Fifteen Beers to Try at Collaboration Fest

Collaboration Fest is back on Saturday, March 30, from 2 to 6 p.m. at the Westin in Westminster. The Colorado Brewers Guild organizes this event, and it is one of the most anticipated festivals of the year.

This year, it will feature over 140 brews, with over 180 breweries involved in making the beer. Tickets start at $65 for general admission (3 p.m. entry), with early entry at 2 p.m. going for $85 and designated driver tickets for $40.

How to Fest: Collaboration Fest is a pretty flexible festival — it accommodates many different approaches. It’s larger than a neighborhood beer festival but smaller than the massive Great American Beer Festival. The beer is a mix of classic styles and experimental beers.

I prefer to walk around and try some of the lighter styles (pale and amber lagers, lighter English beers, golden and blonde ales, low ABV lagers of any type) for the first 30-45 minutes — I don’t like to completely wreck my palate on some of the more experimental flavor bombs at the very start.

After that, all bets are off. Whether it’s mushroom beers (there were three last year), the Munichwine from Verboten Brewing and Liquid Mechanics, or the smoked brisket stout from Monolith and A Bit Twisted, this is a fantastic fest for trying creative beers, some with wild and wacky flavors.

Speaking of flavors: While many drinkers are burned out on crazy concoctions and yearn for something that resembles the beers that originally got them into drinking craft beer, Collaboration Fest is the exception. The creativity and passion that goes into this festival is unmatched. Brewers aren’t creating flavors at this festival just for the sake of trying to sell four-packs for $24 to adults who can’t admit that they have a sugar problem. There’s a true sense of camaraderie and a heavy mist of fun in the air, and attendees should take advantage of the originality on offer.
Below are some interesting beers to try this year. If you’re a fan of more simple offerings, don’t fret: There are dozens of “regular” lagers, IPAs, stouts and more. This truly is a festival with a very wide variety, so there are multiple “somethings” for everyone.

California Common
Mirror Image Brewing and Fermly
San Francisco's Anchor Brewing was run into the ground by its last two corporate owners, and its fate is up in the air. Mirror Image Brewing and local craft beer laboratory Fermly teamed up to brew a tribute.

Blended Barrel Aged Ale
Burns Family Artisan Ales and River North Brewery
Burns and River North are close friends and have teamed up for this big beer. Both breweries have a long history of fantastic barrel-aged beers, and they really went all out here. Each brewery took five of its high-ABV beers and blended them to create this brew.

Smoked Brisket Stout
Monolith Brewing and A Bit Twisted Brewpub & BBQ
This has to be one of the wildest beers at the fest. So much so that I needed to get the scoop from Monolith owner and head brewer Stephen Monohan. “We added forty pounds of brisket [in the whirlpool] from A Bit Twisted,” he says, adding that half the malt bill was peach wood smoked malt from Troubadour Malt out of Fort Collins. “It’s nice and meaty, but still has great stout character."

West Coast Pils
Westbound & Down Brewing and Joyride Brewing
Two hoppy juggernauts and good friends making a hoppy pilsner? Sign me up. These types of beers are always a treat — and a necessary refreshing beer between all the strong flavorful experiments at the fest.

West Coast Pils
Rails End Beer, Comrade Brewing and Cheluna Brewing
Another set of fantastic breweries making a hoppy pilsner. What I really enjoy about Collab Fest is that you can easily find a high-quality hoppy beer amid the fun experimental offerings.
West Coast Cream Ale
Launch Pad Brewery and Nine Spot Brewing
We have West Coast pilsners and cold IPAs, so why not West Coast cream ales, too? Launch Pad teamed up with Nine Spot, a New York brewery, for this one.

Imperial Altbier
Elevation Beer and OCC Brewing
This beer has been dubbed COALT 38. The most famous beer of this style is made by Uerige out of Düsseldorf, home of the altbier. It’s called Sticke, which is a dialect for “whispering.” It is said that the guests would whisper that the brewer was a bit generous in weighing out the ingredients — hence the higher alcohol content at 6 percent. Well, it seems Elevation and OCC were plenty generous, as this beer comes in at 6.6 percent ABV. It is also made with all Colorado ingredients. Wynkoop Brewing and Bent Barley also have a salted version of an altbier available to try at the fest.

Session “Doppelbock”
El Rancho, Barnett & Sons Brewing and Andiamo Brew
This beer might take the prize for the best tongue-in-cheek name at the festival. Doppelbock means double bock, and indicates a stronger alcohol offering. Here the trio of breweries has a 3 percent ABV version. This is also a debut of sorts for Andiamo Brew, which will be exclusively offering low-ABV beers to the Denver market later this year through a contract brewing arrangement.

Kristalweizen
Wynkoop Brewing and 6 & 40 Brewery
Most people are familiar with German Hefeweizen. Kristalweizen is the filtered version of that style. It’s not too common to find, but for those who want a bit more of a focused, cleaner type of German wheat beer, this style may quickly become a favorite.

Barrel Aged Munichwine
Verboten Brewing and Liquid Mechanics
When two breweries of this caliber get together — to make a barleywine-doppelbock hybrid, no less — you owe it to yourself to stop by and grab a sample.
Belgian Brut
Strange Craft Beer Company, Guanella Pass Brewing and Gravity Brewing
No, this isn’t a Brut IPA, a style that has become the butt of so many jokes in the craft beer world. Belgian Brut is made with barley, Viognier grape must and prickly pear — another creative eyebrow-raiser.

Finnish Sahti
Odell Brewing and Mythmaker Brewing
This style of farmhouse beer originated in Finland and contains juniper and berries.

Frequent Flyer
Jagged Mountain and Brewery and Public Offering Brewing
Jagged Mountain head brewer Alyssa Thorpe and Public Offering owner and head brewer Cody Higginbottom attended the Regis University Brewing program together. This collab mimics a Paper Plane cocktail (which is made with bourbon, amaro, Aperol and lemon juice). Thorpe tells Westword that a golden ale base set the stage for flavor additions. “We added gentian root, star anise and sweet orange peel in the whirlpool,” she says. “We also added lemon and blood-orange purée in the fermenter, along with a dry hop of Mandarina and Pacific sunrise.” Lastly, Thorpe says, bourbon-soaked aspen disks from Locke + Co distillery were added to age the beer on and achieve the final result.

Cottonwood Colorado Common
Diebolt Brewing and Burns Family Artisan Ales
Brewed with cottonwood-smoked malt from Colorado Malting, this beer is an ode to the times when malt was typically kilned over a fire. The local touch with cottonwood (instead of the more common beech or oak) adds an interesting fold to this beer.

Belgian Wit
Lone Tree Brewing and Downhill Brewing
This beer will be accompanied by buzz buttons, which are flowers that create a numbing sensation on the tongue, so it will be better to try toward the end of your session, or just before you take a food break.