Friday started with a sense of fun and excitement as we set off for Golden, CO to do the Coors Brewery tour. It might seem odd to some that we would do the Coors tour but despite being beer geeks, we are not beer snobs. The Coors brewery is historic as well as being the largest single-site brewery in the world. And our visit wasn’t without a sense of humor as we joked about how we couldn’t wait for our taste of the Silver Bullet.
But then life had to interfere with our fun day. It was on the shuttle bus from the parking lot to the brewery that we found out our friend and beer writer Bill Brand had passed away the night before. We will always be grateful to Bill for his words of encouragement and for plugging our videos on his blog. With a heavy heart, we proceeded with the tour.
Here is some Coors tour advice I wish I had beforehand. If drinking beer is all that is desired, there is something called the ‘short tour’, which is popular with the local college students. In the short tour, you can just go directly to the tasting lounge. There is also the self-guided audio tour which we would suggest to anyone who knows anything about the brewing process. Unfortunately, we ended up with the full guided tour, so for 45 minutes we listened yet again to how beer is brewed.
The brewery itself is a site to behold. The ugly massive gray facility houses the brewhouse and malthouse, as Coors malts their own barley. They make their own cans and bottles, as well. The tour takes you through the whole brewing and packaging process. Everything is on a huge scale as we saw endless brew kettles, humungous fermentation tanks and the largest and fastest canning/bottling line I have ever seen. Most impressive was the malting facility, especially the germination beds which seemed to stretch on forever.
Halfway through the tour, you get to sample either Coors Banquet (that is regular Coors) or Coors Light. The four of us chose Banquet. If you haven’t tried a macro-lager recently, I highly recommend it. It will reconfirm your faith in the craft beer movement.
With the tour over, it was off to the tasting lounge. You get three samples, but the four of us chose only one. And we didn’t even finish those. I had the Rising Moon Spring Ale from Coors’ macro-micro Blue Moon. It is an unassuming beer. So unassuming, in fact, that a day later, I can’t really remember what it tasted like.
Despite my negativity about the beer, the Coors tour was pretty amazing. And like a lot of the breweries in the micro community, Coors is trying to minimize its impact on the environment with a number of green initiatives. Most notable to me was that Coors is phasing out the use of plastic cups on the tour in favor of biodegradable corn starch based cups.
Then it was on to Golden’s second largest brewery, Golden City. Located four blocks from Coors in a residential neighborhood, Golden City is another popular hangout for the local college crowd, as well as bikers.
And I really mean residential as the the original tasting room was located in the sunroom of the owner’s house. Now it’s located across the yard in a converted coach house and the yard serves as the beer garden. In nice weather, the beer garden is a magnet for locals. Even on a Friday afternoon in February, Golden City had a nice sized crowd enjoying an afternoon of beer and conversation.
The weather was still somewhat nice so we sat in the beer garden and enjoyed the sampler set. Of the six beers available, the Stout and IPA stood out for me. Not a fan of chili beers, I still have to give a shout out to their most interesting beer, Javapeno Stout. A coffee and jalapeno flavored Stout, it still had too much chili flavor for me, but I give them a ‘A’ for creativity.
Back in Denver, it was time to be hanger-ons for a couple of Beerdrinker of the Year events. I want to thank Marty Jones for letting us interrupt the judge/contestant meet and greet dinner at Wynkoop to toast our friend Bill Brand. It was a hard day, but I can’t think of any way better to honor our friend than spending the day enjoying beer.
With one day’s rest from SF Beer Week, we left the disappointed pups on Wednesday morning and headed to Denver to meet up with our friends Matt and 
Boulder Beer Company was somewhat of a milestone for us because we think it might be our earliest brewery tour. I say ‘think’ because we sampled beer in the morning at Indian Wells Brewing Company years ago but are unsure of the exact time. This was certainly our earliest tour.
After months of anticipation, SF Beer Week has come and gone. The last day had a mellower feeling to it since the previous day’s revelry seemed to be our apex of the 10-day celebration.
Still being in a sour phase, the highlight for me was a Norwegian Sour Red from HaandBryggeriet. Aged in oak barrels, this Sour Red rivals anything produced in Belgium. A close second was an American Strong Ale called Batch One from Amager in Denmark.
The culminating event for SF Beer Week was the Celebrator party at the Oakland Convention Center. We always look forward to this event because we are pretty much assured that a lot our friends will be there.
After the New Albion beer, it was open season. Triple Rock’s Ipax and Imax, Russian River’s Consecration, Firehouse’s Otis, 21A’s Double Tripel, Bear Republic’s Apex IPA, Firestone Walker’s Velvet Merken and Saucerful o’ Secrets were a few of the beers I can remember trying.
With the nursing of beers over, it was time to confront the beast, the Toronado Barleywine Festival. Arriving around 2pm, the tasting was in full swing. The Barleywine fest is a challenge as Toronado is the not the largest pub in the world. Negotiating the crowd and finding a spot is almost as much of a challenge as actually getting beers. Oddly enough, we ended up in the exact sample place as last year, right by the door.
Having experienced enough of Barleywine, the crew split up and we, with our friend Dave, headed to the Upper Haight and Magnolia. February is Strong Beer Month at Magnolia and 21A and this was the opportunity to try Magnolia’s powerful offerings.
Maybe it was the baby sips of Barleywine, but I finally hit my stride. Beginning with Promised Land Imperial IPA, I tried four of the six strong beers. The Imperial IPA was followed by a Tripel, a Quad and finally, my favorite, Smokestack Lightning Imperial Stout.
They turned us on to a place I never heard of before, the Church Key. Down the street from La Trappe, the Church Key is a new beer bar on the SF scene… and wow. My first beer was cult beer classic 90 Minute from Dogfish Head. But what sealed the deal on my thinking the Church Key was a great place was the fact they had one of my all time favorite beers, Aventinus, on draft. So, the day might have started slow, but finishing it with an Aventinus was the exclamation point on a great SF Beer Week day.
We last visited Speakeasy 15 years ago and it had been about half that number of years since I actually had one of their beers. With the weather being a bit iffy, we braved the big downpour and headed to Hunter’s Point.
We were joined by several friends including Chris Devlin, the Beer Retard, which was a good thing because we were being interviewed by a reporter from the San Francisco Chronicle. Being surrounded by friends helped our image as fun loving beer drinkers and not loners.
The Beer and Chocolate dinner at the Cathedral Hill Hotel was our big event for the day. Chef Bruce’s Valentine’s dinner always draws a large and enthusiastic crowd. This year was no exception especially with the featured beer, Malheur. We were particularly excited as Malhuer Brut was one of the exceptional beers that we tasted on our trip to Belgium. We were eager to try more of their beers.
Bruce’s dinners are always a good place to catch up with old friends. Ken Pajak and Jim “Dr. Fermento” Roberts were down from Alaska. It was great catching up with them and learning what was new in their neck of the woods.
We probably should have called it a night at that point but being SF Beer Week, we were ready for more. We met back up with our friends Dave, Chris The Beer Retard and his friend Phillipe at Tommy’s Joynt. With our Alaskan friends, the party started anew. We ended up at another bar whose name escapes me eventually making it back to our hotel in the early hours of the morning.