Monday, September 17, 2018
Welcome to Denver, Beer World. Please Enjoy Our Recycled Urine.
We Coloradans are conservationists.
Sometimes that involves conserving our environment. Sometimes that involves conserving our beer and making sure we make the most out of it. And lately, that involves a little of both of those ideas.
To celebrate its 100th anniversary, Denver Water earlier this year released a beer made with Declaration Brewing that came from its PureWater Colorado Demonstration Project, a water purification system that cleans the water coming from our homes so that it's safe to drink. In this case, it not only was looking to prove that H20 could be consumed again, but that it could be added to hops and yeast in order to achieve something drinkable in the vain of the liquid all residents like to consume - namely, beer.
Centurion is a pilsner that is a product of that unusual collaboration - a 4.9% ABV , slightly cloudy project that features a significant German hop bite, as well as a slightly medicinal malt body. What it does not have, it's fair to say, is any hint of urine in its nose or body, so far as this non-urine-drinking beer guy can tell.
The collaboration won't rewrite the beer recipe book, but it also won't make the tens of thousands of people who are streaming into Denver for Great American Beer Festival think it is highly inappropriate. And while there are a number of other pilsners I would recommend first - Rockyard Brewing's Primadonna Pilsner is earning its raves as something smooth and tasty - it also won't make you regret trying it.
To be sure, this is not the first time a brewer has made conservation of water a central part of its appeal to Denver residents, though Declaration is the first brewer that has done it in this way.
Cerveza Imperial last summer sent to Denver what it called the world's first water-positive beer - a brew that puts more water back into the environment than it took out. The Costa Rican brewer partnered with the Colorado Water Trust to restore the Yampa River for every beer sold in this city. Unfortunately, those who wanted to make this kind of environmental gift still had to drink a beer that, at its best in Silver form, was crisp but largely tasteless, but at its worst in standard form offered a wet corn taste that was both stale and off-putting.
Declaration, however, made 80 barrels of a beer you could say inspired you to drink recycle urine - maybe with the caveat that you didn't know exactly what you were drinking. And it at least makes you think that science is getting to the point where that scene from "Water World" where Kevin Costner recycles and drinks his own urine isn't that far in the future - and is a lot less bleak in taste than that scene may have led us to believe.
We Coloradans are conservationists.
Sometimes that involves conserving our environment. Sometimes that involves conserving our beer and making sure we make the most out of it. And lately, that involves a little of both of those ideas.To celebrate its 100th anniversary, Denver Water earlier this year released a beer made with Declaration Brewing that came from its PureWater Colorado Demonstration Project, a water purification system that cleans the water coming from our homes so that it's safe to drink. In this case, it not only was looking to prove that H20 could be consumed again, but that it could be added to hops and yeast in order to achieve something drinkable in the vain of the liquid all residents like to consume - namely, beer.
Centurion is a pilsner that is a product of that unusual collaboration - a 4.9% ABV , slightly cloudy project that features a significant German hop bite, as well as a slightly medicinal malt body. What it does not have, it's fair to say, is any hint of urine in its nose or body, so far as this non-urine-drinking beer guy can tell.
The collaboration won't rewrite the beer recipe book, but it also won't make the tens of thousands of people who are streaming into Denver for Great American Beer Festival think it is highly inappropriate. And while there are a number of other pilsners I would recommend first - Rockyard Brewing's Primadonna Pilsner is earning its raves as something smooth and tasty - it also won't make you regret trying it.To be sure, this is not the first time a brewer has made conservation of water a central part of its appeal to Denver residents, though Declaration is the first brewer that has done it in this way.
Cerveza Imperial last summer sent to Denver what it called the world's first water-positive beer - a brew that puts more water back into the environment than it took out. The Costa Rican brewer partnered with the Colorado Water Trust to restore the Yampa River for every beer sold in this city. Unfortunately, those who wanted to make this kind of environmental gift still had to drink a beer that, at its best in Silver form, was crisp but largely tasteless, but at its worst in standard form offered a wet corn taste that was both stale and off-putting.
Declaration, however, made 80 barrels of a beer you could say inspired you to drink recycle urine - maybe with the caveat that you didn't know exactly what you were drinking. And it at least makes you think that science is getting to the point where that scene from "Water World" where Kevin Costner recycles and drinks his own urine isn't that far in the future - and is a lot less bleak in taste than that scene may have led us to believe.
Labels: Cerveza Imperial, Declaration Brewing, Denver Water, Great American Beer Festival, pilsner, Rockyard Brewery, Water reuse
Sunday, December 31, 2017
10 Best Colorado Beers of 2017
Truth be told, the more breweries that open in Colorado each year, the less beer you get to taste from any of them in particular. As such, these year-end lists become less about the beers that you drank over and over throughout the year and more about the one-offs and unique finds that left impressions long after you first enjoyed them.
Still, the variety of offerings in the Centennial State has never been greater, and the experimentation levels with classical styles have never been more rampant, giving breweries an opportunity to create something so stand-out that they can say it truly was one of a kind. And while imperial stout or IPA may be the base beer to many of these 2017 selections, it is the way those styles were interpreted that made them the ones that emblazoned 2017 with its personality.
As always, these aren't just beers that were produced for the first time this year but brews that jumped up in one way or another in the past 12 months and made their greatest marks.
10) River North/Funkwerks Saison Conspiracy Noir
A dark saison combining elements of Belgian tradition and a delicious malt-forward body, this really jumped to life because of its Syrah grape must and its Cabernet-barrel aging that teased at a slightly tart body but still let the base beer speak for itself.
9) Rockyard Plum Creek Sour
Quite a few people reacted with surprise when this unassuming Castle Rock brewery nabbed the Great American Beer Festival gold medal for wood- and barrel-aged sour beer. But this plum-forward beer (pictured at left) was both sweet and sour and truly was the best tart beer made in Colorado this year.
8) Jagged Mountain This Beer Really Ties The Room Together
Maybe the most improved Colorado brewery of 2017, Jagged Mountain hit its absolute stride with this blonde milk stout that featured the additions of lactose, coffee beans and cacao nibs. It created a full-bodied beer that tasted like it was dry-hopped with coffee rather than overwhelmed by the additive, offering a plethora of flavors that worked perfectly together.
7) Great Divide Barrel-Aged Hibernation Ale
The increasing efforts of Denver's largest brewery toward its barrel-aging program pay off again and again, this year letting a whiskey barrel soak into an already sweet and malt-forward old ale for a year and producing a delightfully unsubtle beer that hits you with a variety of flavors, each one seeming to become part of a bigger tasty picture.
6) Intrepid Sojourner Beer Project Turkish Coffee Stout
Denver's best new brewery adds unusual ingredients to its portfolio of beers like they were offered up in a "Chopped" basket. But nothing was both so unique and so style-redefining as this shockingly smooth dark ale that offered a lot of coffee grit and also a lingering sweetness that just made it taste, well, foreign.
5) New Image East Coast Transplant
A hazy double IPA that presents both a guava/mango nose and just enough hint of bittering hops on the backtaste that it both exemplifies the best qualities of the New England IPA style and defies easy definition with hints of both coasts in its complex profile.
4) Mountain Sun Bourbon-Barrel-Aged Chocolate Thunder Imperial Chocolate Milk Stout
The Boulder/Denver operators of the Mountain Sun concept go all out for their February stout month, both in terms of the number and variety of offerings they produce. Nothing, however, has ever been as magical as this, pulling together a huge body with the combined sweetness of chocolate, lactose and hints of bourbon to make a beer that is giant - but is far more flavorful than it is big, somehow.
3) Comrade/Uberbrew Triple IPA
The star of March's Collaboration Fest might just come to be the most-sought-after beer in Comrade's extensive hop portfolio if it were to offer it regularly. Highly floral and refreshingly grassy, the beer is made remarkable by its lack of alcohol burn. It's a master study in how to go big without scorching any taste buds.
2) City Star Wood Belly
Arguably, no single beer from 2017 did more to redefine the perception of a brewery than this barrel-aged imperial IPA double-dry-hopped with Amarillo, Mosaic and Citra hops. It manages to be so many things at once - wonderfully boozy (at 10.6% ABV), tropical in its hopping and imbued with such a deep oak taste that it's the rare hop bomb that becomes more flavorful as it warms. This Berthoud brewery has made solid beers for years; this, however, is a new level of successful experimentation that should garner a lot more attention for City Star.
1) Station 26 German Chocolate Bourbon-Barrel-Aged Dark Star Imperial Stout
This infinitely complex and drinkable beer debuted before 2017, but if there was a coming-out party for it, it was at January's Big Beers, Belgians & Barleywines Festival, where the increasingly confident Denver brewery held its own against every brewer in that room. The beer is, first and foremost, exactly what it promises - a slice of rich, dark, sweet cake in alcoholic liquid form. But the barrel aging gives it just enough of a pervading influence that it kicks the flavor to the next level, and the high alcohol content here is used to accent the richness rather than overshadow it. In a year when transcending the long-held definition of dark beers became almost a competitive sport for Colorado craft breweries, none of them jumped so far over the bar as Station 26 did with this masterpiece.
Truth be told, the more breweries that open in Colorado each year, the less beer you get to taste from any of them in particular. As such, these year-end lists become less about the beers that you drank over and over throughout the year and more about the one-offs and unique finds that left impressions long after you first enjoyed them.
Still, the variety of offerings in the Centennial State has never been greater, and the experimentation levels with classical styles have never been more rampant, giving breweries an opportunity to create something so stand-out that they can say it truly was one of a kind. And while imperial stout or IPA may be the base beer to many of these 2017 selections, it is the way those styles were interpreted that made them the ones that emblazoned 2017 with its personality.
As always, these aren't just beers that were produced for the first time this year but brews that jumped up in one way or another in the past 12 months and made their greatest marks.
10) River North/Funkwerks Saison Conspiracy Noir
A dark saison combining elements of Belgian tradition and a delicious malt-forward body, this really jumped to life because of its Syrah grape must and its Cabernet-barrel aging that teased at a slightly tart body but still let the base beer speak for itself.
Quite a few people reacted with surprise when this unassuming Castle Rock brewery nabbed the Great American Beer Festival gold medal for wood- and barrel-aged sour beer. But this plum-forward beer (pictured at left) was both sweet and sour and truly was the best tart beer made in Colorado this year.
8) Jagged Mountain This Beer Really Ties The Room Together
Maybe the most improved Colorado brewery of 2017, Jagged Mountain hit its absolute stride with this blonde milk stout that featured the additions of lactose, coffee beans and cacao nibs. It created a full-bodied beer that tasted like it was dry-hopped with coffee rather than overwhelmed by the additive, offering a plethora of flavors that worked perfectly together.
7) Great Divide Barrel-Aged Hibernation Ale
The increasing efforts of Denver's largest brewery toward its barrel-aging program pay off again and again, this year letting a whiskey barrel soak into an already sweet and malt-forward old ale for a year and producing a delightfully unsubtle beer that hits you with a variety of flavors, each one seeming to become part of a bigger tasty picture.
6) Intrepid Sojourner Beer Project Turkish Coffee Stout
Denver's best new brewery adds unusual ingredients to its portfolio of beers like they were offered up in a "Chopped" basket. But nothing was both so unique and so style-redefining as this shockingly smooth dark ale that offered a lot of coffee grit and also a lingering sweetness that just made it taste, well, foreign.
A hazy double IPA that presents both a guava/mango nose and just enough hint of bittering hops on the backtaste that it both exemplifies the best qualities of the New England IPA style and defies easy definition with hints of both coasts in its complex profile.
4) Mountain Sun Bourbon-Barrel-Aged Chocolate Thunder Imperial Chocolate Milk Stout
The Boulder/Denver operators of the Mountain Sun concept go all out for their February stout month, both in terms of the number and variety of offerings they produce. Nothing, however, has ever been as magical as this, pulling together a huge body with the combined sweetness of chocolate, lactose and hints of bourbon to make a beer that is giant - but is far more flavorful than it is big, somehow.
3) Comrade/Uberbrew Triple IPA
The star of March's Collaboration Fest might just come to be the most-sought-after beer in Comrade's extensive hop portfolio if it were to offer it regularly. Highly floral and refreshingly grassy, the beer is made remarkable by its lack of alcohol burn. It's a master study in how to go big without scorching any taste buds.
2) City Star Wood Belly
Arguably, no single beer from 2017 did more to redefine the perception of a brewery than this barrel-aged imperial IPA double-dry-hopped with Amarillo, Mosaic and Citra hops. It manages to be so many things at once - wonderfully boozy (at 10.6% ABV), tropical in its hopping and imbued with such a deep oak taste that it's the rare hop bomb that becomes more flavorful as it warms. This Berthoud brewery has made solid beers for years; this, however, is a new level of successful experimentation that should garner a lot more attention for City Star.
1) Station 26 German Chocolate Bourbon-Barrel-Aged Dark Star Imperial Stout
This infinitely complex and drinkable beer debuted before 2017, but if there was a coming-out party for it, it was at January's Big Beers, Belgians & Barleywines Festival, where the increasingly confident Denver brewery held its own against every brewer in that room. The beer is, first and foremost, exactly what it promises - a slice of rich, dark, sweet cake in alcoholic liquid form. But the barrel aging gives it just enough of a pervading influence that it kicks the flavor to the next level, and the high alcohol content here is used to accent the richness rather than overshadow it. In a year when transcending the long-held definition of dark beers became almost a competitive sport for Colorado craft breweries, none of them jumped so far over the bar as Station 26 did with this masterpiece.
Labels: City Star Brewing, Comrade Brewing, Funkwerks, Intrepid Sojourner, Jagged Mountain Brewery, Mountain Sun, New Image Brewing, River North Brewery, Rockyard Brewery, Station 26 Brewing, Top Beers of Year
Saturday, December 31, 2011
Top 10 Colorado Beers of 2011The past year has been an exciting and experimental year for Colorado beers, even by its lofty standards. And so, to try to categorize the best offerings from 2011 is no easy task.
This list is not necessarily a list of the best beers you could buy at any moment in the state - don't worry, Avery Maharaja, I haven't forgotten about you - but a list of the most exciting beers of the past 12 months. These are the brews that inspired conversation in just the past year, excited taste buds and made you appreciate the brewing craft of this state so much that you wanted to share it with everyone.
10) Cherry Bomb Belgian Stout - Strange Brewing
This fascinating combination of roasted malt and tart cherries is not a new brew. But in the past year, the evolution of the beer to a happy medium between the stout and Belgian fruit styles, as well as the decision to keep it smoothly on nitro, has continued to make it one of Denver's most fascinating brews.
9) Steamworks Berliner Weisse - Steamworks Brewing
Many breweries experimented ) - and did very well - with this previously little-produced German sour wheat beer in the past year. But none made anything quite as tasty as the Durango brewery that is continuously experimenting and coming up with options like this that strike the interest of the palate without beating it to death with tartness.
8) Belgian Yeti - Great Divide Brewing
Great Divide has made a small amount of beers better than Belgian Yeti. But it's been a while since the last time it made something so provocative to combine Belgian yeast with its already bold and flavorful imperial stout recipe. And the fact that Great Divide was ballsy enough to release this in the summer lets you know how countercultural a good beer can be.
7) Summer Cab Ride - Breckenridge Brewery
Breckenridge's SummerBright Ale was a run-of-the-mill light offering - right up until the brewery decided to age it in cabernet sauvignon barrels and turned it into a fascinating and complex lighter beer with wine skin and slightly sour overtones. Now it's one of the most approachable and enjoyable barrel experiments in this state.
6) Mexican Chocolate Stout - Copper Kettle Brewing
Copper Kettle opened in late April and won a Great American Beer Festival medal in late September - a gap that brewery owners believe to be the shortest in history. But it was well-deserved for a beer that so artfully combined spice, cinnamon and dark malt that it felt like you were drinking dinner, not an aperitif.
5) Le Terroir - New Belgium Brewing
New Belgium had displayed Le Terroir in its taproom and at the GABF before. But it wasn't until this year that the dry hopped sour ale became a part of its Lips of Faith series that received general distribution. Tart like a cherry and yet grassy in its hops, it combines the best of Belgian and American brewing and gives you a beer that warms your cockles.
4) Brain of the Turtle - Trinity Brewing
Colorado complexity reached its peak in this sour ale aged with cherries, coffee and almonds - Jason Yester's latest freak show of a beer that conforms to no style but just turns heads and makes experimental beer fans smile. Nothing was talked about more among Colorado beer geeks at the Great American Beer Festival. And no other new beer deserves a statewide release so much in 2012.
3) Myrcenary Double IPA - Odell Brewing
Colorado has become the king state of double IPAs, which makes it particularly hard for a newcomer to break into its market. But Myrcenary, released at the end of 2010, ranks with its best products as a sharply hoppy offering with enough of a malt backbone to make it grassy without being overbearing. It's a four-pack worth picking up.
2) Nitro Milk Stout - Left Hand Brewing
No Colorado beer has been more hyped in its release than this one - which makes it incredibly impressive that the Longmont brewery not only met but exceeded expectations with a magically carbonated and sweet stout that may well the most drinkable beer in Colorado right now. I have turned IPA drinkers into stout drinkers with this selection, and Left Hand's influence is likely to turn a lot of typical dark beer producers into auteurs who put their beer on nitrogen to make it more interesting.
1) Buddha Nuvo - 14 breweries, led by Rockyard Brewing
Collaboration beers are, by their nature, complex and full of flavors that everyone wants to contribute. But no beer pushed the taste envelope so much to the edge - without sailing over it - as this collaboration saison from 14 breweries that presented drinkers with the combined tastes of grape skin, plum, pumpkin and a perfume-like overtaste that fades into simple fascination at the realization of what is in here. One of the highlights of my year as a writer was the opportunity to participate in a multiple-blog collaboration review of this masterpiece. But nothing we said could equal the melange of flavors cavorting in your mouth and making you realize that Colorado beer is producing experiments that will push it further up the charts as the state that should attract national attention both this year and in the future.
Labels: Breckenridge Brewery, Copper Kettle Brewing, Great Divide, Left Hand Brewing, New Belgium Brewing, Odell Brewing, Rockyard Brewery, Steamworks Brewing, Strange Brewing, Trinity Brewing
Thursday, August 25, 2011
Reaching Enlightenment through Buddha Nuvo
When you buy a $39 beer - assuming that is an action you ever take in your life - you expect it to be good. Mystical good. Good as in the beer quenches your palate, then the empty bottle washes your car and does your taxes good.
It was with some trepidation, then, that I purchased the first $39 bottle of beer in my life two weeks ago: The 14-brewer collaboration effort known as Buddha Nuvo. It was a treat I had gotten to see these brewers making way back in February. But when I cracked it open for the Fearless Tasting Crew, no one knew what to expect.
The most concise appraisal of this 750 milliliter investment is this: You could buy dozens upon dozens of more economical beers and chances are you'll not taste even one of the booming symphony of flavors that mesh to make this one of the most memorable Colorado beers in years.
Buddha Nuvo's ingredients include spelt, oats, cans upon cans of pumpkin, peppercorns and the rare Asian fruit known as Buddha's Hand. This 12% ABV saison is fermented with Brettanomyces, aged in French Oak Chardonnay barrels and primed with honey.
You're jolted right away by its strongly floral and perfumey nose that precedes a jasmine-tinted flavor greeting your palate. Swirl it around, sip it down and something else emerges - a muscat-like, slightly grape, slightly plum flavor that feels almost granulated in the way that it falls over your taste buds.
The taste is piercing, and in it you can pick out the dance of ingredients that brewers from places like Trinity, Rockyard, Black Fox, Crooked Stave and Strange - among others - tossed into this creation. It lights up your tongue somewhat like a foreign spice and then leaves you with a sharp alcoholic backtaste that is comparable to the fizz of champagne - not a distraction but an addition.
The Beer Geekette may have put it most simply when she said: "It tastes like a tropical forest." But even such forests can get heavy at times. Buddha Nuvo, on the other hand, is a wholly pleasant, if challenging experience. And it is a thoroughly modern and thoughtful beer that combines a lot of daring ideas with ingredients that, surprisingly, conform within one bottle.
So, go ahead and splurge at participating breweries, beer bars and liquor stores. This one's worth it.
Labels: Black Fox Brewing, Crooked Stave, Rockyard Brewery, Strange Brewing, Trinity Brewing
