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!