Category: Rocky Mountains

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 Michelle. The plans included beer touring of Denver and Boulder as well as attending the Beerdrinker of the Year contest. As last year’s winner, Matt is a judge this year. We are also friends with two of the three finalists, so it should be a good fun.

We had some time on Thursday morning before we picked them up at the airport, so we scheduled a 10am tour of Boulder Beer Company, Colorado’s oldest microbrewery. Celebrating their 30th anniversary this year, Boulder can also claim to be the oldest post-Prohibition brewery.

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.

Since our time was limited, we got a quick tour of the 50 barrel brewhouse, cellar and bottling line. Though we rarely do brewery tours these days, Boulder’s was interesting because it was built in a time when breweries still got cobbled together. My favorite among the eccentricities was a pvc pipe that ran through the floor. It’s how the brewers communicate between the two levels. Very high tech.

And of course we sampled Boulder’s beer. While we were familiar with a few of them, like Hazed and Infused and Mojo IPA, this was our first opportunity to taste their full range of almost a dozen beers.

The standouts for me were the Double IPA and the Mojo Risin, which I tried on both cask and draught. Merideth liked Planet Porter, which  she tried two ways, nitro and draught. We bought some beer and headed to the airport.  Thanks to Dan for taking time out of his day to show us around.

Together with Matt and Michelle, we headed to the opposite side of Denver to visit Ironworks Brewery & Pub. I was a little worried because I had seen reports online that Ironworks was closed and the 45 minute drive across Denver would be waste. It didn’t look good when we drove up, the pub was dark. Wanting to double check, we got out of the car and peered into an empty pub. Before the disappointment could set in, we heard someone say “Do you want to taste some beer?” It was the owner Mike who had just pulled up. We were a few hours early for opening but Mike was willing to open up to pour us some beers.

Over a taster set, we learned that Mike bought Ironworks a year ago and was busily trying to upgrade the pub, including a new brewer to improve the house beers. The beers were pretty good, especially the Stout and IPA.

Next it was time to try some Mexican-style beers at Del Norte Brewery. Yes, Mexican-style beers. I wasn’t really sure what to expect; chili beers, lime beers, chelada or some other odd concoction from south of the border. But it was nothing like that. Del Norte has two award-winning beers, Orale and Manana, brewed with traditional ingredients. Orale, the lighter of the two, was a bit too tame for me. Manana, on the other hand, was a darker lager in the Dos Equis mold. Drinking a sample of the malty goodness, I could easily see myself ordering a few of these at a Mexican restaurant. You have to admire people for thinking outside the box.

Finally, it was time to head into downtown Denver. After a short rest at the hotel, we headed to my favorite place in Colorado, Falling Rock Tap House. Over a few beers, we finally had time to catch our breath and catch up with Matt and Michelle. Pliny, Damnation, Titan IPA cask were my beers of choice.

We ended the evening at the Cheeky Monk, Denver’s entry into the Belgian beer bar scene that’s growing around the country. It was mentioned a lot during GABF and even though it was right around the corner from our hotel, we never made it there. Over our last pints at Falling Rock, Matt mentioned Cheeky Monk and a bell dinged in my head. Yes, we need to go there.

Cheeky Monk had an excellent beer selection though I thought Carlsberg and Lindemans looked oddly out of place next to names such as Orval, Rochefort, Malheur, and Saint Bernardus.

The food was typical Belgian, including many things we ate when we were there two months ago. Cheese Croquettes, Croque Monsieur, and Croque Madame.  Overall, a nice place to end the evening.

It has been a good start to our Denver trip and it’s not over yet.