Microbrew Adventures in Colorado

So, in March my friends Erick, JJ and I decided to go on a road trip.

We met up, packed a car and headed west towards Las Vegas (or as I like to call it, Lost Wages) to visit one of our other good friends and fellow home brewer, Joey Bag of Donuts.

Well, as luck would have it, there are several microbreweries between southwest Iowa and Las Vegas, so we decided to visit some.

1st Brewery: New Belgium Brewery - Fort Collins, Co

New Belgium was a great brewery. The three of us all gave it high marks. You could really tell they took a lot of time to make a visit to the brewery a well rounded experience.

The story goes like this:

We walk in, have our complementary beers, and then inquire about the tour. We are told that you need to go online to sign up for the tour, which we didn't do. We do get our name on the list though, just in case someone doesn't show.

I get a textual message from Nick saying that when he visited the brewery a few years ago they told him to write a haiku about New Belgium and that if we read it infront of the bar, we'd get a free beer... well JJ, Erick and I like free beer. So we put our poetry hats on.

They were fedoras.

We came up with this:

Sunshine Wheat, Fat Tire.
We All Love Mothership Wit.
Fifteen Fifty-Four.

Pretty fucking good, huh?

So I go up to the bar and ask the fella about the haiku, and he says he'd never heard of it, dammit. Haiku written in vein... the worse kind of haiku.

Then, as luck would have it, someone skipped the tour so we got in. Awesome.

So the tour begins and there is a table full of beers. The tour guide starts talking, makes a few jokes and gets some laughs. I make some jokes... get some half assed laughs but I can tell this guide works alone, so I decide to lay off the jokes.

Then, this fella with a hat that looked like a bear. (Bearhat = asshole, amiright?) starts talking. He was annoying, but harmless. Him and the tour guide developed a repour and I knew I was not gonna be the class clown of this tour.

The tour guide handed everyone a beer, and continued to talk about the brewery, and goes over some rules. Then Bearhat pulls every bodies favorite (read: nobodies favorite) trick where they point off into space and go "whats that" and then steals another beer.

Tour guide gets pissed. Bearhat looked like an asshole, and the rest of the tour was pretty great.

We asked if we could try a beer you can't get anywhere else, and the guide let us try the Biere De Marz, which was wonderful. JJ and I finished ours quickly, not realizing he wanted us to slow drink it, so he poured us another. (That's when Erick finished his and got another. We can work a system.)

Another cool thing was we got to try an Abbey, that had been bottled that day. It was good.

At the end of the tour, where they were very good about getting us a 3/4 drunk, we went down a slide and watched a video.

We bought growlers, and all in all the experience was great and a hell of a way to kick off our brew tour.

2nd Brewery: Coopersmith's Pub & Brewing - Fort Collins, Co

Coopersmith's was a brewpub. We were pretty drunk by the time we got there. The first thing I noticed walking in was the names of the beers, like Columbine Kolsch and Punjabi Pale Ale.

Now, to me those sounded sorta sketchy, but they both were pretty good.

We ate dinner at Coopersmith's and they (like any respectable Witherspoons franchise in Europe) had a 2 dinner special. I had fish and chips and drank.

The beer was very good, and the staff were knowledgable. We didn't take a tour, but did get a little history of the place, learning that it was started by 2 former Old Chicago managers.

My personal favorite beer on tap was the Punjabi Cask Conditioned Pale Ale. I bought a growler, and would very much like to go back next time I am in Fort Collins and drink some more.

3rd Brewery: Oskar Blues - Lyons, Co... I mean Longmont, Co.

Oskar Blues is popular for being the only micro/craft brewery that solely cans their beer. That sounds like a joke. It is not.

The whole place wasn't a joke either. We originally drove to the brewery in Lyons which is a brewpub, but no longer the major brewery. That is in Longmont. So we drove to Longmont, and passed another Oskar Blues restaurant, on the way to the new brewery.

The brewery was a giant warehouse looking building. We weren't for sure if it was the right place, maybe we should have stopped at the resturant, but then we saw this door.

And went inside. There was a tiny bar, called "The Tasty Weasel". We tried some beer, Dale's Pale Ale and Mama's Little Yellow Pils standing out in my mind, and then took the tour.

The tour was given by the cutest girl, and she was full of energy and willing to answer all our questions. However, she couldn't. She had only given a handful of tours, but she was cute, so we let it slide.

She also introduced us to the brewer, Eric, who did answer some questions.

Oskar Blues was very impressive, and the fact that they only can seems to be very controversial. We had never heard of the brewery, but they are in over 25 states.

After the tour, we got to hang out in the employee break area, drink and play this shuffle board style game.

At the Oskar Blues restaurant in Longmont, we ate lunch and drank some more. Also, JJ spilled a glass of water everywhere.

4th Brewery: Left Hand Brewing Company - Longmont, Co

Of all the breweries we'd been to at this point, Left Hand was the one I was most familiar with. I had drank a lot of the Left Hand Milk Stout and Sawtooth Ale in my time.

In my mind, the brewery was going to be a lot like New Belgium. Big, Fancy, Flashy. It wasn't. That isn't a bad thing though.

The bartender was great, and there was a couple sitting next to us who gave us a good history of the brewery as well as a history of themselves.

After having a flight of beers, we inquired about a tour. The bartender told us if she could find someone to give us one, we could go.

She did.

At the time I am writing this, I have forgotten his name. Because I was drunk. This was after we'd been to Oskar Blues and drank a lot at Left Hand already. But, what I do remember is that the tour was amazing.

He kept telling us that he wasn't for sure what we wanted to know, and that he hadn't given tours before. But then we spent about an hour and a half going around the brewery, learning everything and taking photos.

I don't want to publish everything that went on in the brewery because of OSHA restrictions, but ask me and you'll get the low down.

I was to drunk when we left to get a growler, but I still plan on going back.

5th Brewery: CB and Potts - Denver, Co

I will not dignify this brewery with information. Just stay away. If not for the picture below I wouldn't even believe we went there.

6th Brewery: Breckenridge Brewery & Pub - Breckenridge, Co
We went to the Breckenridge Brewpub the day after our adventures in Longmont. So we were all a little under the weather. That sucked, considering they had such great beer.

Breckenridge, famous for it's Oatmeal Stout, is no longer only made in the town it's named for, but is now in Denver. But, the brewpub is still supplied by it's on sight brewery.

We met the brew master, and he gave us a tour. He was a really nice guy. For a popular brewery, it was run small. I liked that. The brew master made all the beer, and there were only a handful of employees.

I wish we could have hit the brewery in Denver, just for comparison, but that'll be for another time.

As a whole, the brewery leg of our trip was pretty good. CB and Potts wasn't the only shit brewery we stopped at, there were a couple in Las Vegas that were bad. But still, we drank more good beer than bad.