Great Divide Brewing, which made its name with enormous, potent beers like Yeti and Hercules, will continue a newer romance with lower-alcohol beers in January when it debuts Lasso, an IPA that will carry the lowest ABV in the brewery’s lineup. Brewed with three kinds of hops — Columbus, Centennial…
Breckenridge Brewery will release its first new seasonal packaged beer in eighteen months this January, when it unveils Ophelia, a 7.5 percent ABV hoppy wheat ale. Ophelia will replace Pandora’s Bock during the January-to-May timeframe; that beer will become part of Breckenridge’s small-batch occasional series, which it bottles in four…
Nearly 500 beer geeks and foodniks packed the EXDO Event Center last night for Chef & Brew, an annual bash that celebrates Colorado’s craft beer scene. Seventeen local chefs, paired with the same number of brewers, battled against one another for prizes and bragging rights, the awards of which were…
With nearly twenty breweries currently in the planning stages in Denver, it’s no surprise that some of them are going to experience bumps and bruises on the way toward opening. Factotum Brewhouse is the latest to suffer a setback. The sister-and-brother team of Laura and Chris Bruns had planned to…
Spirit Hound Distillery will finally reopen tomorrow, two months after it had to close when massive flooding hit Lyons, and much of northern Colorado. See also: A six-pack of dark new Colorado beers for your cold weather blues…
For the past five years, Troy Casey has worked for AC Golden, the MillerCoors-owned beer incubator in Golden that makes everything from Colorado Native lager to small-batch sour ales that use Colorado-grown peaches and apricots to the style-busting India Pale Lager that just won an award at the Great American…
Brrrr. It’s starting to get a little nippy out there, and the forecast calls for even colder temperatures this weekend. But the weatherman may not have mentioned that dropping digits means big beers in Colorado, where the breweries start cranking out their deep dark belly-warming concoctions for the dark days…
River North Brewery added two new thirty-barrel stainless steel fermentation tanks and one new brite tank last week, which will increase the brewery’s capacity by 44 percent — and allow River North to focus on canning its River North White, a Belgian-style wit beer that was just released, and on…
As Westword’s Ask the Bartender columnist, I’ve talked with many bartenders for Cafe Society’s “Behind the Bar” series, posing numerous questions to Denver’s top bartenders…and often receiving the same answers: “I love chartreuse,” or “I’m really into smoked cocktails/barrel aging/bottled cocktails.” See also: A bartender by any other name…is still…
UPDATE: We have a winner of our Chef & Brew Festival contest, in which we asked Cafe Society readers to answer this question: How many gallons of Tunnel of Trees IPA did TRVE brew during the month of October? Congrats to PerfectlyFlawed, whose guessed 150 gallons. The actual number is…
Hops Grill and Brewery, a restaurant in Littleton that’s a link in a Florida-based chain, closed its doors yesterday. See also: Ska Brewing bottles (and cans) Modus IPA in Colorado; discontinues Ten Pin Porter…
“We’ve always been a little fly-by-the-seat-of-our-pants,” says Dave Thibodeau, co-founder of Durango’s Ska Brewing. “So, Modus was different. It was the most we had ever worked on a beer recipe and a style… It was the exact beer that we wanted to brew and it just blew up right out…
Last night, following the Denver Bacon and Beer Festival, eight local bartenders — Ryan Conklin (St. Ellie), Todd Mayville (Asti D’ Italia), Stuart Jensen (Green Russell), McLain Hedges (the Proper Pour), Kevin Burke (Colt & Gray), Melissa Durant (Acorn), Holland Rock-Garden (Roosevelt) and Anika Zappe (Star Bar) — gathered behind…
Dancing Pines Distillery was one of the first twenty licensed distilleries in Colorado, opening in Loveland and selling its first bottle in September 2010. Now, three years later, husband-and-wife team Kristian and Kimberly Naslund, and partner Chris McNay, distribute their spirits, rum in particular, in 25 states. Kristian had been…
Last night, at the Omni Interlocken resort, ten local chefs, along with former White House toque John Moeller, competed in the Pairsine culinary showdown, an annual battle that’s part of the Denver International Wine Festival, a five-day wine-and-food-intensive soiree that spotlights Colorado chefs and more than 350 wines from around…
Jeff Atencio brewed his first batch of beer in 1987 while he was a student and a fire fighter living in Vail. Now, 26 years later, he and business partner Todd McClure, are ready to go pro. They’ll open Three Freaks Brewery in Highlands Ranch this winter. “I’ve been hemming…
Over the past few months, I’ve enjoyed breakfast drinks, sophisticated French cocktails, erudite winter warmers and a desperate cry for help in liquid form. All this fancy mixology stuff is well and good. But to quote Liberace by way of De La Soul, for my next number I’d like to…
Jagged Mountain Craft Brewery opened this week with plenty of horse power — and not just because it’s located in a building that once served as a horse stable for a local carriage company. Rather, the Jagged Mountain’s high-octane beers — designed by brewmaster and former Mountain Sun brewer Wayne…
With new breweries opening in Denver seemingly every month, it’s amazing that there is nothing yet in the Platt Park neighborhood near the University of Denver — especially since South Pearl Street is such a hotbed for restaurants. That will change next year when Denver Pearl Brewing opens its doors…
As Denver snow lovers gets ready to strap on their bindings for the ski and snowboard season, a couple of ski-town breweries are heading in the other direction, sending their beers to the big city. The first is Aspen Brewing, which purchased a canning line from Boulder’s Wild Goose Engineering…
The craft-brewing industry’s troubles with beer and brewery names aren’t going away any time soon, as the latest example shows. Former Future Brewing, which won’t open in Denver until later this year, has already been served with a cease-and-desist order over the names of its beers — beers that it…
Lagers sometimes get a bad rap from craft-beer drinkers. They’re often lighter and less flavorful than ales, and since America’s big three commercial beers are all lagers, beer geeks often lump them in with the macrobrews at the bottom of the tap list. Chris Phelps, the co-owner and brewer at…
