The people who know the cocktail bar hiding off a dirt road in the mountains use the word “magic” often.

How else to explain Bread Bar?

The bar manager, Jeff Wilkins, got married at this former bakery in Silver Plume, the old mining town perched high along Interstate 70. He’s been working here since 2019.

“And the magic of Bread hasn’t gone away,” Wilkins says. “It still feels really, really special.”

There’s something about the little building that appears just as it did in the late 1800s. Something about the winter, when snow gently falls, the windows fog up, and there’s a glow inside ー warm like the drinks sipped by skiers stopping on their way back to Denver. There’s something about the fall, when the aspens glow around the deck. There’s something about summer nights on that deck, where music is played as the stars shine bright above.

“That part does feel magical to me,” says one of Bread Bar’s owners, Rob DuRay.

Says another owner, Steve Fenberg: “You go in, and time stops a little bit.”

Time has gone on; this summer marks 10 years of Bread Bar, or Bread, as it’s simply known by Fenberg, DuRay and other Denver-area friends who opened the place.

Ten years later, people are still discovering the magic.

There’s something about the little building, yes ー something about finding it when the lights are on (only Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays).

“It’s just kinda tucked away,” Wilkins says. “It’s a secret, but it’s not a secret.”

The word is out about Bread  ー a cocktail bar unlike any other in Colorado, the owning friends are proud to say.

There’s something about “that piney smell of getting up in the mountains away from the city,” DuRay says. “The light feels different. The air feels different.”

Bread, he says, “touches all these senses in a way that other bars don’t.”

That includes taste, of course.

One popular cocktail is Baby Doe Tabor, which blends vodka with a blackberry sage jam, citrus and soda. The Leavenworth blends tequila with passionfruit liqueur, sweet and spicy gingercello, tangy lime and fragrant bitters. Another standout on the menu: Half Past Seven, which features a very rare Patagonian spirit called Träkál, distilled from the region’s apples, pears and berries.

The cocktail names honor the local mining history, which Fenberg got to know over the years before Bread.

He got to know Silver Plume as “this old mining town that’s largely preserved and never turned into a true ghost town.” It was the kind of town “you’d think would be way off the beaten path,” he says, “but it’s literally just sitting off I-70.”

Fenberg came to love Silver Plume. “And I always loved this little building at the end of the road,” he says.

When he saw it for sale in 2016, the former state Senate president was just starting his political career. Fenberg was in his 30s and between jobs ー “where I could do stupid things and take risks,” he says.

Better to do so with friends, he figured. He called his pal from college back in Boulder.

“I thought it was crazy,” DuRay recalls.

Fenberg drove DuRay to Silver Plume, where the sun hung high across a blue sky. Snow was melting. Plants were blooming. “That promise of spring sort of thing,” DuRay says.

They proceeded up the dirt road to the old bakery remembered by a faded word above the door: “BREAD.”

“I was immediately sold,” DuRay says.

He and Fenberg met with a couple of other friends later that evening and hatched a vision.

They envisioned “a place that folks on their way to the mountains or coming up from Denver felt like was this secret little gem they stumbled upon,” Fenberg says. “But at the same time, we didn’t want it to feel like a tourist stop. We wanted people in town to feel like it was theirs.”

The idea was “refined but accessible,” he says. That’s seen on the menu of refined cocktails that are listed with another option called Bread & Butter: a Coors Banquet and shot of whiskey.

And the locals, indeed, are seen at the bar.

“One of my favorite Bread moments,” DuRay says, “is when somebody who’s in from the city or traveling from a different state sits down and starts asking questions and happens to be sitting next to a local who gives them all the history and lore.”

Now it seems Bread Bar is part of that lore ー a seemingly magical place. How else to explain it?

It can’t be explained as much as it must be experienced, the bar manager suggests. Come this summer, Wilkins implores.

“There might be nothing better than Bread Bar on a summer night,” he says. “Everyone’s laughing, having a good time and playing cards and listening to music. I don’t see a lot of cellphones. It feels like everybody just slows down.”