Bars & Breweries

This triple-threat flight of margaritas — one Coin-style, one watermelon, one caliente — are just the thing to get your weekend off to a very happy start. If you can find them, that is. Where am I drinking?…

It’s not quite on the same tap as the Great American Beer Festival, which flows down on Denver on September 24 at the Colorado Convention Center, but the toddler-aged Greater Boulder Beer Festival, which turns two this year, isn’t exactly a slacker when it comes to suds. Sure, it’s small…

Figuring out where I’m drinking should be easy; there’s a hint in the photo. Figuring out what will be harder, since you can’t find this drink in any other Denver bar, although it’s making a comeback on the East Coast. What is it — and where?…

If the pundits are to be believed, the entirety of our country’s centuries-old racial upheaval will be solved today with the cracking open of a couple cold ones. After President Barack Obama ignited a fiery national debate on race relations last week by weighing in on the controversial arrest of…

Today marks the first day of the Wine Festival at Steamboat, a four-day food-and-wine event that includes cooking demonstrations, food and wine seminars, grand tastings, fly-fishing and mountain biking, food and wine day trips, and the uncorking of more than 800 domestic and international bottles of vino. Headlining Colorado’s culinary…

Back in college, while reading some novel set in Prague, I became obsessed with visiting that city. I finally managed to get there a few years ago, and I loved everything about it — except the food. While I enjoy pork, I don’t enjoy it at every meal. And that…

The White House could get a little taste of Denver this week if President Barack Obama is able to pull off a meeting over beers Thursday between Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates and Cambridge, Massachusetts police sergeant James Crowley, who arrested Gates on July 16 at his own home. While…

Last night I attended the first of a quintet of dinners coming from the Denver Five, the merry band of chefs who’ve represented Denver so ably by cooking at the renowned James Beard House in New York City the last two years. The group consists of Tyler Wiard (Elway’s), Jamey…

When the Hotel Teatro was named one of the top 50 large hotels in the United States and Canada in Travel + Leisure magazine’s 2009 World’s Best Awards survey, the boutique slumbering pad at 1100 14th Street could have re-wallpapered their guest rooms with gratuitous copies of the travel zine’s…

Booze, glorious booze. Last night the fine folks from the Denver Independent Network of Restaurants (DINR), the Colorado Wine Board, the Colorado Brewers Guild and the Colorado Distillers Guild held a Colorado wine-, beer- and spirits-tasting event that packed the Walker Fine Art Gallery with more than sixty different wines,…

Happy hour starts in five minutes here. Where am I drinking? …

Over 22 breweries and 70 different beers are on tap at the Summer Brew Fest, which comes down tonight at Mile High Station, 2027 West Lower Colfax Avenue. The indoor/outdoor event begins at 7 p.m. for general admission ticket holders ($30 in advance; $35 at the door) and at 6…

Sometimes you wander into a neighborhood joint and find the stools occupied by a gaggle of sleepy, surly, set-in-their-ways regulars all too ready to give your sudden presence the dreaded stink-eye. “Who the fuck are you?” their silence and stares say, “and what the fuck are you doing in here?”…

Solera Restaurant & Wine Bar, 5410 East Colfax Avenue, is hosting a wine tasting happy hour tonight from 5 to 7 p.m. in the bar, which is as good a place as any to sip from a half dozen (or more) different South African wines, for $15 per person. (And…

Yesterday afternoon, Denver’s best chefs rolled out the culinary red carpet and rubbed tongs with smitten admirers and other do-gooders who showed up in droves at Share Our Strength’s Taste of the Nation, a charity event that benefits anti-hunger organizations in Colorado and across the nation. The celebration was chef-chaired…

At last night’s Taste of the Nation event at Mile High Station, nine Colorado mixologists muddled, shook, stirred, poured, begged, stole and offered bribes to the throngs of charitable party-goers who voted with dollar bills and tokens to determine which mixologist had whipped up the top cocktail. The contenders –…

View Westword.com’s Map of the Bars in a larger map Because we are, by and large, a bunch of drunks, every week we feature at least one bar in our food section. One week, it’s Drew Bixby braving some unchartered watering hole with his “Drunk of the Week.” The next,…

Primebar brought a big new concept to the old Palomino space. And when I say “big,” I mean huge: 12,000 square feet, with 400 seats inside and 100 more on the patio that fronts Skyline Park and looks out on the 16th Street Mall, as well as bars in the…

El Taco de Mexico, the iconic taqueria at 714 Santa Fe Drive, just quadrupled in size, thanks to a new patio — so new, in fact, that when I stopped by yesterday evening for my requisite smothered al pastor burrito, the price tags were still dangling from the tables. And…

The Blues & Brews festival on Old South Pearl Street was one hell of an outdoor party Saturday, with blues bands jammin’ from noon to 10 p.m. and the stumble-close residents of the Wash Park and Platte Park neighborhoods tripping — or riding the abundant pedicabs — from bar to…

Silos. The word brings to mind grain. Grain and nuclear warheads (at least if you lived through the Cold War). But in booze-happy Colorado, silos will soon mean something else. In Longmont, the Oskar Blues Brewery is getting ready to debut its second restaurant, Oskar Blues Homemade Liquids & Solids,…

It’s not about winning. It’s about fun. Especially when you get your ass handed to you both by Denver’s monthly lifestyle magazine, 5280, and by the Tambien Beer Pong girls, who use every asset to their advantage. If Westword had won, it would have been about winning and fun. But…