For the past three years, certified sommelier and chef Kendra Anderson has penned a weekly “Swirl Girl” wine column for Westword, giving readers — novices and bona fide oenophiles alike — crash courses that detail her love for the grape, and now she’s taken her passion one step further. Anderson…
The Wynkoop Brewing Company will debut its newest canned beer next week — one with some unusual Colorado ingredients. No, it’s not Rocky Mountain Oyster Stout — although two-packs of that ballsy beer will also be released in cans soon. The beer is called Belgorado and it’s made almost entirely…
New Belgium Brewing in Fort Collins will debut a new series of seasonal beers this year, most of them focused on a new or unsual variety of hops. The Hop Kitchen beers, as the series is called, will be sold only in 22-ounce bomber bottles and on draft. “People want…
Verboten Brewing, which will open its doors this weekend in Loveland, takes its name for the German word for “forbidden,” and is a reference to German beer-purity laws, or Reinheitsgebot, which forbade brewers in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries from using anything but water, barley and hops in their beers…
A handful of great new Colorado craft beers hit the market at the very end of 2012, including: Boulder Beer’s A Honey of a Saison; Great Divide’s Orabelle; Elevation Beer’s Downpour Imperial Red Ale; Ska Brewing’s Hibernal Vinifera and Crazy Mountain’s Boohai Red Ale. All four are stellar brews, and…
The father-and-son team of Dan and Jack Diebolt plan to give north Denver’s Sunnyside neighborhood its second brewery this year, when they open Diebolt Brewing in a small warehouse building at 3855 Mariposa Street sometime in late spring or summer. Diebolt will be located about ten blocks south of the…
You have three more days to help out the Colorado-based producers of Crafting a Nation, a feature-length documentary that “tells the story of how the American Craft Brewers are rebuilding the economy one beer at a time.” The group’s Kickstarter campaign ends on Friday, and although donors have already pushed…
Change is inevitable, but it’s not always smooth, which is why Eugene Kahng, co-owner of the soon-to-open Colorado + Liquid Art Works brewery in Wheat Ridge, hit a few bumps when he painted over a mural that had decorated the side of Valente’s Italian Restaurant, a community mainstay that closed…
Jamie Wells has been working for four years to convert his 1.5-barrel homebrewing kit into a commercial system that could sate the thirst of many more people, and on Thursday, January 10, he’ll finish that task by opening J Wells Brewery at 2516 49th Street in Boulder. His little brewery…
In 1906, William F. “Buffalo Bill” Cody took his traveling circus on the road to Belgium, performing in Antwerp, Brussels, and half a dozen other cities. Now, more than a hundred years later, a beer that was accidentally brewed as a result of that tour (according to legend, that is)…
The Mountain Sun Pub & Breweries group is getting ready to open its newest eatery and taphouse, Under the Sun, at 627-A South Broadway in the former Giovanni’s space. That’s right below the Southern Sun Pub & Brewery in south Boulder. The restaurant will feature a lower-priced flatbread menu and…
Breckenridge Brewery rolled out a new monthly firkin program during the Great American Beer Festival last year that is designed to play off the First Friday art walks that take place on the first Friday of every month in the Art District on Santa Fe. See also: – Renegade Brewing…
Utah’s Epic Brewing has signed a lease on a 20,000-square-foot building in the River North neighborhood, where it will open its second brewery. The facility is just four blocks from Our Mutual Friend, a nanobrewery that opened in October, and very close to Black Shirt Brewing, River North Brewing and…
When Strange Brewing Company opened in May 2010 and kicked off a wave of new craft brewery development in the Denver area that continues to grow astronomically, owners Tim Myers and John Fletcher became the godfathers to some of those who followed, offering help, advice and support to anyone who…
Colorado craft breweries and their many fans enjoyed a spectacular year in 2012, as the options for consuming locally made beer continued to grow and fill our tastebuds with joy. If the state’s 160-plus breweries weren’t expanding, then they were adding new beers or welcoming friendly competitors. And there were…
Welcome to 2013 and the next year of your wine-drinking life. Over the past twelve months we saw a slew of clever new wine concepts worth trying, and a whole lotta wine-related WTFs to studiously avoid. All the while we watched and waited, eyes peeled for signs of the wine-related…
Chad Yakobson became the second small Denver brewer to land some awesome press in the New York Times when some of his quotes and an artsy photo of him at his Crooked Stave Barrel Cellar led off a story last week on sour beers called “Brettanomyces, a Funky Yeast, Makes…
Colorado breweries made and packaged dozens and dozens of amazing new beers in 2012, expanding their range and proving which state is the center of the craft beer universe. And although hundreds more were brewed and sold on draft in tap rooms, bars and breweries, this list — like the…
It took balls for the Wynkoop Brewing Company to turn an April Fool’s Day joke about a brew made with bull testicles into reality in October, during the Great American Beer Festival. But the brewery really had to sack up after that as it negotiated with the feds about what…
Apparently, the cocktail sphere is getting punched. Earlier this week, Food & Wine magazine pointed out, correctly, that prior to the popularity of the Manhattan, martini and mai tai, there was punch, which dates all the way back to the 17th century. >See also: – Anika Zappe named bar manager…
Hugo’s Colorado beer & Spirits opened today in Capitol Hill, just in time to catch the last part of the holiday liquor store rush — something that should help owner Joe-Michael Wright catch up after permitting delays that have held him up since October. See also: – Freshcraft, Right Coast…
In the Christmastime classic, It’s a Wonderful Life, Jimmy Stewart, as George Bailey, gets a taste of what the world would be like if he had never been born. It’s not a pretty picture, and it reminds Bailey, and the audience, of the joy he created. The Wynkoop Brewing Company,…
