ACBW Day 3: Crazy Mountain Brewery

The scene at Crazy Mountain was like something out of Craft Brew Magazine, if Craft Brew Magazine were real and full of giant glossy photos of good looking people brewing and drinking beer. It was perfectly sunny and sweatshirt-cool out. A group of drinkers were enjoying a very funny game of ladder golf (a/k/a “donkey balls”). Several medium-sized, well-behaved dogs looked on and took turns monitoring the grounds. A group of rugged gentlemen (a mountain frat, if you will) were gathered just outside the front door, being jovial. The garage bay next door was wide open and housed a group of women who sat on folding chairs in a circle and drank beer. Inside the tap room, a couple was sitting on the chairlift (you can’t be a mountain-anything without a chairlift. Even the zoo has chairlifts), enjoying each other’s company. At the oversized picnic table—adjacent to a wall bearing a pretty sick mountain mural—a dozen people sat or milled about. I snuck a photo of them and, while no one seems to be aware of the camera, every one of them is smiling. Roses grew right up out of the concrete floor and I’m pretty sure I saw a unicorn checking the temperature of the wort in the back. Normal Rockwell would have painted this scene if he were alive and toured breweries and hallucinated about unicorns.

I really liked the creative undercurrent at CMB. It reminded me a little of some of the northern Michigan breweries that are fearlessly and brilliantly experimental. I sampled three of CMB’s seasonals and was wowed by two. My favorite—both in name and substance—was the Après Cuvee.

This review is short mainly because my visit was short. I stopped into CMB only after being tipped off by my new Michigander friends, Ted and Amy, at Glenwood Canyon. But I still had a two-hour drive back to Denver. And a steady stream of thirsty mountain folks, taking advantage of $2 Tuesdays (right? It must be true. I tweeted it while I was there), kept derailing my otherwise pleasant conversation with Kevin, one of the owners, who was working the bar. I had so many questions, too: why “Crazy” Mountain? Who painted this sick mural? Why are you located under a Subway? How is it possible that you have more dogs than Subarus and Jeeps combined in your parking lot? So I’ll have to go back, with my dog and my unicorn. And my Normal Rockwell iPhone app.

A postscript about circled-up group of ladies in the garage next door: they call themselves “Females and Ales” and they are a women’s drinking club. They meet every other Tuesday and each female brings her favorite beer to pass according to a shifting theme. How great is that? It’s like a potluck of beers. Again, I didn’t have time to get the lowdown, but you can find much more detailed description Krista Driscoll's well-written article.

(P)review 2: Pateros Creek Brewing Co.

I am rarely on time. Chuck will attest to this. So will my wife, my optometrist, and my high school band director. But to Pateros Creek I was a good six weeks early. They won’t open to the public until around the beginning of June (though they have been brewing out of Loveland, CO, since September of last year). Bob Jones, Pateros’s business manager, was kind enough to let me crash his painting party in the middle of the day three weeks ago to talk about beer and his brewery that will soon be.

I found Bob taking a break from his decorating duties and chatting with the heating and cooling guy over the heat exchanger on their 10-barrel system. The giant brass tanks are shiny and new-looking, save a few transportation battle scars. Pateros picked them up from a defunct brewery in Wisconsin. There's a great video of the installation on Youtube. Bob informed me their plan was to be brewing by the following week. Given that much of their equipment is still in Loveland, and the rather naked state of the brewery (not unlike my sprinkler system: a few pieces lying about, looking really good, but not actually attached to anything), I thought this was pretty optimistic. (If pictures and Twitter feeds are to be believed, the first batch was, indeed, fired up almost exactly a week later.)

Bob manages to be soft spoken but conversational, quiet but informative. Like a science teacher. Or Ira Glass. Bob’s son, Steve, is the brewer, giving them a kind of inside guy/outside guy division of labor reminiscent of ‘Beer School.’ Steve’s wife, Cathy, is also involved, in the position of “Marketing/Creative Director.” That’s no small job, even at this small brewery. Pateros, after all, has not always been Pateros. They initially incorporated as Horsetooth Brewing Company. However, Fort Collins is a serious beer town, home of the Liquid Poets Society and nine official breweries. You’re bound to encounter some beer overlap. Sure enough, Pateros got a call from another local brewery that laid claim to the name ‘Horsetooth’ for one of their own beers. Right behind the call came a nasty letter from an attorney, backing everything up with nasty words. Words like “cease and desist” and “trademark infringement” and "res judicata," I imagine.

Attorneys. Pfft.

So the Horsetooth Brewing Company agreed to change their name. Accordingly, they fired up the marketing machine. They devised a brilliant way to expand the publicity they were getting from the threat of beer-on-beer legal action: an invitation to the public to rename them. It was wildly successful. Bob said they got something like 600 suggestions. That’s 600 people who knew the brewery existed and were interested enough to want to contribute something. All before selling a single pint. The winning name—Pateros, obvs—is its own conversation piece. Ask Bob or Steve about it next time you’re in there. (Or read about it.)

This spat does seem to have a relatively happy ending. Both Pateros and the Horsetooth brewer joined the seven other breweries for the second annual “FC Collusion.” They all get together and collectively produce a single brew, which they just released today in honor of ACBW. I don’t know if Bob or Steve hung out with their (former?) rival. I didn’t follow-up or anything. But I watched the video and didn’t see any attorneys milling about. So I’m guessing it went okay.

Look for Pateros to open in the next few weeks. They’re right on College, just a block or two from the north end of the strip. Pateros beer is already in restaurants around town, but I’m going to wait until I can enjoy it fresh out of the tap. Sitting out on their patio. Sipping a Cache la Porter. Having discussions about trademarks and local history. And not worrying about the time.

(P)review: Denver Beer Co.

I stopped in at Denver Beer Co. yesterday for their “Hop Swap,” a practical marketing gimmick in which the beer-drinking public does their work for them. Each participant adopts a Cascade hop plant from the brewery, cultivates it for the summer, harvests the cones and then returns them to DBC to be included in a batch (or two) of beer. It reminded me of that class project where you and a partner have to parent an egg for a week without breaking it to get an ‘A’. (Actually, did anyone ever do that? My hunch is that it was simply a creation of sitcom writers. Sitcom writers from the 80’s. Terrible ones.)

I was initially skeptical of the Hop Swap. It made little sense. Who would spend an entire summer growing a crop for someone else, for free? No grade, no stipend, no kind of quid pro quo. It seemed awfully un-American.

My investigation revealed two things: 1. Being in a situation where something in limited supply is being given away, first-come first-serve, will cause me to need to have one, right now. I feel this is a distinctly American quality. 2. The people of Denver are such supportive beer fanatics that they will do almost anything to ensure the production of more barrels, including growing the ingredients pro bono. In the 10 minutes I was there, chatting and poking around, they probably gave out 20 plants. A steady stream of curious folk wandered up from the street, from their bikes, from cars—and keep in mind DBC is not right on any major pedestrian walkway. Nearly everybody went away an excited owner of a baby hop vine. Several signed up a “friend” and took two. It was hard not to buy into it after a conversation with Patrick, whose calm enthusiasm and easy explanation made me forget why I’d had any doubts to begin with. Perhaps most impressive is that they enlisted all these brewing soldiers without the use of alcohol—they don’t open until July and had no beer on hand to prime the pump.

Since I can’t comment on their beer (yet), a couple comments on the facility: first, it’s enormous. DBC is brewing in seven-barrel batches and a good chunk of their Walmart-sized building (only a mild exaggeration) is stuffed with kettles and tanks and other equipment. These guys are committed. And they expect to sell most of their beer out of the tap right there at the brewery. No plans to bottle or can any time soon, though you should be able to find their beers at a few restaurants around town. Finally, look forward to some interesting seasonals and single batches from these guys. A 7-barrel batch sounds kind of big to experiment with, but Patrick gave me a few examples of some of the one-offs and they sounded pretty intriguing. I don’t remember the details, but that’s no surprise. I had hop fever by that point.

Happy American Craft Brewing Week!

To celebrate ACBW, Jonesydog will be profiling a series of smaller breweries we think you should keep an eye on. Up-and-comers. Hot prospects. Breweries we are excited about, and that we think you'll get excited about. These are the kinds of places that represent what craft beer is all about. And we are so cutting-edge that some of these places haven't even opened their doors yet. But they will, and soon, and we have good reason to believe they'll deliver.

In the mean time, we hope you're enjoying all the great ACBW events around Denver. Here's a calendar. Go nuts. And check our Twitter feed for updates.

Great Divide Brewery

I know all of our loyal readers have been breathlessly waiting for our latest post, so I'm hoping not to disappoint. Today's post is (hopefully) an act in two parts, as the Jonesydog staff begins celebrating the awesomeness that is Denver Beer Week. To kick it off properly, your humble authors hit the tasting room at the sorely under-appreciated Great Divide Brewery tap room. The following is my account of the evening; with luck, the co-contributor will pitch in his thoughts as well.

So here is the thing about Denver, and Colorado as a whole, from a beer drinker's perspective: its an embarrassment of riches. Most of us here trip over breweries on our way out the door in the morning. Trying to stay on top of beer in Colorado is ultimately a losing battle, because its everywhere, all the time (but if you're gonna lose a fight...). Because of this, some great, great stuff gets lost in the cracks, and I'd argue Great Divide is foremost among them. With the ubiquity and out right fun of New Belgium, the awesome beer and beer culture of guys like Oscar Blues, sometimes is easy to forget the guys who sit down and get the job done well. Hence, our review of Great Divide.

We hit the Divide late in the evening, with only a few hours to lounge around and do some tasting. The tasting room is small, but focused: eight taps, one bar, and a handful of chairs for those that venture in. The bartender was awesome, informed, wasn't stingy with the pours, and didn't mind giving us the once over of the brewery or cracking open bottles when kegs weren't tapped. Have your jam-packed New Belgium tasting room - I'll take this any day. Wisely, outside some pizza vendors were hawking their wares, and having had a chance to talk to them briefly after they shut down, I think its well worth my time to be tracking them down in the future.

But I digress: we were there to taste beers, and we tasted some great beer. I'm going to throw in my own little disclaimer here: I hit the Divide after a pretty hefty day of work and some high-intensity miles on my road bike. It didn't take much for me to get a little sideways later in the tasting. As such, I'll probably skip over a few, and focus on ones that really hit home:

1) Yeti Imperial Stout. We got this later in the night our of a bottle, as the keg was kicked. I've seen Yeti around for awhile, and having ridden and raced on Yeti cycles for over a decade, I've always had a soft spot for this one. That said, I've never actually drank one (the beer, that is). The Divide website describes Yeti as an assault on the senses, and my friends, they do not lie. Like Oscar Blues Ten Fidy, Yeti s an imperial stout that takes to sipping, not drinking. Dark in color, rick in flavor, with a good tan head, this beer asks you to spend some time with it. If thinking of decompressing after a long fall or winter night, the Yeti is your man.

2) Claymore. Claymore and I have been dancing around each other for a while now. I first noticed this beer earlier in the year, a strong scotch ale. Since then, other than a brief tasting at the kickoff for Denver Harvest Week, I've been missing out on this one. To my great loss: Claymore is a great scotch ale, deep red in color, with a strong caramel flavor with a hint of smoke and a pretty mellow hop profile. This, my friends, is how its done.

These were the two standouts of the evening, but when I say standouts, I mean A+ students in a straight A lot. I'm hoping other contributors can fill in the details on some of the other beers, notably those great Belgian offerings Great Divide has. Of the tasting rooms I've hit, this one ranks high, and of the brewing crews I've seen, Divide is among the best. Now, if only they'd crank up their output...

But seriously, stop overlooking these guys. Next time you're stocking up for the weekend and are about to grab one of your Colorado standby beers, think twice and grab a Divide. Great stuff.


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Exciting News, and Less Exciting News

We'll start with the good stuff first:

We are entering Colorado's much vaunted drinking season. In this state, fall is made for lovers of malted and distilled beverages. The manic bike/camp/paddle/hike/go go go summer season is winding down, and while you may have hit the Labor Day Ski Sales, you're not hitting the slopes until mid-October (at best). No, now is the time to wind down, rest up, and prepare for lots of early mornings, cold snowy days, and long hours on I-70. What accompaniment to this transition, but a cool beverage? Thankfully, Colorado and Denver specifically have recognized this pairing, and have done their best to satisfy your needs. To wit:

1) The Denver Beer Fest: Holy Crap. Culminating in the Great American Beer Festival, the Denver Beer fest is a week long parade of non-stop beer-fueled goodness. Events by breweries large and small, local and foreign , you simply cannot go wrong during the Denver Beer Fest. Never overlook that Denver's current mayor made his fortune brewing. The Great American Beer Festival is something that everyone should attend once, because you will never see such a collection of awesome (and occasionally terrible, but always funky) beers in your life. Just don't drop your sample glass.

2) Oktoberfest: Every mountain town has their own, and having attended a few, Breckenridge consistently comes out a winner. I wish I had the words to express how great these all are. Fall in the mountains is an experience enough; pair changing leaves, a low key vibe, and good Oktoberfest beer (the one time of the year I REALLY get into Paulaner) and you'll never miss it again. Secretly, in my book this one tops Great American Beer Fest. So, not so much of a secret.

Starting this Thursday, Brandon and I are going to embark on fully exploring both these events and the local breweries that support them. Look for at least weekly updates from your humble writing staff.

Finally, less exciting news:

Our readers may have noticed that our tagline is: 'Beer, Whiskey, Bikes, and Skis'. Some reading this may accuse us of adding the last two words merely to make it look as though we aren't total alcoholics, but this isn't (quite) true. Both of us are known to hit the slopes as much as possible through the winter (and beyond), and I've been on bikes in one form or another for some time. Its worth noting today the passing of cycling legend Laurent Fignon, who died this morning. Most notably, Fignon was a two time Tour de France winner who gave it all in some of the most cut-throat days of cycling. Known for his ponytail and glasses, Fignon was nicknamed 'The Professor', but he would put the hammer down on anyone who interpreted that as weakness. As a winner of both Classics and several Grand Tours, he was a hero to many, including myself. If you are having a cold one while reading our latest post, please raise it to the Professor.


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Michigan: Jolly Pumpkin Artesian Ales (Ann Arbor)

My visit to Jolly Pumpkin emerged from a lucky confluence of time, location, and necessity. I was driving to Detroit Metro Airport from Flint, by way of MBC, celebrating the arrest of the Flint Stabber along the way. Ann Arbor is only marginally out of the way, I had a late flight, and Jolly Pumpkin was on my list. I had already failed to reach Kalamazoo during this trip (and so no Bell’s). And I was stymied by an awkwardly managed Atwater Block (they are in transition right now, sure, pick up your phone or post your hours, man). I really needed a win. Plus, Jolly Pumpkin has shown up on a number of “best of” brewery lists, and anyone in my Detroit crew who had been there only had good things to say. So I fought the drive-time traffic through downtown Ann Arbor and pulled up a stool.

Sometimes breweries—like bands—produce variations on a theme. Jolly Pumpkin is such a brewery. I don’t mean this as a criticism. Their palate is sophisticated, rich, and spicy. They advertise their style as: “traditional rustic country style beers.” Everything was really enjoyable. This might be the best beer I’ve found brewed in Lower (non “Up North”) Michigan. I wouldn’t normally expect such bold brewing from a place that pays Main Street rent. Downtown breweries are generally more concerned with volume, and therefore value accessibility over creativity in brewing. Jolly Pumpkin actually brews off-site, in nearby Dexter, and uses the downtown location for tasting. This probably allows for more productive use of their pub space, which, in turn, frees them up to make more than just a pale, a blonde, and an IPA.

Final note: Eric Asimov, a wine critic for the New York Times, recently conducted a blind taste test to determine who made the best Belgian beer. 20 different beers, from the U.S. and from Belgium, were tasted. The number one Belgian beer, internationally? Jolly motherloving Pumpkin. Read the article here.

Weizen Bam Biere. Super sour. Gets into the corners of your jaw kind of sour. Not at all subtle. Good little sting at the end. The Detroit Brewer I ran into in Traverse recommended this beer. Solid recommendation.

Beliportico. VERY woody aroma. A little darker than copper. Strong woody taste, but chaperoned by sweetness. Enjoyable grapefruit on the back end. Very sophisticated brew. I really like it, but I don’t know if I could have 16 oz of it.

IPA. Again, this beer tastes like it’s being served out of a wooden barrel; again, this is a really positive element. And again, this is a complex and interesting beer. Not too hoppy or flowery, as many IPAs are these days.

Bam Biere. Grapefruit on the back end (I sense a number of themes here). Rich and spicy taste. Bronze medal winner at GABF in 2009, according to their website.

Bam Noire. Finally, some malt. Keeps the spiciness, but ventures out from the theme unifying the first four beers. Still has that bite on the end. Still very tasty.



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