Beer Run Blog

Anatomy of a Beer Festival, Post-Covid

About 45 minutes into the Vail Craft Beer Classic on Saturday, a feeling wafted over the event that was, well, strangely normal. Beer geeks discussed the early finds of the day. A local brewery circulated word of a special tapping. Taster glasses jutted out from hands, subsequently filled with suds.

What no one talked about was coronavirus, except in terms of "hasn't it sucked that the pandemic has knocked out events like these for 17 months?" Glasses were cleaned well, but not excessively so. Hugs and pats on the back marked the day. Masks were nonexistent.

If there was an impact of the pandemic seen on the first specialty festival to come back - for a second straight year - since the world shut down, maybe it was the crowd limit self-imposed by Team Player Productions, which made the event all the more free-flowing and celebratory. Lines never exceeded about eight people for the 40 tents of booze purveyors, and that lent to an atmosphere where you stopped and chatted and even planted yourself in front of the band for a few minutes rather than rushed to the hot brewers to beat everyone else there. (Note the below picture of the lineless Weldwerks tent, which happened several times during the event.)

There was just a hell of a lot of smiles. Heck, this open-air festival even took on rain, but people ducked under tents or under their own umbrellas (see bottom of article), too eager to take part in the communal enjoyment of beer again to bother seeking more permanent shelter when the skies opened. And the Vail Craft Beer Classic offered a lot more reasons to stay than to overthink what might be purely the safest course, which frankly seemed an appropriate theme for a day when no one felt they were taking an undue risk.

Lagers ruled the roost at this summer gathering. Both the 4 Noses Jasmine Rice Lager - incredibly smooth with just a wanted hint of non-Rheinheitsgebot addition - and the perfectly crisp and clean FlyteCo Chinese Rice Lager just felt right to be consumed in an open green field. Wibby Brewing's Volksbier Vienna reminded you why the Longmont German beer specialist is one of the most underrated brewers in Colorado. And if Wild Blue Yonder Brewing's Oak-Barrel-Aged Lager added only a hint of vanilla to the backtaste of the creation, it was enough to let you know it still was something special.

But the creativity was big too. The aforementioned Weldwerks brought its Rockets Red Glare Berliner that was nothing short of the alcoholic version of a Bomb Pop. Bakers' Brewery's higher-alcohol In Bloom Saison served as a reminder of the creativity of brewers whose products don't make it to the Front Range - as did Ramblebine Brewing's incredibly drinkable Demberries, a slightly tart and fruity ale that doesn't forget that it's a beer first and foremost. And if you didn't get a sip of Launch Pad Brewery's Peacemaker Porter, the term "smoked session porter" may not light up a smile for you the way it does for me.

All in all, the event was a reminder why beer festivals remain both relevant and extremely doable. Conversations with folks you know and folks you don't make the beer-tasting experience a more elevated one because of thoughts shared in a collegial way. Good gatherings are ones where the brewers pour and then discuss their offerings. You leave wanting to seek out more adventures for your palate, both from the creators who just lit it up and others you hope to find.

Beer festivals are back, and they can be done safely and in a less crowded way than maybe we knew before. And events like Vail Craft Beer Classic show that it's time that more come back too.

Labels: 4 Noses Brewing, Baker's Brewery, Beer festivals, FlyteCo Brewing, Launch Pad Brewery, Ramblebine Brewing, Vail Craft Beer Classic, Weldwerks Brewing, Wibby Brewing, Wild Blue Yonder Brewing

Beer Festivals Are Back. Here is How One is Pulling That Off.

The Vail Craft Beer Classic is coming back for its second straight year of socially distanced drinking with limited crowds in just two weeks. But the moves it's making to stay safe and relevant this year may impact the way that it and a whole lot of other beer festivals change permanently.

Unless you were one of the 700 people spread across four sessions who attended the event in 2020, you may not realize there was actually one beer festival last summer. Organizers cut capacity crowds by 82%, eliminated lines at booths for the sake of keeping groups of attendees apart and reported zero transmissions of coronavirus at a time when most people still were hunkering down in their homes.

They expected to put the same safety measures in place this year but have been pleased to see a loosening on everything from mask requirements to crowd constraints. Still, Team Player Productions is limiting each of the four sessions on June 25 and 26 to 250 people, even in a park that holds about 1,000, and it believes it may have hit on the sweet spot of attendee comfort and crowd optimization.

Kristen Slater, event director for the Denver-based organization, noted that while many festivals run on a ratio of one brewery for every 50 people, the Vail Craft Beer Classic will offer one beverage provider for every eight to 12 attendees. While guests this year will be able to sample the beers at the booths where they're poured — something they couldn't do last year, when they had to remain masked and take them back to designated areas for each cadre of attendees — she expects lines won't grow more than two to three people long, and the vibe will be very relaxed.

"That's really a decision we made early on that we didn't want that environment," Slater said of the typical throngs converging on the most sought-after booths. "And people loved it and they loved not having the pressure of having to get your beer and move to the next line."

This year, to meet all guests where they are on their public-mingling comfort levels, the festival will offer reusable taster cups if they want to take them from booth to booth or will offer compostable single-use cups and frisbee trays that attendees can use to gather the cups and bring them back to their stations. The festival will take place in Ford Park and Sculpture Garden, and there will be the usual trappings of a beer festival as well, including music.

And, yes, there will be 40 breweries, with a mix of Colorado star players (WeldWerks, Odell, Great Divide, 4 Noses) and local finds that would make you want to travel into the mountains for the weekend (Vail Brewing Co., Ramblebine, Cabin Creek, Baker's Brewery). And the pour list is not, well, poor, offering treats from WeldWerks' Pop-Rocks-inspired Rockets Red Glare Sour to Cheluna Brewing's Rojo Tamarindo Gose to a Chardonnay-barrel-aged saison from Cabin Creek.

By keeping ticket prices relatively close to 2019 levels — $64, with tickets available still to the 2 and 5 p.m. Friday sessions and a small wait list building for the noon and 3 p.m. Saturday sessions — and crowds small, Slater believes the whole festival will feel like the uncrowded but higher-priced VIP sessions of other events. Plus it will have a special touch — West Vail Liquor Mart will have QR codes at the booths of each of the breweries whose products it has in stock (about two-thirds of them), and attendees can order those beers for post-festival pickup or delivery if they would like.

Organizers certainly look forward to welcoming in more guests in future years. But Slater, for one, doesn't think that the elbow-to-elbow festivals of pre-pandemic times will return fully at any point. And these less crowded, more experiential gatherings that are taking place this summer may just offer a peek into how beer events will be redefined in future years.

"I think we're kind of going to see a hybrid. I think there is a knee-jerk reaction to big crowds for some people," Slater said. "But we're also seeing that people are willing to pay more for an elevated experience."

 

Labels: 4 Noses Brewing, Baker's Brewery, Beer festivals, Cabin Creek Brewing, Cheluna Brewing, Great Divide, Odell Brewing, Team Player Productions, Vail Craft Beer Classic, Weldwerks Brewing

10 Best Colorado Beers of 2020

In a year that seemed so dark, maybe, just maybe, it was appropriate that Colorado beer makers stepped up their game particularly in the area of dark ales. To be sure, there was much more that highlighted the year, from barrel-aged barleywines to vibrant hazies to sour experiments that included Japanese citrus-based sauces. But it sure seemed as if the most textured, daring and successful creations of the year that was 2020 were those those turned to the dark side - and made it as enjoyable as possible.

This annual list of Colorado's best beers - at least those determined by one local beer writer - is somewhat challenged this year, as the beer festivals and gatherings that often provide the best look at what the state's breweries are doing did not happen after mid-March. But I tried to drink as much as I could from as many locally sourced creators as I could, and these are the most unique, complex and quaffable beers I found:

10) 4 Noses Lotus Rising

The hazy IPA is, by now, an established beverage, and longer-running gems from Weldwerks' Juicy Bits to Westfax Brewing's Urban Lumberjack made lockdown a lot easier to bear. But the best new addition to the category was this gem from Broomfield's 4 Noses Brewing, simultaneously thick with tropical notes and leaving just enough bitterness on the backtaste to remind you that being hoppy is still an important part of being a delicious hazy IPA.

9) Elevation Beer Montanya

Here is how you make an imperial porter stand out: Add Horchata spices and age it in rum barrels from the distiller of its namesake. This beer never seemed as boozy as its 10% ABV suggested, and every taste produced a bite from a seemingly different spice. But it landed both hugely and pleasantly, particularly if you were camping at the foot of a nearby fourteener, and it reminded you how valuable mountain-town breweries like this Poncha Springs beer maker are to the Colorado ecosystem.

8) Cannonball Creek The Return of the Mackaroon

Here's the other approach to dark beer: Take a traditional stout, made by a brewery known far more for its lagers and pale ales, and infuse it with coconut and macaroon to give it a sweetness that neither overwhelms nor is subsumed by it dark body. Rolled out in the spring, this beer felt like the perfect accompaniment to a brisk spring hike (and paired well with pizza). And it served as a reminder at just how versatile Colorado's most consecutively awarded Great American Beer Festival medalist can be.

7) Spangalang Brewery Ms. Behavin'

Anyone who believes that barleywine is a relic of an earlier time is challenged to drink this beautiful barrel-aged beer from one of Denver's most overlooked breweries and declare that it is anything but a full-mouthed joy. Its body is a like a lightly caramelized, raisins-soaked-in-booze blanket, covering over any sign of it s 12.5% ABV content and presenting a beer so smoothly presented that it forgoes astringency and passes straight to warmth. A masterful update of a classic style.

6) Strange Times Too

Strange Craft Beer has played with its traditional recipes in host of ways for 10 years, but few if any variants have landed as successfully as this Brettanomyces-laced version of its Cherry Kriek, which popped to life with a tartness that added to its fruit base and created enough of an edge to be daring without being at all difficult to swallow. Not all big-sellers should be messed with; this experiment, however, gave a whole new definition to a much-loved beer.

5) Purpose Brewing Itadakimasu #032

The boldest Colorado beer of 2020 was this Fort Collins provocateur's sour ale aged with a citrus soy sauce, creating a taste wholly unlike anything else at the Big Beers, Belgians and Barleywines Festival where it was unleashed in January - which is a statement in itself. Both tart and unusually thick, this caused a minor flinch at first taste, followed by a stunned appreciation of how owner Peter Bouckaert (talking here, left, with Black Project co-owner James Howat) can blend such flavors together. A revelation into the possibilities of creativity.

4)  Verboten German Chocolate Cake Not a Speck of Light

Just the second imperial stout produced by the quickly ascending Loveland brewery, this was a masterful effort with three variants, the German chocolate cake version being the one that packed the most flavor into a 13.6% ABV body that was dangerously easy to drink. Aged for more than a year in a blend of barrels, this took on the characteristics of everything that was in it, particularly Ugandan vanilla beans and Ghana cocoa husks, as well as the barrels that gave it more character.

3) Upslope Wild Christmas Ale

After years of producing some pretty sturdy wild-yeast holiday efforts, this Boulder brewery found a whole new dimension by adding Saigon cinnamon to the delicately tart orange flavor, creating a cacophony of tastes that were both funky and strangely sweet on the aftertaste. In many ways, this is the best original Colorado Christmas ale in the past half-decade, daring drinkers to rethink their definition of a holiday beer while still drawing forth a flavor that was spice-enhanced, even if in a radically different way. Let's hope Upslope does not decide to make this recipe a one-off.

2) Wiley Roots Du Hast Cake Imperial Stout

This gigantically flavored beer is everything that the idea of boundary-pushing pastry stouts purports to be - both unnaturally easy despite it big body and adding to the lexicon of flavors that beer, at its best, can bring forward in our taste buds. Here was coconut and chocolate and dessert sweetness layered upon the most solid traditionally dark-beer base that one could imagine. This Greeley auteur has been pushing boundaries for years - creating, for example, a cinnamon sour - but this is arguably its finest experimentation yet, a beer for beer lovers and sweets lovers and anyone who respects liquid adventure.

1) Casey Brewing & Blending No Title

It felt like a stroke of genius to blend three adjuncts that could make this beer un-drinkably sweet - Madagascar vanilla, coconut and almond - with a heavily roasted and slightly bitter chocolate body that turns this imperial stout from Glenwood Springs into a beer that imbues a bolder and seemingly easier flavor with every sip, despite its 10% ABV body. In a year in which tradition flew out the window at the same speed as our expectations of normalcy, this searing rebuke of Rheinheitsgebot laws was like a break from both the past and the present, daring drinkers to imagine a future in which beer styles are not defined so much as cemented by experimentation. From the first pour to the last swig, it was packed with intensely pleasing flavors without any alcohol burn. It was the beer that signaled both an escape from the surrounding landscape of 2020 and from any preconceptions about how much you could add to beer and still, importantly, make it taste like an excellent beer.

Labels: 4 Noses Brewing, Cannonball Creek Brewing, Casey Brewing, Elevation Beer, Purpose Brewing & Cellars, Strange Craft Beer, Top Beers of Year, Upslope Brewing, Verboten Brewing, Wiley Roots Brewing

5 Colorado Beers and Beer Trends that Have Made Fall Tastier

The time between pumpkin-beer season and Christmas-beer season has been anything but boring in Colorado this year. And while one beer in particular has stood out, there are several brews that are worth discussing while they remain available.

1) Verboten Brewing Not a Speck of Light

Just the second imperial stout offering from one of Loveland's most exciting breweries, this is, quite frankly, one of the best new beers of 2020 so far in Colorado. Aged for more than a year in a combination of whiskey barrels from Peach Street Distillers of Palisade and The Axe & The Oak Distillery in Colorado Springs, the three variants of this beauty each weigh in around 13.5% ABV.

Quite frankly, you would never know Not a Speck of Light carries that kind of strength - and that is one of the reasons why this monster is so impressive. Brewer Josh Grenz used enzymes in the mash to calm the taste of alcohol, leaving you to taste the sweet, chocolate-malt body in all its accessibility.

Of the three versions of the beer that Verboten has made, the German Chocolate Cake is the most impressive, with its combination of cocoa husks, heavy chocolate, coconut and pecans providing a sweetness that makes this dangerously smooth, the chocolate proving to be a taste that envelops the alcohol and makes it a surprising non-entity in the flavor profile. But the basic barrel-aged version of this triumph is one of those imperial stouts that stands on its chocolatey and also sweet-whiskey feel and lets you enjoy everything it is and everything it isn't.

2) Oskar Blues Death by Coconut

Oskar Blues has been making this seasonal chocolate- and coconut-infused Irish-style porter for a number of years, but never has it felt as dialed-in as it does this year. An inviting aroma with substantial coconut sweetness segues into a a body that tastes cake-like but is very smooth. The underlying body here is one of the keys - a solid effort that allows the sweet and solid flavoring to take center stage but gives it something to rest on that is classically excellent.

3) 4 Noses Lotus Rising

Released in September as the first beer the Broomfield brewery has made using Lotus hops, this New England IPA is simultaneously rich with citrus and tropical notes and yet very easy to drink. Just a lick of bitterness jumps up as the beer slides across the back of your tongue and gives this a memorable zing. Comes on juicy, leaves with enough bitterness to remind you it's all IPA.

4) Sanitas Dry-Hopped Sour

Sabro hops, as popular as they are, mar most otherwise impressive hop-focused beers by dulling a sharp impact with their coconut-oil overtones. But in this beer, they're put to good use cutting into the sharp tartness and giving the beer a more absorbing cushion that also makes it feel more laid-back in a still-exotic way. Don't kid yourselves, the hops are the backup singer here. But they act as contrasting flavors around the edges, and this all works very well together.

5) Packaging mixing multiple kinds of beers

When you're doing more of your drinking inside your home rather than trying to run the full menu at your local brewery via 14 tasters, you still need a way to get more variety in what you're imbibing. And over the past few months, breweries have stepped up to provide this, both through the packaging they are putting into stores and the way they are letting people bring their beer home from the tasting room.

Oskar Blues provided the perfect retail example with its mixed IPA pack late this summer, allowing you everything from the Pinner session IPA to a nice Double IPA in the Can-O-Bliss series. Other breweries have been offering these mixed packs for a while, but OB seemed the first to get that the same drinker wants variety in somewhat similar offerings, rather than reaching for a stout and a seltzer in the same pack.

Meanwhile, more breweries seem to allow the mix-it-yourself pack from their coolers, particularly by putting together a quartet of 16-ounce cans that allows the buyer to really dig into different flavors or different styles - but upon their choosing. Just in the examples below, I was able to get everything from an Oktoberfest to a Nelson Sauvin-hopped hazy IPA at Resolute Brewing in Centennial and everything from a Belgian red ale to a tropical sour at Barquentine Brewing of Edgewater - and learn a lot about the breweries in the process.

Labels: 4 Noses Brewing, Barquentine Brewing, Oskar Blues, Resolute Brewing, Sanitas Brewing, Verboten Brewing

7 Colorado Pumpkin Beers to Drink in the Seven Days Before Halloween Ends    

Pumpkin beers to many have long seemed like the hellish figure in the picture above (the guardian to corn maze at Anderson Farms in Erie) - a horror inflicted on the drinking world by a small number of breweries attempting to please  an only slightly larger number of aficionados. But as I, one of those horrible aficionados, discovered when I want in vain to pick up my now-sold-out annual dosage of Southern Tier Pumking on Saturday at my favorite liquor store, they've become so popular during coronavirus that they're flying off the shelves.

With the knowledge that people are diving headfirst into this long-underappreciated trend this year, here then is a very short list of some of the best experiments and tried-and-true offerings that are new or returning from Colorado breweries this season. It's a roundup that not only gives a window into the efforts that make the style worthwhile but also proves that pumpkin beers themselves are evolving and becoming far more diverse in the ways they are presented.

1) Spice Trade Pumpkin Spice Latte

Pumpkin beers rarely, if ever, have used fresh-roasted coffee beans to such the advantage as this mold-breaking offering from Spice Trade Brewing. Used in combination with lactose, vanilla and ample but not overwhelming pumpkin-pie spices, it creates a beer that is both boldly roasted and supremely smooth, and its accessible sharpness is something rarely found in a genre more often defined by more-than-ample spicing.

2) Weldwerks Pumpkin Pie Berliner

No Colorado pumpkin beer comes as close as this to reproducing what makes Pumking so brilliant - creating the liquid taste not just of pumpkin-pie filling but of the graham-cracker crust and the Cool Whip on top - but then, as Weldwerks does, it gives the style its own unique twist. The tart kick at the end of this gem accents the spices in a unique way and also creates entryway into the style for lovers of the sour-beer ascetic. Wickedly creative, it is worth seeking out.

3) Goat Patch Pumpkin Patch Punch

With its silver medal at this year's Great American Beer Festival, the time for Colorado Springs' best-kept brewing secret to remain secrets should be over. This almost glowingly orange offering is another testimony to its skill - an impressively tasty mélange of true gourd taste with spice that is blended into its sweetness and generates no bitter potpourri aftertaste. You could drink this all day.

4) Holidaily Patchy Waters Pumpkin Ale

It took a gluten-free beer to show exactly how much flavor could be gleaned without any of the bitter aftertaste that too often has marked the genre. Brewer Alan Windhausen adds most of the spices here after the boil, giving them a presence without a lingering burn by extracting the flavor without extracting so many of the spices' astringent qualities. A model of big taste and smoothness.

5) Odyssey Beerwerks Fluffy Pumpkin

No beer made in Colorado brings across the quality of marshmallow so well as this, which seems an odd statement to write on a beer blog but nonetheless remains true. The dominant taste of this dark beer is cinnamon, but its bitterness is squished by an almost gooey softness that makes this truly fascinating. Neither overtly sweet nor overtly spicy, this is unique in a very good way.

6) 4 Noses Pump Action

While the bittering spices in this imperial pumpkin ale feel ratcheted up a bit from years past, it remains one of Colorado's standard bearers in this genre - a hugely flavorful beer that is the equivalent of a pumpkin churro in liquid form, with just enough sweetness hiding on the back end to make its flavor profile feel complete even as it's firing at your taste buds from every angle.

7) Twisted Pine Mr. Brown's

If you love old-school, spice-heavy brown pumpkin ales, this offering from one of Boulder's classic craft-beer makers will scratch that itch. But it also carries a sensible blend of darkness and heady malt base that reminds you that good pumpkin beers are, first and foremost, good beers first, even if they don't shy from featuring the flavors of cinnamon and nutmeg, as this does.

Labels: 4 Noses Brewing, Goat Patch Brewing, Holidaily Brewing, Odyssey Beerwerks, Pumpkin beers, Southern Tier Brewing, Spice Trade Brewing Co., Twisted Pine Brewing, Weldwerks Brewing

It's the Same Great Pumpkins, Charlie Brown

This set out to be a column about the newest and boldest pumpkin beers on the market, the ones that 12 friends haven't already recommended to you for several years in a row.

The problem is, however, that those particular beers that pair well with black cats and slasher movies have earned their reputations for a reason - they're the ones that are made well, year after year, even as the quality of other beers of this style can vary pretty widely. And at a time when fewer new breweries seem to be attempting to make potables out of hoards of gourds, the chasm between great pumpkin beers and others seems to be widening, leaving the classics on an island of their own.

Is that a sign that the style is losing popularity? Not necessarily, as pumpkin beers always have been polarizing and some brewers have never liked trying to assemble them at all. Not just that, but while some breweries are avoiding the genre, others (see Southern Tier Brewing) are making multiple versions using the same seasonal ingredient, almost single-handedly pumping up the style.

Or does it mean that we've run out of original ideas for how to mix together pumpkins, spices and malts to create something new and interesting? It doesn't have to, although some of the most creative beers at the recent Great American Beer Festival were meant to be year-round pleasers, not those narrowed to an annual release.

 But the best of the style simply remain the best of the style. And it is to those beers that tribute should be paid.

Southern Tier's Pumking Imperial Ale remains the most creative and compelling pumpkin creation out there, a virtual pumpkin pie in a glass. You're struck immediately by the scent of pie crust with just a hint of mixed spices, and the creamy nature of the beer gives a distinct impression of pie filling. Plus, the alcohol is extremely subdued for an 8.6% ABV beer.

Nearly as compelling - but, sadly, not available in Colorado - is Schlafly Pumpkin Ale out of St. Louis. There is a full malty body with both sweet and subtly spice-laced undertones here, and it's a complex adventure for one beer. Pressure needs to be exerted to get it here more than just during GABF.

In Colorado, you can't do better than 4 Noses Brewing's Pump Action, an also not-so-alcohol-apparent imperial pumpkin ale that comes on with a full mouth of spice but less of residual hot back taste than many others of the ilk. It uses its amber body particularly well as a cushion to smooth out the tastes of nutmeg and cinnamon, leaving them pleasing without being acerbic.

Neck and neck with it in Colorado is Upslope Pumpkin Ale, which, like Pump Action, has taken home GABF medals. This cranks up the six spices in the beer a little bit and tones down the sweetness of the pumpkin but settles with a bready, heavy body that zings you without overpowering.

One of the most improved pumpkin beers in the state is Denver Beer Co's Hey! Pumpkin, a smooth and almost creamy offering that goes lighter on the spices and heavier on the pie-like baking sugar. There's barely any bitterness on the back end, leaving it more approachable while still full of flavor.

And maybe the one surprise of the season was Uinta Brewing's Funk'n Patch Brett Pumpkin Ale, a beer that adds enough to perk up the lively, funky characteristics of the beer while pushing it just slightly into the category of sour. The Utah brewery's beers tend to vary wildly in terms of hitting the mark, but this one delivers in a differentiated, put-the-fun-back-in-pumpkin-ales way.

There's a chance that none of that is news to you. But it's worth reiterating all the same that there are breweries, even if a select number of them, that are doing pumpkin beers well and giving you incentive to reach out and try some before the calendar turns to November.

Labels: 4 Noses Brewing, Denver Beer Co, Fall seasonals, Great American Beer Festival, Pumpkin beers, Schlafly Beer, Southern Tier Brewing, Uinta Brewing, Upslope Brewing

5 Things I Learned from Sesh Fest 2017

Bigger does not always equate to bigger at beer festivals. But with the exception of the far-too-big lines for the restrooms at Sesh Fest 2017, the growth of the festival - in brewers, in space and most importantly in diversity of beer - was something to celebrate.

Coming at a time when more breweries actually are making lower-alcohol beer to ride a wave of popularity among drinkers, the festival showed off how flavorful less boozy styles can be. Gone are the days when your choices below 5 percent ABV include a session IPA and a couple of watered-down English- or German-style beers. And that's a good thing.

Here then are things that became clear during an afternoon at the Highlands Masonic Events Center:

1) Sesh Fest could have been re-named "Low Alcohol Sour Fest"
It was almost hard to find a brewer whose offerings didn't include a gose or petite sour, all bursting with flavor even as they kept down the booze. Crooked Stave's Petite Sour Rose, a beautiful light-bodied sour with flavors of both fruit and flowers, may have been the best beer in the show. Or it may have been the Mila Petite Rouge Sour from Beryl's Beer, brimming with a fruity guava taste to bring even more drinkability to it. Or it could have been the New Wave from Ratio, a strawberry Berliner Weisse that lights up your taste buds with tartness only to fall back on big fruit notes. The point is, there were enough small sours there to make this a legitimate debate.

2) Low alcohol still permits high experimentation with adjuncts
Caution Brewing proved once again that you can get huge flavor into an English mild - no small feat in itself - by injecting Earl Grey tea, and The Earl stood out once again as one of the finest session beers at the event, if not in all of Colorado at this point. But 4 Noses Brewing also demonstrated aptly that dumping mango puree into a wheat beer (its Mango Wheat) allows you to make a beer that could pass as subtle yet is hugely refreshing, with enough flavor that you swirl it around your mouth an extra time to see how many flavors you can discover.

3) That said, don't go crazy with the adjuncts
Some very good brewers brought some very odd-tasting beers as well, producing mash-ups that didn't work quite as well as many of their other offerings. Horse & Dragon's Surf & Rescue, a coconut lime wheat, tasted oddly like perfume, even as the coconut oil was used to good effect to calm the taste. And Fate's Laimas Coffee Kolsch butted the sweeter malt tastes up against the harsher roast of the coffee in a way that felt like opposing forces clashing in your mouth - an opinion I'll maintain despite the fact that the brewery has been making this beer for years.

4) It's time to realize that Greeley isn't a one-brewery town
People often flock to a Weldwerks booth at any festival for good reason, as its beers are so flavorful they seem to overshadow everything else in Weld County. But time spent at the Wiley Roots booth on Saturday reinforced exactly how much the often-overlooked brewery in the same town is doing fantastic things. Its Watermelon Carousel Gose was full of fruit burst, with just enough spritz from its sour mash to tell you there was something more complex working your taste buds. And its session IPA stood out among similar offerings at the event.
5) Two Parts and Colorado Brewers Guild are upping their organizational game
First of all, getting 52 breweries to bring multiple session offerings showed just how much the push to pour flavorful low-alcohol beers has taken hold in the brewing community. But lines at all the booths were reasonable, food booths were plentiful and the Shandyland set-up inside the masonic center gave people a chance to try something new in a specific area. That said, the lines for the port-a-potties stretched longer than then lines for the bathrooms at Great American Beer Festival often do, creating too much talk about when it was appropriate to break the seal that could have been spent on which booths were offering unique beers.

Labels: 4 Noses Brewing, Beryl's Beer, Caution Brewing, Colorado Brewers Guild, Crooked Stave, Fate Brewing, Horse and Dragon Brewing, Ratio Beerworks, Session beers, Two Parts, Wiley Roots Brewing

Top 10 Colorado Beers of 2016



At a time when it seemed everyone was focused on something other than beer, Colorado breweries flew seemingly under the radar with their greatness during the year that just ended. The best and most memorable offerings came not from adding exotic new ingredients (with one exception) or from trying to ratchet alcohol or tartness to new levels, but from simplifying, aging a bit and just doing everything well.

So, before we bid goodbye to 2016 altogether, let's stop and admire once again the 10 beers that made the year one worth remembering.

10) 4 Noses Pump Action Imperial Pumpkin Ale
When your beer takes gold in the pumpkin categories for both the World Beer Cup and Great American Beer Festival in the same year, you know you have something special on your hands. What makes Pump Action stand out so much is its offering of a significant body (nearly 8 percent ABV) without overbearing alcohol or spice content. It's just smooth and silky.

9) Trinity Saison Delivery
One of Colorado's true saison specialists broke new ground even by its lofty standards with this gem, first made for the 2016 Craft Brewers Conference. Colorado apple, grains of paradise and dark candy sugar made this decidedly fruit-forward, while the Chardonnay-barrel aging gave it a slight pucker. Wrap it up, and it became a pretty eye-opening combination.

8) Great Divide The Smoothness
Black lager can be a forgettable style - right up until you decide to age it in Jameson barrels and imbue the lighter-bodied beer with a whiskey flavor that was perfectly balanced and managed to breathe new life into the simple malts in the beer. I'll come back to Great Divide at more length later, but this beer was shocking in its simplicity and tastiness.

7) Beryl's Beer Trent's Plums
If plum was a favorite new additive in 2016, no one made it sing more than this too-often-overlooked Denver brewery that brought out the fruit's tart properties by letting it age for two years in red-wine barrels with a sour brown ale. It took your taste buds right up to the edge but walked that delicate line of being significantly sour without being too acerbic.


6) AC Golden Kriek Noir
Speaking of pushing sour taste to the edge, Coors' experimental brewery - which also did some excellent work on the lighter end of the spectrum this year - made its own statement with this wine-barrel-aged Belgian ale with sour cherries added (pictured above). Almost sweet on the nose, this was aggressive and cutting in its flavor profile, rewarding drinkers with a constantly evolving complexity that was simultaneously edgy and refreshing.

5) Comrade Yellow Fever
Colorado's new poster child for hop-drenched beers showed off its versatility by ramping up the flavor profile of this Citra blonde ale infused with jalapenos and nabbing a World Beer Cup medal for it. With a mild look and less-than-fiery nose, this beer surprised twice. First, it announced its rising heat only as you swirled Yellow Fever in your mouth. Second, it let that heat cool just when you thought it might be too much, creating an exhilarating experience.


4) Weldwerks Double Dry Hopped Juicy Bits
You may love or hate the "New England IPA" trend, but you can not walk away from this beer (pictured above) - a hopped-up version of the Greeley brewery's hazy IPA - without feeling like you have somehow found a new frontier of a style of beer (IPA) that leaves few surprises anymore. It pelts you with fruity and grassy overtones without any lingering bitterness, allowing you to enjoy the hops for all the flavor they can impart. It's the kind of IPA that can make hop haters rethink their sentiments.

3) Crooked Stave Raspberry Petite Sour
While Crooked Stave is known rightly for its astringent, taste-bud-pushing creations, it may have found its greatest success yet by stepping just slightly off the pedal and letting the fruit and wild yeast mingle in a pleasing, almost soft way here. Eye-poppingly pink in its pour, this is both sweet and tart, both bullish on its wild side and more concerned with its fruit than its acid. It simply is delicious.

2) Spangalang Anniversary Ale
To celebrate its first birthday, this rising Denver star blended several of its hop-forward beers, combining barrel-aged and fresh IPAs in one big, never-again-reproducible batch. In doing so, it produced the most interesting one-off beer made in this state in years, a taste-bud-wowing experiment that was simultaneously hoppy and woody, earthy and pleasingly bitter. Before it turns two, Spangalang already is making some of the best beer in Colorado; this was evidence of just how much better it can be.

1) Great Divide Barrel-Aged Hercules
Ever since my book "Mountain Brew" came out in 2011, I've been asked what is my favorite brewery in Colorado. I usually duck the question but, when cornered, have tended to identify Great Divide as the single best in this state. By the end of 2015, though, I was starting to question that long-held assumption, wondering if the long-time experimental brewery was starting to lose ground to others that were innovating more. Then, everything changed this year.

Great Divide's barrel-aging program, which has been in place for years but got a major boost with the 2015 opening of its Barrel Bar on Brighton Boulevard, elevates this brewery into a class of its own for several reasons. First, it allows it to rediscover and reinvent already top-tier offerings and bring out new flavors in them, from its Old Ruffian barleywine to the aforementioned black lager. But second, it does so without simply dropping beers into wild-yeast-ridden barrels and turning everything sour. Its usage of oak and whiskey barrels that deepen the flavor and body of the beers gives it a real personality in an atmosphere when even great breweries begin to seem a little bit like each other in their experiments.

Putting its Hercules Double IPA into whiskey barrels for two years before unleashing this beast at its 22nd anniversary party this summer was the best beer idea of the year. The hops retained an amazingly out-front presence despite their age, and the whiskey took on just a supporting role, as wood and vanilla notes blended seamlessly with Cascade and Simcoe hops. Like much of the best of 2016, this didn't break new ground in flavor profiles. It just brought a classic recipe to bear in a new and better way that will set the mark for this brewery and all others going forward.

Labels: 4 Noses Brewing, AC Golden, Beryl's Beer, Comrade Brewing, Crooked Stave, Great Divide, Spangalang Brewery, Top Beers of Year, Trinity Brewing, Weldwerks Brewing