Business Growth and Adaptation
Today, Dark Sky Brewing Company is a successful business with two downtown locations—one a taproom styled as a sit down restaurant, and the other an unstructured bar and beer garden. The business also recently acquired an offsite production facility used for brewing and canning. In addition to operating the locations visited by its guests, Dark Sky distributes its beers to retailers, even recently becoming a vendor for the large alcohol retailer, Total Wine.
Dark Sky has grown leaps and bounds since its initial opening in 2014, all due to the hard work and innovation of its owners, Larami and Ryan Sandlin.
100 Beers in One Year
Larami and Ryan came to Flagstaff in 2002 to pursue education at NAU that would help them operate a small town construction business. When they weren’t busy with the business, they spent their time mastering home brewing as a hobby. One night while drinking around a fire pit they began talking about opening a brewery, and decided that they could make such a business work in Flagstaff. Their decision was solidified when they noticed a “For Lease” sign on a downtown building on Beaver Street and thought, “This is the place. We’ve gotta do it.”
When the Sandlins decided to enter the craft beer market, there were already six breweries in Flagstaff, so they knew they needed an original approach if they were going to compete. Larami tells us,
“We knew coming in as number seven that we would have to do something totally different, and the one thing that we noticed about the other six was that they had their mainstay beers. So we decided that in order to be totally different, we needed to rotate tap lists constantly and just be super fun and creative. And that’s why we came up with the concept of brewing 100 different beers in our first year.”
At first Flagstaff customers were used to mainstay beers and took time to warm up to the rotating tap list approach, but ultimately the strategy paid off, leading the Sandlins to realize they would need to grow quickly.
Growth and Adaptation
In 2014, when the taproom first opened, Dark Sky was in a space of only about 2500 square feet with only 300 square feet dedicated to brewing. As its popularity grew, Larami and Ryan knew they would need to expand. Only two years after starting the business, Dark Sky took over the adjacent suite in their building, essentially doubling their capacity.
In those early years, Dark Sky partnered with a few different food trucks to provide their unique beer selection with food to complement it. Then, in 2019, they learned through a mutual acquaintance that the owner of a small local pizza restaurant, Pizzicletta, had an extra oven and was looking for a space in which to put it to use. This spawned a partnership in which Pizzicletta sublet a kitchen space in Dark Sky’s building, allowing customers to enjoy a classic pizza and beer pairing.
Although this space was originally more of a casual bar setting, when the COVID-19 pandemic struck, the Sandlins decided to pivot Dark Sky to a sit-down restaurant set up, allowing them to keep better control of the space and the number of people in it.
Then, in 2021 another opportunity to grow and diversify presented itself when Larami noticed that the restaurant next door was closed over Memorial Day weekend. The closure struck her as unusual and she began casually asking around about it. When she learned through another community acquaintance, who the building’s owner was, she reached out and eventually secured the space for a second Dark Sky location.
This new space returned to the less structured bar model Dark Sky had first opened with. In addition to an indoor bar with a variety of seating areas and an in-house kitchen called “Atmosphere” that serves up the creations of Joe Rodger, a chef friend of the Sandlins, this new “beer garden” location features a large outdoor patio that serves to beautify the area with built in gardens where previously there had been nothing but a paved parking lot.
Community Connections and Collaborations
Dark Sky’s business model is one that values and seeks to collaborate with others in its communities. Whether working with other businesses to offer food and beer pairings that are mutually beneficial, creating collaborative beers with other breweries that help promote them, or developing a space that benefits the business while improving the area around it, Dark Sky’s owners seem always to be looking outward to those around them when they make business decisions.
This philosophy is evident in how Ryan describes working with other breweries on collaborative beers:
“We do quite a bit of collaborations with our Phoenix brewery friends so they can get some exposure up here and we can get some extra exposure down there. It’s fun. We all do the ‘Flag 9’ beer every year for beer week with everybody up here. We all get together. Collaborations are worth it. We all help each other. It’s not like a competitive business. Anything you need, you can pretty much always get help.”
The new beer garden’s patio design is likewise a study in successful collaboration. Initially, the City of Flagstaff was resistant to Dark Sky’s patio proposal since it would reduce parking downtown, but as Larami talked them through her plans to beautify the space, they came to understand that this design would represent an improvement to the area and ultimately gave Dark Sky a grant for beautification.
A partnership with The Arboretum helped the Sandlins fill their beer garden with pollinator friendly garden spaces that attract hummingbirds and butterflies. The patio’s outer fence also features bike parking and a free bike repair tool kit provided by Flag Bike Revolution. According to Ryan the toolkit was getting used right away, so it was clearly something the community needed. “There’s nothing like that down here, so if you get off the bus and you have a flat tire there’s a little pump right there.”
Larami and Ryan have also created a mechanism to do further good in the community with their non-profit, Dark Sky Community. Their objective is to raise $250,000 and funnel that out to community partners in need through sponsorships and grants. Through Dark Sky Community, Larami hopes to support puppy rescues, kids artwork initiatives, and school lunch programs among other efforts.
Doing Business in Flagstaff
Dark Sky has been incredibly successful in Flagstaff, increasing its revenue by tenfold since its first year. In only seven years, the business has increased from one staff member (other than Larami and Ryan) to 49, and from less than 300 barrels brewed in the first year to nearly 2000 in the current year. This success has not been without its challenges. At the beginning, Larami and Ryan tried to do about 90% of the work themselves, splitting time between brewing, working at the bar, and construction. It’s only in the last year or so that they began to feel settled after so much change.
When asked what advice they would give to other Flagstaff business owners, the answer was simple: “Always evolve.”
Despite the challenges of finding a space in an already crowded market, weathering a pandemic, and managing their businesses growth, the Sandlins agree that Flagstaff’s inclusive and friendly environment have made it simple to do business here, even for a woman operating in two male-dominated industries (construction and brewing). They are looking forward to getting past the pangs of unpredictability at the new beer garden and getting to the point where everything just flows.
“It’s definitely, like I said, a labor of love for us,” Larami confides, “but we’re in it to win it. We want to be here in Flagstaff, and we’re definitely not going anywhere now.”
