Beer Run Blog

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

Welcome to Stout Month

Back in 1994, when American breweries numbered only in the low hundreds, Paul Nashak had an idea that he thought might bring a few more people into his then-five-month-old Mountain Sun Pub during a slow time. He would load up his taps with stouts in February, call it Stout Month and maybe give folks a little extra reason to stop by.

Stout Month is no longer an idea. It's a full-blown movement that extends beyond the walls of Nashak's current five pubs and into breweries across Colorado that are setting aside more space in February for dark beers of their own creation. Many of those breweries are sending beers to be put on at Mountain Sun pubs. A few are even making beers that will be available only at Mountain Sun's locations this month.

Nashak, managing partner of the brewery, now gives talks on Stout Month. He lines up a wider variety of beers than he once imagined possible. He goes into the pub some days with a certain beer on tap and leaves only when that tap is on its third different creation of the day.

And he loves that everyone wants a piece of that one-time weird idea.

"I think when people started coming into Mountain Sun in the darkest, coldest, slowest month of the year and seeing that we had lines at 2:30 p.m., they realized we'd tapped into something," he said.

The list of Mountain Sun stouts that will be on tap at its properties from Boulder to Denver this month is 31 recipes long. Thirty-six beers from other breweries - including out-of-state craft brewers like Modern Times Brewing that are being added to the list of Colorado offerings for the first time in about eight years - will supplement that haul.

Mountain Sun has standard stouts and dry Irish stouts and cream stouts. But it's also concocted a Girl Scout cookie stout, a Norwegian wheat stout and a brand new cherry chile stout. There are five imperial stouts and three barrel-aged stouts waiting too, including the bourbon-barrel-aged Chocolate Thunder Imperial Milk Stout that was one of the standouts of the Great American Beer Festival.

Nearly as exciting, though, is the list of guest stouts that will be on tap.There are multiple s'mores stouts, a maple donut Russian imperial stout and a Turkish coffee stout. TRVE has three stouts that will be pouring at Mountain Sun.

Chris Bell, co-owner of Call to Arms Brewing, admitted that he rarely makes stouts. But, wanting to be a part of Stout Month madness, the Denver brewery this year created Body By Beer Milk Stout, Buzzy Body Coffee Milk Stout (which is a phenomenal blend of sweet smoothness with a kick of highly flavored roast) and Dust in the Wind Dry Irish Stout. The latter will be on at Mountain Sun.

Even though Mountain Sun will host the largest Stout Month celebration, other breweries will host their own celebrations of the style too. Resolute Brewing in Centennial, for example, will roll out six beers across the course of the month, including a chocolate orange stout and a rum raisin imperial stout. Black Sky Brewery will have a few of its own, including a blackberry stout and a chocolate mint pistachio stout.

The point is this: Stout Month began almost as a lark. And now it's an obsession. And we are the ones who get to benefit from Paul Nashak's rather brilliant idea.

Labels: Black Sky Brewery, Call to Arms Brewing, imperial stouts, Modern Times, Mountain Sun, Resolute Brewing, stouts, TRVE

Resolute Brewing Year One: "Exceeded All Expectations"


Five or six years ago, there might have been several obstacles that kept Resolute Brewing from succeeding fully. It planned to open in a strip mall in the suburbs. It was going to focus on German-style beers. It didn't make an IPA for its first nine months.

But this is a different beer world. And so when the Centennial brewery celebrated its one-year anniversary last month with 200 people lined up outside its door to get in for the party, it told a tale greater than just how well one brewery was doing. That event — along with, say, the fact that the brewery made 1,200 barrels in its first year after forecasting in its business plan that it would make 450 — spoke volumes about each brewery finding its own space in the growing Denver beer scene and contributing tastes that may have been unfathomable in the scene's younger days.

"For one year, we've exceeded all expectations," said Clifton Oertli, one of five partners at Resolute. "Honestly, the biggest concern we have right now is being able to keep up with growth."

If you haven't been to the brewery in the Denver Tech Center, you still might have found its
hefeweizen or its doppelbock at one of the 50 taps that pour Resolute from Summit County to Fort Collins to Colorado Springs. Or maybe you've stumbled on the greatest surprise the brewery has offered — an American-style light lager that is the house beer for 5280 Burger Bar in downtown Denver and allows you to enjoy its light body and legitimate malt backbone without tasting the rice, corn or other adjunct crap that have come to define the style.

But if you have made it down to the taproom, you'll find the heart of the idea that spawned plans for the brewery — dogs, families, people playing games out back. And WiFi that is accessible to everyone, especially folks who decide that it's easier to finish their work with a pint of American Blonde rather than going back to the office. These are the things the partners said they didn't see at many of the downtown breweries they'd frequented.

The story of Resolute goes back to Columbine High School, where four of the five founders went. When Oertli, an engineer by trade, wanted to launch the brewery, he dipped back into the community that had helped him become who he was. And when the original four partners decided that they needed a full-time brewer, they  found Zac Rissmiller, an Elk Mountain brewer who had gone to Columbine with one of their sisters.

The Columbine connection to the brewery for Rissmiller especially is more than just one of locality. He and partner Matt Davis were students there during the hideous attack in 1999 when 13 students died. Being a part of that has led to a close partnership between the brewery and Phoenix 999, an organization that helps people with post-traumatic stress disorder. Being there also influenced his decision to pick a career path allowing him to do something he truly wanted to do.

"It's the reason I do what I do for a living, because I'm never going to take life as a passive thing," Rissmiller (pictured at top with Oertli) said. "I have an engineering degree too. I don't need to make money. I need to be happy."

The crowds that now populate Resolute have been there since day one, and the brewery is getting used to them — and feeding off their energy to expand its line of beers. It busted out a session IPA this summer, and it celebrated its first birthday with a Belgian dark strong ale aged on peaches. More experimentation is coming.

Most of all, more beer is coming, and that's a good thing. Resolute is growing a well-deserved reputation as a brewery that won't blow you away with its complexity but will leave you satisfied. The fact that so many people have come to appreciate it is a testament to both the brewery and to Denver-area beer drinkers willing to reach outside of what once was their comfort zone.

"It doesn't matter what kind of accolades you get, it doesn't matter what kind of things are going on," Rissmiller said. "You've just got to make better beer."

Labels: 5280 Burger Bar, American light lager, German beers, New Colorado breweries, Resolute Brewing, suburban breweries