Hotel in Cherry Creek North, pours drinks for a couple at the bar.

“It’s my very first time in Silver Plume,” she says, noting that she’d been hearing about Bread Bar for some time and decided to drive up and check out the fall colors while working a shift. (She’s a fan of the Clifford Griffin but also mentions the Chief Colorow, named after a chief of the Colorado Utes, which Wangsness describes as “the perfect Manhattan.”)

“I’m just so happy right now,” she says. “This isn’t that far outside the city, but it’s far enough. “

A woman visiting from Germany sits in the sun on the sofa across from the bar, recalling how she visited the bakery decades ago when she lived down the mountain. She says she was delighted to find a charming bar in the building and adds that she’s looking forward to telling family members to visit the place.

Cleaning glasses at the small back bar, Fenberg nods to the woman and wishes her safe travels.

“It’s great being a place like the community’s living room, as well as a cool destination to get out of town,” he says. “In a strange way, it doesn’t feel like the bar belongs to the four of us, it’s more of a community thing than that. Everybody has a different story about this place that pre-dates us, and we want to respect that.”

While Fenberg didn’t have a heavy lift in his campaign once he’d secured the Democratic nomination – Senate District 18 is among bluest seats in the state – he says he’s enjoyed the hours restoring the building and bartending, which he’s been doing one or two days a week.

“In a lot of ways, this is an escape from running for the Senate. It’s not in my district,” Fenberg says (Clear Creek County is represented by Republican Kevin Grantham, who was just recently elected Senate president by fellow GOP caucus members). “It’s an escape on the weekends. Any time I’m working here behind the bar, it feels like talking to regular people and learning about what it is people care about, what their lives are facing, what they’re struggling with, what they’d like to see happening – not in the context of ‘I’m your senator,’ but in the context of, people saying things to their bartender.”

It’s taught him a few things already, Fenberg says.

“I’ve mostly been engaged in the political process through the advocacy sense. Opening a small business like this helps me have a much better grasp of what it’s like to be someone who engages with the government as a small business owner and an individual,” he says. “Frankly, I think our government does need to do a better job at engaging with regular people and helping people navigate the government process.”

After spending a decade running New Era, Fenberg says, he’s got a decent grasp about how to “make democracy more accessible, but I think there’s an opportunity to make government itself more accessible – not just voting, but how websites are built, things like that. It’s helpful to have an experience outside of being a political advocate, being a senator, just being someone who owns a small business.”

His experience might lead to some legislation, Fenberg says.

“From a small business owner perspective, it’s not easy to navigate the rules to figure out how to get the permits and the licenses from all the different entities, and how the local interacts with the state. “I’ve also learned from talking to some people about what the state can do to keep these places intact and historic. There probably are more resources available for places like this than the town knows about.”

The mayor and Town Council, for instance, have been working on restoring Silver Plume’s caboose for 50 years. “They do the mountain equivalent of bake sales, which is great, but I think, as a state, we could prioritize memorializing towns like this a little more.”

But there are plenty of times, he adds, when he isn’t thinking about politics or public policy or legislative solutions.

“The best part is when it gets late, and there’s six or seven people, and they all are locals, and they tell stories about when they moved here in the ’70s,” Fenberg says. “Or there’s this one guy in town, Jerry, whose family founded the first mine in town, so his family is literally the first white family to live here – and he’s still here, and so is his brother. The house he was born in is down the street, and he owns five or six properties in town and just knows so many stories. It’s like he tells a story and then someone else comes in later and tells a different version of the same story, and who knows which one is right? I get a chance to talk with people who are just incredibly hard-working and lead normal lives and come in here for a beer, and it’s just nice to slow down and have conversations like that.”

Stepping back onto the deck, Fenberg looks around at the mountains that tower over Silver Plume and its 170 residents.

“It’s a place that feels like is often disappearing in Colorado. The great thing about Silver Plume is, not a lot has changed in a hundred years. A lot of the same families are there,” he says. “There are towns like this that feel forgotten. On the one hand, that’s why they’re so great – they didn’t get a bunch of investment for tourism, and that’s kind of what makes it a magical place, but it’s right here off I-70.”

With an easy smile, he adds that he hopes to be up at the bar at least once a week during the legislative session. “I think it’ll keep me sane.”

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Recipe for Bread Bar’s Clifford Griffin (created by The Way Back)

2 oz Rittenhouse Rye

1/2 oz Peach Street Amaro

1/2 oz simple syrup

3/4 oz fresh lemon juice

Shake, serve in a rocks glass with ice, red wine float over top