Excel Roofing founder J Bretz recently sat down with Chris Day, the manufacturer’s representative for Brava Roof Tile, to talk through how the product holds up in Colorado and Wyoming weather and what homeowners should expect to pay. Brava is a composite roofing tile built on a recycled polymer base, and it belongs to a very small group of products J Bretz is willing to call a roof you install once and never think about again.
Brava is a polymer modified roofing tile. It is not a coated metal panel and it is not a mineral surfaced asphalt product. "It’s a recycled polymer base, and we’re doing a mix of high density and low density polyethylene in it," Day said. "That’s our base formula."
The tile is compression molded and produced in shake, slate, and Spanish barrel profiles. The shake profile reads very close to real cedar, which matters in Colorado, where a great many homes, especially in the foothills and high country, were designed around a cedar shake look.
In Colorado and Wyoming, hail is the reason most roofs get replaced. Day pointed to a neighborhood in Colorado Springs as his example. "We had that big storm in Colorado Springs seven or eight years ago that took out everybody’s stuff. We came in, put a bunch of Brava into that neighborhood," he said. "Two years later, a lighter storm came in. We didn’t lose a single roof, but then we came back in and replaced our competitors’ roofs."
That first storm totaled a large number of genuine tile roofs in the Broadmoor area, so coming through a follow up storm without a single loss is a meaningful data point. The industry standard for impact is UL 2218, which runs from Class 1 to Class 4. Class 4 is the top of the scale, and Brava carries it. J Bretz’s opinion, and he is clear it is only an opinion since no such test exists, is that Brava would pass a Class 5 or Class 6 if those ratings existed.
Day has never personally seen a Brava roof totaled by hail, though he has heard secondhand of one in Austin where the stone punched through into the home below. Both men landed in the same place on the practical limit: grapefruit sized hail or larger. "At that point, we’ve got bigger problems," Day said.
J Bretz has watched a lot of polymer roofs go chalky over the years, particularly grays that slowly turn white under Colorado sun. Day credits two things. Brava uses mineral pigments, the same class found in high end clay tile, and those pigments are what make compression molding possible. On top of that, Brava runs a high UV package on anything installed above 4,000 feet. That is what lets the company stand behind a 10 year fade warranty at 8,000 or 10,000 feet, where ultraviolet exposure is far higher than at sea level.
Colorado’s wildfire requirements have turned fire rating into a code question rather than a preference for homeowners in higher risk areas. Brava meets Class A as an assembly, meaning the tile is installed over specific underlayments that together produce the Class A result. Day also listed ICC, Wildland Urban Interface, Miami-Dade, and Texas Department of Insurance approvals. Miami-Dade is one of the most demanding product approvals in the country.
Because Brava is polymer based, it does not absorb water, so it never develops frost adhesion. Snow releases from it readily. Day recommends evaluating snow retention on any mountain installation as best practice. J Bretz goes further and recommends snow retention or snow fences anywhere snow could slide onto people, walkways, entries, decks, or parked vehicles. Fatal accidents from roof snow slides happen every winter in the United States, and this is a detail worth designing before installation rather than after.
A standard Brava installation, whether shake, slate, or Spanish, weighs roughly 300 pounds per square. A typical asphalt shingle roof runs 220 to 300 pounds per square. A concrete tile roof is generally around 1,000 pounds per square, squarely in the territory where a structural engineer gets involved. Brava sits in the same weight class as asphalt, so no framing reinforcement is needed, and because the shake profile does not absorb water like real wood shake, there is no weight gain when wet.
Brava requires essentially no maintenance and never needs resealing the way a classic cedar shake roof did. Beyond blowing off pine needles and dust, there is nothing on the annual list. It is also recyclable at end of life, and can be sent back to the manufacturer, shredded, and used in new product.
The resealing question prompted a warning from J Bretz that applies to asphalt roofs rather than Brava. He tells homeowners to stay away from the shingle rejuvenation sealants advertised on television, Roof Maxx among them. In his view these products are a scam, and the money is thrown after a roof already near the end of its life. Set it aside toward the replacement you are going to need anyway.
J Bretz tells homeowners that an average asphalt shingle roof in the Denver metro area runs around $20,000. Asked what the same home would cost in Brava, Day did not hedge. "You’re probably looking about three X on that, about sixty thousand dollars," he said.
Those are ballpark averages from the time of the interview. Real pricing depends on square footage, pitch, complexity, valleys and penetrations, accessibility, and current material costs. But three times asphalt is the right order of magnitude to plan around.
Brava warranties the product for 50 years. Day described the accelerated aging equipment at the company’s Iowa facility, machines that blast samples with UV and other stressors to model decades of exposure. Based on field performance, J Bretz expects a Brava roof to last every bit of 60 years.
With no hail at all, a homeowner is lucky to get 20 years out of an asphalt roof, and from Pueblo to Fort Collins and north into Casper and Sheridan, hail shortens that considerably. Excel Roofing has customers who have used the company two to five separate times across our 33 years in business. Over the life of one Brava roof, a homeowner in hail country is realistically buying two or three asphalt roofs, before inflation on each replacement. That is the return on investment argument, and why Day calls Brava a generational roof.
Wind and hail deductibles in Colorado have climbed sharply, and many are now percentage based rather than flat. A roof unlikely to ever be totaled changes how a homeowner can structure a policy. J Bretz said he would personally be comfortable carrying a deductible as high as $20,000 or even $30,000 on a Brava roof, since barring grapefruit sized hail he does not expect to file a claim, and a higher deductible lowers the premium. Every carrier is different, so have that conversation with your agent.
Most carriers also offer a discount for a Class 4 impact rated roof, though the amount varies widely. Local code is moving the same direction. Day noted that municipalities are increasingly writing Class 4 minimums into building code, in part because they are tired of watching landfills fill with roofing that fails every few years. Fort Collins and Berthoud are among the Colorado communities moving toward Class 4 only requirements, and Brava qualifies.
The summary J Bretz and Chris Day landed on at the end of the interview:
Brava is not the least expensive roof on the market and is not trying to be. It is the right answer for a homeowner who has been through the hail claim cycle more than once, who wants the look of cedar shake without the fire risk and maintenance, and who intends to own the home long enough for the lifecycle math to pay off.
Excel Roofing has been installing roofs across Colorado and Wyoming since 1993. We will walk your property, show you samples, and give you an honest side by side comparison of Brava against a Class 4 asphalt or stone coated steel system so you can decide with real numbers in front of you.
You Don’t Pay A Cent Until You’re Content.