Bartender Allison Widdecombe of Williams & Graham just took first place at the Woodford Reserve Manhattan Experience, a nationwide competition held at the Bowery Hotel in New York City on Monday. “I’ve been so close to winning a national cocktail competition,” says Widdecombe. “It was just a matter of time.”…
The Big Beers, Belgians and Barleywines Fetival celebrated its fifteenth anniversary in Vail last weekend with a series of seminars, tastings, dinners and a commercial tasting event that brings together some of the biggest, most rare beers in the country. But even as the three-day fest has grown, it has…
The Ward Cleaver Mercantile Dining & Provision 1701 Wynkoop Street 720-460-3733 You may have tasted Stuart Jensen’s cooking; he has worked in kitchens at Cholon Modern Asian Bistro, TAG and a few Boulder eateries. But he’s since transitioned to his current role behind the bar and is now bar manager…
With more than 250 breweries in Colorado, it’s hard to get a good sampling of everything that is being made — even over the course of an entire year (see my list from 2013 as well). It gets even more difficult because our state’s prodigious craft-beer makers are constantly turning…
El Chingon fits well on the newly-revitalized Tennyson Street in Berkeley. A badass concept that relocated from a strip mall in Arvada to a converted cottage, it’s a potent stew of classic Mexican cooking (from the recipes of executive chef David Lopez’s grandma, who shares his title) and bistro-style elegance…
Barley’s Angels Colorado, a networking and social group for both women in the beer industry and consumers, has started a brewery job board as of January 1. Run by two Barley’s Angels volunteers, the site, at barleysangelscolorado.com, lists available non-gender-specific jobs and provides a link to the description and application…
Like the beverages it celebrates, the Big Beers, Belgians & Barleywines Festival in Vail has gotten deeper and more complex as it has aged. Now in its fifteenth year, the festival, taking place this weekend, will welcome more than 1,500 brewers, industry veterans, beer celebrities, regular beer geeks — and…
Colt & Gray 1553 Platte Street 303-477-1447 At 10 o’clock on a Sunday morning, Colt & Gray is closed, but bar manager Kevin Burke comes to the door and lets me into the darkened restaurant. We sit down at the empty bar, which was crazy busy for New Year’s Eve…
Sixteen new breweries opened inside Denver city limits in 2014, a record year that brought the total number of breweries here to 44 — and that doesn’t include beer makers like Joyride Brewing in Edgewater and other nearby suburbs that helped the Mile High City’s beer culture bubble over. At…
It’s winter; now all we need is a wonderland. Might I suggest Beatrice & Woodsley, the venerable purveyor of whimsy on South Broadway? For years, its Nosh & ‘Tails cocktail hour, every weekday from 5 to 6:30 p.m., has been a mix of sophisticated soiree and playful bar time. With…
Beast + Bottle 719 East 17th Avenue 303-623-3223 The staff at Beast + Bottle regularly visits local farms and breweries to taste fresh products, which eventually find their way on to the farm-to-table restaurant’s dinner and drink menus. One of those farms supplies watercress, which fell into the hands of…
Winter Park Resort, which turns 75 this year, has struck a deal with the state’s largest craft brewer that will guarantee plenty of Mary Jane Ale for the foreseeable future. As part of the arrangement, New Belgium Brewing will make a certain number of barrels of the beer per year…
The Star Bar in Ballpark proudly serves no food whatsoever, paying more attention to compiling a robust list of local brews and spirits — and a pile of regulars. It’s been successful enough that it seems like a decades-old juice joint despite its relative youth, perhaps because that’s exactly what…
Sean Nook is serious about making good beer. But he doesn’t take himself too seriously when it comes to marketing or selling it — which is why his place, Black Bottle Brewery in Fort Collins, takes an irreverent approach to its everyday operations. Last year, for instance, Nook came up…
Most of us can’t sing unless we’ve had a couple of pints, which means that the Fort Collins-area brewers who got together to sing this jingle at Horse & Dragon Brewing may have had a couple. The singing Christmas card was organized by the Colorado Brewers Festival and the Downtown…
RiNo Yacht Club 3350 Brighton Boulevard 720-443-1135 Much of what we perceive as flavor, say scientists who study such things, is actually aroma. We’ve all had that experience of being sucked back into a memory where we first caught the scent of a lemon, fresh-baked bread, the ocean. For McLain…
Sure, Rob and Karin Lawler know cheese. The Truffle Cheese Shop on 6th Avenue became a foodie destination with the two forces of the Lawler’s friendliness and their knowledge of good cheese and practices. But is it easier to go from being a cheesemonger to a dinnermonger than it is…
New breweries opened at a stunning rate of 1.5 per day across the United States in 2014, bringing the total number to more than 3,200 by the end of November, according to the Brewers Association, the Boulder-based trade group that covers the craft-beer industry. And there are another 2,000 breweries…
To celebrate the impending opening of its massive new brewing campus in Littleton — and all of the square footage and brewing capacity that it will have at its disposal — Breckenridge Brewery will release its first large-scale barrel-aged bottled beer this month. Barrel Aged 72 Imperial is Breckenridge’s 72…
When Marcel Templet left the Capital Grille last August to become bar manager at the Cooper Lounge, he established a bar program designed to feature products sourced from Colorado. This core value was easy to stick to until it came time to add a brandy cocktail to the menu, since…
Lower48 Kitchen has gotten a lot of attention for refined food served in an accessible way. The “Each” menu, with small bites on offer for only a few bucks apiece, helped capture our imagination and snag Westword’s Best New Restaurant award this year. In ideology and presentation, this approach isn’t…
Last July, we wrote about former Upslope head brewer Alex Violette, who was planning to leave Colorado and start an American-style craft brewery in Vietnam. And according to an Outside magazine story this week about U.S. craft breweries going global, Pasteur Street Brewing will open in Saigon on Christmas day…
