Beer Run Blog

6 Things I Learned at Collab Fest 2017


It turns out that Collab Fest didn't need the beautiful setting of the luxury deck at Mile High to stand out as a festival. Moved this year to the National Western Complex, the celebration of breweries making beers together - roughly 180 auteurs combining on some 100 beers - was just as unique and relevant without the glitz factor of being able to look down upon the Broncos' field.

What's more, the types of beers that leaped off the page this year were different than in past years, moving beyond the sour and imperial barrel-aged combinations to a surprising number of very tasty concoctions that used unexpected ingredients. Attending the event left you excited about the creative flavors that remain largely untapped still in the sector.

Here, then, are a few things that stood out:

1) Comrade killed it.
In a festival marked by immense creativity, the best beer of the day - and best by a long stretch, for that matter - was Comrade Brewing's collaboration with Montana-based Uberbrew on Uberpower Triple IPA (pictured at right). Flowery and grassy, huge without a big alcohol taste, this dangerously smooth and flavorful beer was one of the greatest hop assaults that even a tried-and-true hophead has ever had in their mouth.

2) Simple pale ales stood out as well.
In some sense it's hard for a classic, lower-alcohol taste to find a niche among so much blustery boldness. But the Dog vs. Quail Pale Ale from Cannonball Creek Brewing and  Hogshead Brewery (pictured at top) was fresh and bright with a lingering piny hop that accented its British, German and American ingredients. And the decision by the Colorado Brewers Guild board to offer a light, grassy pale ale with the moniker of Board's in Session was a surprisingly good and memorable one for the 11 collaborating breweries.

3) Some gimmick beers are worth drinking over and over again.
Lady Fingers, the tiramisu brown ale from Boulder Beer and New Holland Brewing was as sweet as you'd expect but also very approachable, and it seemed no odder on the palate than Boulder's best beer, its Shake Chocolate Porter. Meanwhile, the Corner Store imperial malt lager from Gravity Brewing and Kettlehouse Brewing was a high-quality hoppy beer, with big malts offering a proper base for the slightly boozy but more aggressively flowery hop bite.

4) Others were worth one taste.
The most passionate conversation I had on the floor was with Ryan Hannigan of Focus on the Beer, who insisted that the Mr. Kelly's Coconut Curry Hefeweizen - the Boulder/Ska collaboration that was exactly what it sounds like - was the most unique and best beer on the floor. While I conceded the first part of the statement to him, the bold combination came off a bit like a thick soup full of spices more than a beer, and I was quite happy to have about an ounce of it.

5)  Bread beer - the next great trend
Rye pretzels and German malts were the stand-out ingredients in Don't Kvass the Streams, a kvass-inspired German ale from Wit's End and Prost Brewing. And the sour rye taste was an astoundingly good complement to the beer base, rendering the creation both bready and slightly tart. In a market drenched with New England IPAs, I might run more quickly to efforts like this that produce new and exciting flavors.

6) Then again, sours aren't done yet.
TRVE cranked up the flavor profile with Slow Death, its whiskey-barrel-aged dark mixed-culture ale with cinnamon and lemon peel that it produced with Burial Beer Co. of Asheville. Complex and still drinkable, it reminded festival goers of how much room there remains in the sour sector that might seem saturated to some.

Labels: Boulder Beer, Cannonball Creek Brewing, collaboration beers, Colorado Brewers Guild, Comrade Brewing, Gravity Brewing, Hogshead Brewery, Prost Brewing, Ska Brewing, TRVE, Wit's End Brewery

10 Beers To Try at Collaboration Fest


Saturday marks the fourth Collaboration Fest, and the beers that will be served there only continue to get more nuanced and more adventurous. But since there are 180 breweries combining on roughly 100 beers at the event, it can be a bit overwhelming to decide even which direction you want to head when entering the National Western Complex for the show.

Consider this, then, a high-level sneak peak at the strangest, wildest, most wonderful combinations that will be poured at the Two Parts/Colorado Brewers Guild event. And if you haven't gotten your tickets for the mid-afternoon adventure of the palate yet, consider this your chance to decide if you want to buy them - or, frankly, if you can afford not to attend.

1) Ladyfingers - Boulder Beer and New Holland Brewing
Maybe you feel like you've tried a lot of desert-style beers in recent years, but there's a good chance you haven't drunk a tiramisu brown ale before, especially one made with New Holland's house vanilla extract. After Boulder's creation of Shake Chocolate Porter in 2013, one is wise not to turn away sweet beers that America's oldest craft brewery may offer.

2) Uberpower Triple IPA - Comrade Brewing and Uberbrew
The idea of drinking a triple IPA from Comrade Brewing is enticing enough on its own, given how the east Denver brewery is pushing the boundaries of hoppy beers. But combining its talents with the talents of the 2016 Small Brewery of the Year winner out of Montana bumps this up to irresistible.

3) Japance Off - Denver Beer and Altitude Chophouse and Brewery
Altitude's absence at the Big Beers, Belgians and Barleywines festival this year was a sad one, but one of the most clever small breweries in the Rocky Mountain West found another reason to come back to Colorado - and partner with a Denver beer maker that continues to up its game. This is a hybrid Japanese and French saison made with sake yeast and floral French hops. No word yet on whether it's a traditional Japanese saison or a new-age version ....

4) Corner Store - Gravity Brewing and KettleHouse Brewing
The Louisville and Montana breweries are offering up a dry hopped imperial malt liquor. Just let that description sink in. And then try to imagine the reaction of an OE 800 fan trying one.

5) Spiciest Memelord - Odd 13 Brewing and Kane Brewing
One might worry that a kettle sour could be lost on the taste buds with all of the double IPAs and imperial stouts that breweries will be rolling out. Then you realize that this is made with habanero and raspberry. Oh, and that it's Odd 13 working with a respected New Jersey brewer.


6) Chocolate Orange Belgian Tripel - Ratio Beerworks and WeldWerks Brewing
If these two breweries made an American-style light lager, it would be worth trying. But this collaboration is as ambitious as it sounds. And it's hard to imagine it being anything short of startling.

7) Oaked Rye Dunkelweizen - Upslope Brewing and Resolute Brewing
Dunkelweizen is one of the most underutilized styles in America, and the appealing combination of this style aged on medium toast French oak cubes with some Colorado rye in there means a lot of good experimentation.

8) Brettxit - Bonfire Brewing and Casey Brewing
Casey can do sours. But an ESB fermented in wine barrels with four different Brett strains, made with an under-the-radar Eagle brewery? This is the kind of beer that defines a festival if it works out well.

9) Enemy of the People IPA - Great Divide Brewing and beer bloggers
Last year's Fourth Estate Belgian Chocolate Stout, made by bloggers and Lost Highway, was one of the real hits of the event. As an added bonus this year, I had to miss the group brew with Great Divide at the last minute even though my name is still on the beer - and that can only help its flavor profile.

10) Calvin and Hops - Something Brewery and New Boswell Brewing
I'm a guy who believes really well named beers deserve a taste. And this kumquat double IPA that is a product of a relatively new Brighton Brewery (Something) and an Indiana brewery you've probably never tried before boasts the coolest name of the festival.

Labels: Boulder Beer, Casey Brewing, collaboration beers, Comrade Brewing, Denver Beer Co, Gravity Brewing, Great Divide, Odd 13 Brewing, Ratio Beerworks, Upslope Brewing, Weldwerks Brewing

Ten Best Colorado Beers of 2014


If the past few years have been a period when Colorado brewers went bigger and bolder every year, 2014 could be called a settling - not a settling for lesser beers, but a settling back into more traditional styles or ABV strengths, leading to a resurgence in less complicated but tastier offerings.

That's why this fourth annual edition chronicling one beer geek's thoughts on the best the Centennial State had to offer includes lost gems like a session beer, a brown ale and more pale ales than double IPAs. But it also includes some intensely complex beers and one-off gems, proving that Colorado's beer scene is hard to put into a box - but easy to put into your stomach.

Here, then, are my thoughts on the 10 beers that most shined and defined 2014 in Colorado - both new beers and beers that may have debuted previously but grabbed a new spotlight this year.

10) Odell/New Belgium FOCOllaboration
Fort Collins' two largest craft breweries seemed overdue to combine forces on a product. But it proved worth the wait - a pale ale with the flower and citrus bite of an IPA and the smoothness of two beer masters who know how to do beer without overdoing it.

9) Crazy Mountain Neomexicanus Native Pale Ale
In a year when pale ales made a resurgence, the best thing found in them was completely new - the Humulus Lupulus Neomexicanus hop, a style that is native to North America but never had been used in a Colorado beer. It offered a lemony profile that blended perfectly with Crazy Mountain's approach to letting the hop do all of the talking and not over-malting the beer.

8) Caution Brewing's The Earl
Tea-infused beers aren't made widely enough to be considered a trend just yet. But anyone who tries this dynamo will think they should be. Despite its lighter body - the base beer is a low-alchohol dark mild ale - this creation zings to life with an aggressive addition of Earl Grey tea. It is highly aromatic and can take over your palate without destroying your taste buds.

7) Strange Craft Beer Fresh-Hopped 1000 Barrels Imperial IPA
The regular version of 1000 Barrels is no slacker. But adding pounds upon pounds of CTZ, Cascade and Chinook hops to it cut down the malt sweetness and accented the grassy beauty of the hop like no beer in Colorado did in 2014. Here's hoping that the crew there bring this back for a 2015 encore.

6) River North Grand Unified Theory
Maybe the most unique Colorado beer of 2014, this version of River North's imperial wit aged in cocktail barrels added a sour zing plus the eye-opening tastes of sweet vermouth and bitter liqueur to a body that already was heavy in flavor while being slightly lighter in weight. Coming in near 10 percent ABV, it was the rare beer whose flavor was aided by the clear presence of alcohol, as that just piled on to its complexity.

5) Telluride Face Down Brown
This offering from Telluride Brewing has been around for a few years. But 2014 was the year that it announced that it not only was the best American-style brown ale in the country - it won gold in a Colorado sweep of that category at the Great American Beer Festival - but that it has become one of the state's most essential beers. With noticeable hops backing a solid roasted body, this has started showing up on a lot more beer menus this year, and for good reason.

4) Great Divide Barrel-Aged Grand Cru Cuvee
Known for its dark and its hoppy treasures, Great Divide took a new pathway to excellence at the start of this year by churning out a Syrah-barrel-aged version of its already bulky Grand Cru that added a pungent but not pucker-worthy tartness and somehow remained amazingly drinkable at 12% ABV. Like Strange's offering, this is a one-off that needs to come back.

3) Copper Kettle Snowed In
The debate may be over in regard to Colorado's best winter seasonal. Copper Kettle followed up its fascinating 2013 version of this beer, a barrel-aged imperial oatmeal stout, by adding a heavy dose of coffee and a heavier presence of underlying roasty malt that made this not only the talk of Denver Festivus but the hands-down best Christmas beer in the state. This is technically the only holdover beer from the 2013 top-beers list, but with its makeover it feels brand new.

2)  Trinity Super Juice Solution
No brewery in Colorado breaks more new ground more consistently than Trinity Brewing. But for all its high-gravity and barrel-aged experiments, nothing hit the bulls-eye - or, more correctly, created a new bulls-eye further down the road for everyone else to catch up to - like this sessionable sour IPA. First it presented a raw grassiness, then a second layer of punch bearing both cherry and apple tartness. Finally, it left you considering not only what was in it but where session beers could go next if this is their experimental standard-bearer.


1) Boulder Shake Chocolate Porter
Complexity be damned, the best Colorado beer of 2014 had an absurdly simple premise: Add cacao nibs to a traditional American porter and see what happens. The result was the smoothest but arguably most pleasing beer ever from the nation's oldest craft brewery - a mouth-filling waft of cocoa, caramel and balanced body that was equally good in the summer and winter. And it was every bit as good on nitro as it was in standard form. Dark-beer lovers lauded it, and even those who tended toward more complex beers - me included - had to step back and challenge their assumptions about what makes a beer memorable. It will set a high bar for porters and should jump-start the chocolate-porter trend to match the vanilla-porter wave that's rolled across the state.

Labels: Boulder Beer, Caution Brewing, Copper Kettle Brewing, Crazy Mountain, Great Divide, New Belgium Brewing, Odell Brewing, River North Brewery, Strange Brewing, Telluride Brewing, Top Beers of Year, Trinity Brewing

The New Three Days of Festivus


Denver's coolest Christmas-time beer festival is getting bigger — and is moving some of its jolly fun outside of Denver as well.

Festivus will celebrate its third year of airing grievances and gathering all of Denver's breweries in one room on Dec. 13 at the McNichols Civic Center Building. But before that it also will drop two presents on Boulder and Fort Collins — local Festivus gatherings of their own, attempting to bring all of those cities' breweries together in holiday cheer.

For those who haven't been to Festivus, the particular joy of the event, aside from all the people who show up in ugly sweaters, is that it gets pretty much every brewery within Mile High City limits in one room, sort of like a Great Denver Beer Festival. And event organizer P.J. Hoberman has instructed participants to bring at least one rare or one-off beer to be served, producing an abundance of sours and barrel-aged treats along with the traditional offerings found at other festivals.

That kind of city exclusivity and creativity drew 26 brewers to the event last year. In a sign of how much the Denver beer scene is growing, 39 already had committed to Festivus 2014 by the end of October - including some that will be nearly, but not quite, open.

"As Denver has such a great beer scene, it's fun to have them all under one roof," Hoberman, of Denver Off the Wagon fame, said. "You can talk to that brewer and try that beer and then go buy it the next day."

It only makes sense, then, to bring out the highlights of Fort Collins (Dec. 12) and Boulder (Dec. 5) in the same way. Boulder, after all, can argue that it's America's oldest craft brewing town as home to the longest-running craft brewery in the country (Boulder Beer) and a few second-generation pioneers like Avery Brewing and Mountain Sun that made a national name for themselves or ingrained themselves fully in Colorado's culture. And Fort Collins - with its easy-touring beer avenue and run of national attention-grabbers like New Belgium, Odell and Funkwerks - may have the most impressive per-capita brewery power of any city in America.

Both of those Festivi will be smaller, featuring about 18 breweries, Hoberman said. As such, he is holding the events in smaller venues and is expecting smaller crowds (details here, scroll down on page).

Here's a bet, though, that both can be popular as Denver's if they are run well and the local brewing community responds. And when I asked Hoberman if he's willing to expand the festival to other cities - Colorado Springs' brewing community has grown to the point where it certainly could support one too, I argue - he said he would.

"We'd love to expand it to any city that has a brewing culture to support the event and any city that wants it," he said.

Fair enough. Let the Festivus games begin.

Labels: Avery Brewing, Boulder Beer, Denver Off the Wagon, Festivals, Festivus, Funkwerks, Mountain Sun, New Belgium Brewing, Odell Brewing

Nitro. Bacon. And Beer.

For those who've never had the chance to spend Saturday afternoon drinking nitrogenated treats and Sunday afternoon pairing imperial stouts with whiskey candied bacon ice cream, you really need to rethink your weekend agenda.

But after two great festivals - Left Hand's Nitro Fest, which went on in a tent outside the brewery despite Saturday's snow, and Sunday's Denver Beer and Bacon Festival that was overly crowded but still showed some original flourishes - one can pick a few things about where the craft beer industry is going. And with that, here are some things learned from this past weekend's bashes.

1) Nitro Fest

* The IPA on nitro can be a good thing.
Nitro is best known as a smoothing agent for big porters but an additive that makes a sharp, hoppy beer a little boring. But if done well, a little bit of a gas actually can sharpen up an IPA. Take, for example, Green Flash's West Coast IPA, a wickedly bitter beer that, with the addition of nitrogen, becomes more approachable but still blasts you with a mouthful of fresh grass. Or there is Bear Republic's Demolition Derby, which gives not only a hard hop finish but a barrel-aged woodiness that shines with the nitro. This is a trend that needs to be pushed further.


* Coffee and pumpkin make a nitro beer glow.
Left Hand rolled out six nitro beers for its birthday bash, but none shined as brightly as Beer Week Sauce, its too-often-overlooked coffee porter that takes on hints of creamy vanilla when gassed up. Just as intriguing: Mountain Sun's Dark Harvest Pumpkin Stout, which is a melange of spices knocked down just one smooth notch to the point where you could drink the complex beer all day.

* Boulder Beer's Shake may be the two best beers of 2014.
Few offerings this year have seemed as genuinely unique as the chocolate porter that tastes like an old-time ice cream treat. But when it's on nitro, it becomes less straight beer and more desert treat - and it may be more intriguing.

2) Bacon and Beer Festival

* S**t you never thought of pairing goes very well together
Maybe you've never had Little Man Ice Cream's whiskey candied bacon ice cream. Even if you have, maybe you'd never thought "Wow, what beer compliments this?" The answer is: Though an Epic Imperial Stout (pictured above) introduces a commonly sought tough-on-sweet texture with the ice cream, the real winner is the Elevation/Epic Epication Blackberry Imperial Saison, which brings out the sweetness in the candied meat like nothing you'd expect. And that's what happens when you get to pair a lot of porks and porters in one brilliantly conceived festival.

* The next big taste? How about a hoppy wheat?
Once a style that seemed more a lark than a serious effort, the light but bitter combo of two seemingly disparate tastes now is coming together quite successfully. TRVE's Scorn, a dry-hopped pale wheat, was extremely crisp and eye-opening. And Denver Beer Co's hopped wheat, which is soon to be its next canned offering, stepped the game up even more with a great blending of the lemon mouthfeel of the wheat and the citrus bite of the hops. Oh, and if you can pair it with Cap City Tavern's bacon potato torte with pork belly, all the better.

* Our Mutual Friend has some tricks up its sleeve.
The most interesting beer of Beer and Bacon was a brown ale from the RiNo brewery - that had been run through a randall full of orange peel, cocoa nibs and Amarillo hops, picking up the orange peel especially to give it a dark desert type of feel. At a time when many breweries experiment by going extreme, the idea of going sweet and subtle with a standard beer was a great winner.

Labels: Bear Republic, Boulder Beer, Denver Beer Co, Elevation Beer, Epic Brewing, Festivals, Green Flash Brewing, Left Hand Brewing, Mountain Sun, Our Mutual Friend, TRVE

Five Beers for Apres-Ski

Labels: Backcountry Brewery, Boulder Beer, Breckenridge Brewery, New Belgium Brewing, Odell Brewing