Sunday, October 25, 2020
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
Wednesday, February 01, 2017
A February Full of Beer-Event Personality
Craft beer fans and football fans share a mutual disdain for the month of February. For football fans, it's that desolate time in between the Super Bowl and the NFL Draft. For beer aficionados in Colorado, it's the lonely month between Big Beers Festival and Collaboration Fest.
Luckily, though, a few event organizers have heard the anguished cry of the craft-beer drinker and tried to do something to make this month more memorable. And over the next 28 days, a number of gatherings - including a pair of new or reborn events in particular - are going to fill calendars surprisingly quickly and make March seem it got here with no delay at all.
First there is Beer Fight Club, the brainchild of buddies Jeff Flood and Adam Schell that debuts on Saturday at Larimer Beer Hall. Less an all-out Tyler Durden-style brawl and more a civilized March Madness-style precursor, it pits eight River North neighborhood breweries against each other in head-to-head blind-taste tests until only one survives the bracket to be crowned Beer Fight Club champion.
Flood and Schell had wanted to get into the craft-beer promotion business, and so they talked with a number of breweries about what kind of event might draw out drinkers and get them through the doldrums of winter. What they came up with was a ticketed event in which the eight contestants bring a beer of their choosing and advance through the bracket based on the combined votes of audience members and a specially chosen panel of experts. Flood and Schell hope to host three more such events featuring different brewing neighborhoods in the coming months, and then have a "best-of''' bracket to determine the ultimate Beer Fight Club champion.
"Every weekend there's a different type of beer fest, so we asked how we do something different," Flood said of the event, scheduled from 5 to 8 p.m. Saturday at Larimer Beer Hall featuring breweries like Epic, Mockery and River North - all of which will have folks at the event. "We really want to connect the beer drinker to the brewers, so they can establish a little longer-term relationship."
A smaller event was also the theme around which Colin Bickford and Patrick Brown wanted to organize the Mile High Beer Festival, a collection of 25 Colorado breweries that will be pouring beer at the Exdo Center in RiNo on Feb. 11 for both an afternoon and an evening session. They wanted reasonable lines, breweries that came from a reasonable distance away and a crowd that got to taste a substantive number of beers on the Colorado scene.
Bickford earlier organized the Epic Beer Festival with 80-plus breweries in 2013 and the Country Beer Festival in Jefferson County in 2016, but he wanted a different event in the heart of Denver this year. So, he and Brown gathered an array of Colorado craft breweries - from heavyweights like Odell and Crooked Stave to up-and-comers like ,Resolute and Verboten - and will have them pouring in a fairly intimate setting of some 500 attendees that revives the first Mile High Beer Festival, which Brown organized several years ago.
"We found that people don't want bigger. They just want a nice experience," Bickford said.
Those are two of the highlights for the month. Here's a few more:
* Denver Beer Co. which is becoming the master of the food-and-beer-pairing events, will host a beer, bacon and coffee festival at its main brewery from 8:30 to 11 a.m. on Feb. 12.
* A number of breweries and bars are hosting Valentine's Day events. But for my money, you can't go wrong going down to Freshcraft that night, which will be tapping Southern Tier Creme Brulee.
* On Feb. 15, Yak & Yeti Brewery officially becomes Spice Trade Brewing Co., which will continue to operate within the Arvada restaurant but as a separate entity. It will tap a Szechuan Saison and a Mayan Chocolate Russian Imperial Stout, among other things.
* On Feb. 18, Bristol Brewing brings back its annual Firkin Rendezvous, in which 40 breweries will tap experimental versions of their beers. Tickets are $45.
* And, of course, all month is Stout Month at Mountain Sun and its affiliated brewery restaurants. Their offerings include the likes of a Mint Chocolate Girl Scout Stout, a Coconut Cream Stout and a Norwegian Wheat Stout. Oh, yes.
Craft beer fans and football fans share a mutual disdain for the month of February. For football fans, it's that desolate time in between the Super Bowl and the NFL Draft. For beer aficionados in Colorado, it's the lonely month between Big Beers Festival and Collaboration Fest.Luckily, though, a few event organizers have heard the anguished cry of the craft-beer drinker and tried to do something to make this month more memorable. And over the next 28 days, a number of gatherings - including a pair of new or reborn events in particular - are going to fill calendars surprisingly quickly and make March seem it got here with no delay at all.
First there is Beer Fight Club, the brainchild of buddies Jeff Flood and Adam Schell that debuts on Saturday at Larimer Beer Hall. Less an all-out Tyler Durden-style brawl and more a civilized March Madness-style precursor, it pits eight River North neighborhood breweries against each other in head-to-head blind-taste tests until only one survives the bracket to be crowned Beer Fight Club champion.
Flood and Schell had wanted to get into the craft-beer promotion business, and so they talked with a number of breweries about what kind of event might draw out drinkers and get them through the doldrums of winter. What they came up with was a ticketed event in which the eight contestants bring a beer of their choosing and advance through the bracket based on the combined votes of audience members and a specially chosen panel of experts. Flood and Schell hope to host three more such events featuring different brewing neighborhoods in the coming months, and then have a "best-of''' bracket to determine the ultimate Beer Fight Club champion.
"Every weekend there's a different type of beer fest, so we asked how we do something different," Flood said of the event, scheduled from 5 to 8 p.m. Saturday at Larimer Beer Hall featuring breweries like Epic, Mockery and River North - all of which will have folks at the event. "We really want to connect the beer drinker to the brewers, so they can establish a little longer-term relationship."
Bickford earlier organized the Epic Beer Festival with 80-plus breweries in 2013 and the Country Beer Festival in Jefferson County in 2016, but he wanted a different event in the heart of Denver this year. So, he and Brown gathered an array of Colorado craft breweries - from heavyweights like Odell and Crooked Stave to up-and-comers like ,Resolute and Verboten - and will have them pouring in a fairly intimate setting of some 500 attendees that revives the first Mile High Beer Festival, which Brown organized several years ago.
"We found that people don't want bigger. They just want a nice experience," Bickford said.
Those are two of the highlights for the month. Here's a few more:
* Denver Beer Co. which is becoming the master of the food-and-beer-pairing events, will host a beer, bacon and coffee festival at its main brewery from 8:30 to 11 a.m. on Feb. 12.
* A number of breweries and bars are hosting Valentine's Day events. But for my money, you can't go wrong going down to Freshcraft that night, which will be tapping Southern Tier Creme Brulee.* On Feb. 15, Yak & Yeti Brewery officially becomes Spice Trade Brewing Co., which will continue to operate within the Arvada restaurant but as a separate entity. It will tap a Szechuan Saison and a Mayan Chocolate Russian Imperial Stout, among other things.
* On Feb. 18, Bristol Brewing brings back its annual Firkin Rendezvous, in which 40 breweries will tap experimental versions of their beers. Tickets are $45.
* And, of course, all month is Stout Month at Mountain Sun and its affiliated brewery restaurants. Their offerings include the likes of a Mint Chocolate Girl Scout Stout, a Coconut Cream Stout and a Norwegian Wheat Stout. Oh, yes.
Labels: Beer Fight Club, Bristol Brewing, Denver Beer Co, Freshcraft, Mile High Beer Festival, Mountain Sun, Spice Trade Brewing Co.
