Old Style Sausage operates in a US Department of Agriculture (USDA) inspected 1,600-square-foot facility in Louisville, Colo. and has for the last five decades. Before that it made sausage in a 10-foot-wide retail storefront in Old Town Louisville. But it started in the basement of Ed (Eddie) Deborski’s parents. April 1, 2024, will mark the 50th anniversary of the boutique sausage maker working out of the Louisville-based building.
Eddie’s son, Mike Deborski, owner, chief executive officer and “…whatever hat I have to wear at the time,” tells the story of ex-Denver Broncos offensive lineman Larry Kaminski, who met Eddie at Sunstrand Aviation, where both men were QA engineers. At the time, most pro football salaries were not enough to live on. Kaminski, a transplant from Cleveland, told Deborski he had trouble finding the kind of sausage he wanted.
“He said, ‘Eddie, I can’t find any kielbasa, I can’t find any kishka,’ and my dad said, ‘come on down and we’ll make some in the basement,’ meaning my grandparents’ basement,” Deborski said.
Larry went over to the house and he and the Deborskis made sausage. Mike Deborski remembers standing on a chair to watch while Larry, Eddie and Eddie’s father made the sausage, getting the blend of spices just right while drinking beer and then cooking up some patties to make sure it tasted just right before they began stuffing and linking it. The group smoked the sausage, Larry left happy and all was good with the world.
“A week later, Larry goes to work and says, ‘Eddie, I got these orders for the sausage, we gotta go into business,’” Deborski said. “My old man says, ‘that was for you. He [Larry Kaminski] says, no, this is for Bobby Anderson and Floyd Little and Pete Duranko and all the Bronco line; we gotta make sausage for them. And here we are, Deborski and Kaminsky’s Old Style Sausage.”
Old school
Deborski and Kaminski’s Old Style Sausage was the name of the company the first two years and it became Old Style Sausage when the company moved to its current location. But the original crafting in small batches has stayed the same.
Every piece of meat is hand trimmed and Deborski believes that good in equals good out. Rather than herb and spice mixes, Old Style uses fresh cilantro, fresh green onions, fresh garlic, frozen IQF brick blueberries and fresh Granny Smith apples in the formulation of its chicken apple sausage.
“So we’re using fresh every point of the way that we can and we think it makes a big difference in the product,” Deborski said. “We also do a lot of custom recipes, so we work with chefs to develop recipes for them. There is a lot of labor involved, but we think our chefs appreciate it.”
The Louisville facility puts out roughly 6,000 lbs a week and what the company makes today, gets shipped to Denver, a little over 30 minutes south, tomorrow to get worked out of frozen inventory. With that volume in the small footprint, Old Style Sausage does rely on a Handtmann stuffer to get sausage in the casing quickly.
“That’s our primary stuffer,” Deborski said. “It’s been a good piece of equipment for us. They’ve supported it well.”
The company employs eight, going to 10 in the summer when school lets out and sees its busiest times of the year from the beginning of the spring through about the end of November. Then a seasonal lull in the business provides a little bit of a break to, “…shine the place up again and put things back in order,” Deborski said.
Old Style ships to 26 cities nationally, most are single pallet, LTL, and they go to distributors such as Altamira, Gordon Food Service, Shamrock Foods, Sysco Food Service, US Foods, as well as a couple of high-end specialty foodservice distributors. Everything is foodservice except for one small retail outlet, a high-end specialty market, Atlas Valley Purveyors.
“The guy had to convince me that it was a fit for us to do business and he’s one of the best customers I got right now,” Deborski said. “Maybe not the biggest, but one of the best.”
Source: Old Style SausageSurvival and Growth
Sixty percent of Old Style’s business is dedicated to supplying three- and four-star rated Michelin hotels, and when COVID hit many of those hotels suffered. But Old Style Sausage made it through by participating in Boulder Valley School District’s The School Food Project.
Many from the Deborski family were students in the Boulder Valley district including Mike, his kids and nephews, so the project held a special place for him. The project works to bring up the quality of foods in the district to give kids better choices at the school, and potentially keep them away from less healthy alternatives, especially in the high schools.
“We partnered with them and we’re providing our high-end sausage products that they serve at the school level,” Deborski said. “So it’s our Italian sausage and our brats and they’ve had great success with it. They’ve been a great relationship, and it really helped us through COVID.”
Approximately 60% of Old Style’s business is high end, three to four star Michelin rated hotels and COVID had a significant affect on their business, and consequently, Old Style Sausage’s business.
“But it all turned out okay,” Deborski said. “All of our customers are back and all of our volumes are back, so it all worked out.”
Currently, Old Style services five different hotel brands throughout the United States, four of which want Old Style to grow with them and get into more units. Fifty years of production in a 1,600-square-foot space has put the company at its maximum capacity.
“We actually grew out of our building to the point that we have other companies copacking and packaging for us,” Deborski said. “We grew beyond it.”
Deborski would love to move into a new and bigger building and believes Old Style will at some point, but for right now he is taking small steps to get to that point. He currently has the plans for an addition to the existing facility in front of the planning commission, which he said would give the company the ability to take that first small step to service the current demand for Old Style Sausage.
With redevelopment projects happening all around the current facility, including apartments and a proposed connection to a commuter rail connecting to Denver in the works, Deborski believes a new facility in the future is the best thing.
“We’re allowed to stay as long as we like, but ultimately it’ll make more sense to be producing in more of an industrial area,” he said.
The Colorado Rocky
Breakfast sausage ranks highest on Old Style’s sales list due to its use on buffets at hotels and high-end restaurants. But the sausage maker’s signature product is the Colorado Rocky brat.
Eddie Deborski was stationed in Germany while serving in the military. He fell in love with the food and managed to get a recipe. He brought that recipe home from Bavaria, and it became the Colorado Rocky Brat. Deborski was able to trademark the name before MLB’s Colorado Rockies were named.
“My old man loved Colorado and loved the Rocky Mountains,” Deborski said. “There wasn’t a franchise team at that time, it was probably a couple years prior to the team being named. We’ve held that brand ever since.
“I really feel that our bratwurst is very Bavarian,” Deborski said. “And it’s kind of cool because we get people from the Midwest that moved here to Colorado for all the right reasons, but they don’t have the guy down on the corner anymore to get their bratwurst. And so, our bratwurst is coveted for that reason.”
As a matter of tradition, and in honor of Larry Kaminski and the critical role he played in Old Style Sausage’s birth, a couple of times a year Deborski makes up a batch of polska kielbasa and sends it to Kaminski. Deborski brands the special sausage Larry Kaminski’s Polska Kielbasa.
“He just gets a big kick out of that,” Deborski said.
