Category: USA

Our beer geek foursome spent the last day in Colorado in the Rockies foothill town of Boulder. Amongst its many charms, Boulder is home to one the best beer scenes in all of Colorado.

On our way there we stopped off in Arvada to check out the unique brewpub, Yak & Yeti. Their uniqueness is that they have house-brewed beer paired with  the cuisines of India, Nepal and Tibet. Not being a fan of those cuisines I have to admit my expectations were not very high.

Oh, how I was wrong. Arriving right at opening time, we sat ourselves in the pleasant little bar area and ordered a taster set. There were six house beers, ranging from Pilsner to Stout. Of note to me were Namaste Pilsner and Himalayan IPA. Merideth was particularly fond of the Chai Stout.

We also ordered a few light appetizers, Naan bread and these light crisp lentil chips called Papadams that came with four dipping sauces. Our snacks probably weren’t paired with the correct beers, but were tasty all the same. All and all a pleasing experience so I guess need to keep reminding myself to have a open mind.

Onward to Boulder, our next stop was Avery Brewing. Located at the edge of town in a industrial park, Avery was a brewery of which I had very high expectations. One of the ‘cult’ breweries we needed to add to the list, there were a number of beers that I have been wanting to try.

It was another nice February day in Colorado so we grabbed one of the MacDonald’s playland looking tables out front with the rest of the hipster Sunday afternoon crowd.

Of the dozen beers available, I chose seven samples. The most anticipated was Maharaja Imperial IPA whose release party the previous day drew a crowd of 400 people. I have had Maharaja before and it was as good as I remember. Salvation, a Belgian-style Golden Ale was also very pleasing to the taste buds.

However, the star of my little seven beer show was New World Porter, a beer that I was tasting for the first time. And thanks to the bartender for suggesting  I get three versions of it: draught, cask and dry-hopped. Most of the time I prefer cask, but the dry-hopped was the best of the three beer comparison. May I suggest a dry hopped cask version of the beer….

We were met by our friend Dan Rabin who, among other things, is the Rocky Mountain reporter for the Celebrator Beer News. Besides the pleasant conversation, Dan also introduced us to Adam Avery. Noticing his arrival on a bicycle, we had no idea who he was despite the Team Avery jersey.

Having lived up to my expectations, I can’t wait to go back to Boulder in the summer to waste away an afternoon at Avery Brewing.

The final stop on our little beer tour of Boulder was Southern Sun, the sister brewery to downtown Boulder’s Mountain Sun. Swinging the pendulum from hipster Avery to family-friendly Southern Sun, we settled in with another taster set. After the massive beers at Avery, it was nice to throttle back on the ABV.

It would have been nice to say that we had more gas in the tank after Southern Sun. Mountain Sun was having Stout month and it would have been nice to walk around downtown. But Merideth and Matt were feeling the effects of three days of beer drinking with a nasty cold. Our trip ended with the four of us in a hotel room watching the Oscars trying a few beers that I had brought from California. We ate popcorn for dinner.

 

The main event of our trip to Colorado was attending the 2009 Beerdrinker of the Year contest. This year, we had two friends as finalists, Mark and Phil. Plus, Matt as a judge.

Cody, the third finalist and local favorite, claimed the Wynkoop as his local. We met Cody for the first time the previous night at the judge/contestant meet and greet and he seemed like a really nice guy.

We headed down to the Wynkoop a little early to get some food and beer in our bellies and let Matt bask in his last few hours of wearing the tiara. The contest was still a couple of hours away, but the Wynkoop buzzed with activity and merriment. We met up with our friends Eli and Fran as well as meeting fellow beer geek Chipper Dave for the first time.

The contest is held in a side room behind the bar. Cody had a huge contingent of friends on hand to cheer him on, so the room was packed. Last year, Matt was the clear front runner, but this year it was a much closer contest. Both Mark and Phil held their own despite Cody’s homefield advantage. The judges asked great questions which the contestants fielded with skill. Kudos to Phil for his creativity, Mark for his wit and Cody for his passion. All three seemed worthy of the title “Beerdrinker of the Year”.

In the end, only one person can be the winner. And this year it was Cody. The winner gets free beer for life at Wynkoop and being local Cody will certainly benefit from this perk. The first winner from a non-coastal state, Cody also broke the run of winners hailing from Virginia.

We ended the evening by dining with Cody and his wife, Mark and his wife and Matt and Michelle. It was nice to increase our circle of friends and we look forward to having a beer with Cody in the future.

Not that there should always be a local finalist, but I have to say that the presence of a local gave the contest much more of a buzz than last year. Thanks to Marty Jones for being a brilliant host again this year as well as having the crowd toast Bill Brand.

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.