Front Range Brewery Tours

Last week I had the pleasure of visiting eight breweries in four days.

My summer passion for backpacking and my winter passion for backcountry skiing is rivaled only by my year-round passions of drinking good beer and riding bikes. On Tuesday, Annie and Jamie and I headed up to Boulder to visit three craft breweries. First up was Avery Brewing Co. (www.averybrewing.com), one of my favorites. The Avery tap room is a joy to behold - 20 taps and two beer engines of hand-crafted ales and lagers, many of which can be found nowhere else. Avery is a brewery, not a brew pub, so while there is no food on-site you are encouraged to bring your own. Annie and I brought some Asian food so for my first pint I ordered a Centennial dry hopped IPA, which paired nicely with the spicy flavors of my lunch. Annie ordered an IPL (India Pale Lager) which tasted cleaner due to the cool lager fermentation, but was equally delicious. Next, we split a pint of Brett Ellie's, a beer found only in the tap room and only when the brewers feel like making it. This beer began as an Ellie's Brown, a delicious but pedestrian brown ale named after founder Adam Avery's chocolate lab. The beer gets much more interesting when it undergoes a secondary fermentation with brettanomyces yeast ("brett"). While brett is often viewed as a contaminant in beer (and especially in wine), creative brewers have begun to use brett in secondary fermentations or even brew 100% brett fermented beers. In my experience, beer drinkers either love brett beers or hate brett beers due to the "interesting" flavors brett imparts. These flavors are commonly described as "barnyard," "horseblanket," "leather," or generally as "funky." Sounds delicious, right? I suggest everyone try a brett beer or two before you make up your mind.

The next stop was the Boulder Beer Company (www.boulderbeer.com), Colorado's first microbrewery (founded in 1979). This was the first time any of us had been to the brewery. We had three pints on the back patio - I had a nitro Imperial IPA, Annie had a small batch stout and Jamie had an unfiltered blueberry wheat beer. I thought the IIPA was too sweet (too much residual sugar from the malt that the yeast didn't ferment into alcohol) so I traded with Annie. The stout was good but not great, as was Jamie's blueberry wheat beer (although I generally don't care for fruit beers or for wheat beers, so take my opinion of a fruit wheat beer with a grain of salt).

Finally, we headed a mile or so down the road to the Twisted Pine Brewing Company (www.twistedpinebrewing.com) where we ordered a ten beer flight. This was also the first time any of us had been to Twisted Pine. The tasting room was very laid back and there was a small patio out front. In general, I thought Twisted Pine's beers were very good. I especially enjoyed their IPAs - Hoppy Boy (IPA), Hoppy Man (Imperial IPA) and Hoppy Knight (Black IPA). They also produce a tasty chile beer called Billy's Chilies, which is delicious as a taster but I wouldn't order it as a pint (the same holds true for Wynkoop Brewing Company's Patty's Chile Beer). Twisted Pine also makes "the world's hottest beer" - known as Ghost Face Killah because it is brewed with ghost peppers (200 times hotter than a jalapeno) as well as Anaheim, Fresno, jalapeno, Serrano and habanero peppers. Unfortunately for us, one of Twisted Pine's empty kegs that used to be filled with rootbeer somehow got filled with the Ghost Face Killah, so the beer smelled and tasted like root beer as well as ghost peppers. Personally, I was upset that they knowingly served imperfect beer and emailed them to let them know how I felt.

The next day, Jamie and Camden and Annie and I loaded our bikes (my other year-round passion) in the truck and drove north to Fort Collins to explore some more breweries. First, we rode the bike path through town, then headed to New Belgium Brewing Company (www.newbelgium.com) to rehydrate. New Belgium is an incredibly popular brewery (for good reason) and they book free tours online that sell out weeks in advance (even on a Wednesday afternoon). We were there early and lucky for us one of the employees organized an impromptu tour for us and some others hanging out in the Liquid Center (tasting room). Before we set off on our tour, I sampled a "Partially Blonde" (Belgian single) and a Munich Helles (pale German lager). I've been on the New Belgium tour a number of times now, but it's always fun and hearing the story of how the brewery got started is always inspiring to a homebrewer like me. In short, an electrical engineer/homebrewer took his mountain bike to Belgium to tour breweries and learn about Belgian beer. He fell in love with Belgian beers, which were essentially unavailable in the US in 1989 and decided to homebrew Belgian style beers exclusively. Two years later, he went commercial with his beers (still being brewed out of his basement). Today, New Belgium is the seventh largest brewery in the country and distributes to 26 states.

At this point, it was past Camden's nap-time (he is two years old) so he and Jamie drove back to Denver and Annie and I biked to O'Dell Brewing Company (www.odellbrewing.com). O'Dell was started by another homebrewer about the same time New Belgium was, and the two breweries are located about three blocks apart. About a year ago, O'Dell underwent a big expansion which doubled their plant size, increased the size of their tasting room, and also increased their parking capacity (both vehicles and bikes). Check out the custom fabricated O'Dell logo hop cone bike rack!

O'Dell Brewing Company's new bike rack

Annie and I ordered a taster of "pilot" beers that are only available in the tasting room. The curry-spiced wheat beer was surprisingly good, and the Imperial Oktoberfest with brettanomyces and the barleywine with brettanomyces were both spectacular.

The last stop on the bike brewery tour was the Fort Collins Brewery (www.fortcollinsbrewery.com), which also just completed a major expansion and moved three blocks down the street from O'Dell. The quality of breweries in such close proximity is unbelievable. We ordered a tray of their seasonal beers (including a delicious Stranahan's Colorado whiskey barrel-aged amber lager) and finally a tray of their year-round beers before heading back to Denver very satisfied.

Thursday, we rode our bikes to Strange Brewing Company (www.strangebrewingco.com), Denver's newest and smallest microbrewery. It opened in late May in an industrial strip center near Invesco Field. The neighborhood is a little rough, but the tasting room is comfortable and there is even a bike rack inside! We had tasters of every beer, then ordered a pint of Tainted Black Pale Ale and got an impromptu tour of the brewhouse from Tim, one of the two owners/brewers.

On Friday I made a spur of the moment trip to Asher Brewing Company (www.asherbrewing.com) in Boulder since I happened to be in the neighborhood (picking up a permit for a slot canyon backpacking trip in Utah - blog post forthcoming). Asher is Colorado's first all organic brewery. I ordered a pint of Tree Hugger Organic Amber, then sampled the Green Bullet Organic IPA and Asher's Kolsch-style beer. Kolsch is an interesting style of beer that is technically only produced by fourteen breweries in the world (although many other breweries, like Asher, produce Kolsch-style beers). The term "Kolsch" is an appellation established by the Kolsch Konvention in 1986, which serves to restrict the use of the term to only breweries located in and around Cologne (Kolsch), Germany. This is similar to the protection of the term "champagne" to describe sparkling wine produced within the Champagne region of France. Enough with the history lesson - try one sometime!

The Unemployment Chronicles

For those of you who haven't heard, I quit my job last month. Since then, I've been busy having fun. In an effort to keep friends and family updated on what I've been doing, I present "The Unemployment Chronicles."

In mid-September, I loaded my pack and my dog into my truck and drove to Aspen to backpack the Four Pass Loop, a highly touted 26 mile loop that crosses four mountain passes over 12,000 feet and circumnavigates the Maroon Bells. The Bells are a pair of fourteeners (peaks over 14,000 feet in elevation) in the Elk Mountains, a rugged mountain range in central Colorado.

I left my house in Denver at 6:00 AM and made the scenic 160 mile drive to Aspen in good time. I was on the trail and standing on the shore of Maroon Lake before noon. Directly in front of me was the postcard panorama of the Maroon Bells, probably the most photographed peaks in all of Colorado.

The Maroon Bells from Maroon Lake

Many tourists make the 100 yard walk from the parking lot and go no further, but I had 13 miles and two mountain passes to tackle that afternoon so my time at Maroon Lake was shortlived. I decided to hike the loop in a clockwise direction, climbing West Maroon and Frigid Air Passes on day one to avoid having to switchback my way up the much steeper Buckskin Pass from the east.

An hour or two after leaving the trailhead Ranger and I were above treeline and approaching West Maroon Pass. I passed a group of women from Crested Butte on their way back to the trailhead and overtook a man backpacking with a pair of llamas. He said it was nice not to have to carry any gear, but the llamas were more stuborn than he thought and were slowing him down.

The stretch of trail between West Maroon Pass and Frigid Air Pass was wonderful, never dropping below 11,500 feet and offering tremendous alpine views to the west and north.

As I crested Frigid Air Pass, the southwest flank of Maroon Peak came into view again. By mid-September in the mountains in Colorado the days are noticeably shorter and the sun was low in the western sky. I could see that the trail ahead (and 1,000 feet below me) was being overtaken by shadow. After a few dozen downhill switchbacks I was in Fravert Basin. I continued down the trail for perhaps two more miles and then found a place to sleep for the night. I dropped my pack, pulled out my beer, and bushwacked through some willows to the creek, where I moved some river rocks to create a spot to chill my beer without risk of it floating downstream. Priorities taken care of, I set up my shelter and got dinner cooking before returning for my now cool can of Avery IPA. I ate my dinner and watched the alpenglow dance on the ridge in front of me. By 8:00, it was dark and cold and it was time for bed.

I awoke at sunrise but couldn't talk myself into giving up the warmth of my sleeping bag (it is COLD at 11,000 feet in September!) so I napped for another hour and let the sun rise a little higher in the sky. I followed the trail down Fravert Basin and passed a cascading waterfall before coming to the trail junction for Trail Rider Pass.

Approaching Trailrider Pass

At the top of the pass I could see Fravert and Hasley Basins to the south and Snowmass Lake to the north.

Snowmass Lake from Trailrider Pass

Snowmass Peak from the shore of Snowmass Lake

I stopped to eat a snack on the shore of Snowmass Lake before crossing the marshy Snowmass Creek drainage and climbing once again toward the fourth and final pass of the loop, Buckskin Pass. I passed a large group of Aspen Middle School students on their way to Snowmass Lake, then another group, then another and another, and thought to myself how lucky I was to be able to do this trip mid-week and after Labor Day to avoid the crowds that usually go along with this popular trip. After passing what seemed like the entire Aspen Middle School, I switchbacked my way up to the top of Buckskin Pass and looked back to the direction I came.

Ranger at the top of Buckskin Pass, with Snowmass Peak, Hagerman Peak and Snowmass Lake in the distance

I knew I was the last person to crest Buckskin Pass that day, and it was all downhill from there. I cruised the remaining miles down Minnehaha Gulch and an hour or two later found myself back on the shore of Maroon Lake just in time to catch the sun set behind the Maroon Bells!

No trip is complete without a post-hike beer, so I stopped at the Aspen Brewing Company on my way out of town to rehydrate. A pint or two of Independence Pass Ale later and I was back on the road headed for home.