Denver Rare Beer Tasting Returns for the Fourteenth Round

Many beer festivals include a charitable component or multiple donation causes; these fundraisers are critical to organizations worldwide. With the Denver Rare Beer Tasting, Pints for Prostates has one core mission: to raise funds for prostate cancer.

A simple blood test saved organizer Rick Lyke's life in 2008, and the money raised since then has gone toward saving other lives. "The craft beer community has embraced our mission," says Lyke. "Over the years, the money raised at the Denver Rare Beer Tasting has helped fund free health screening events across the country for thousands of people."

Lyke relies on a troop of volunteers, a majority of them local and many of them returning every year, to set up, maintain and clean up the event. But while the focus of the cause is all about men's health, the beer isn't an afterthought — Rare Beers pours some of the best brews from around the country. At this year's event, set for Friday, September 22, at the McNichols Building, breweries from New York to Texas to California will be pouring some rare gems and sought-after variants.

"Rare beers is one of the few festivals that I look forward to yearly," says Brandon Buckner, co-owner of Bottle Logic Brewing, one of the fest's returning participants. "We get the opportunity to show off one of our unique limited offerings with fans and our industry peers, and it's all for a great cause."

All About Beer is coming back as the festival media sponsor, helping support this important cause.

The Denver Rare Beer Tasting comes close to the end of Denver Beer Week, which runs September 15 to 23, and overlaps with the Great American Beer Festival, taking place September 21 through September 23.
Here is a curated preview of some of the standout beers to enjoy at the festival:

Alesong Brewing and Blending
Eugene, Oregon
Double Barrel Maestro
Alesong has won over fifty awards in just seven years of existence, including ten Great American Beer Festival medals. The brewery is best known for farmhouse ales, with a secondary focus on big beers. Double Barrel Maestro is a 16 percent ABV bomb of a barleywine; the beer aged for a year in Heaven Hill Distillery barrels before seeing a second rest in Henry McKenna barrels.

Bottle Logic Brewing
Anaheim, California
Intrepid Observation
Bottle Logic is a much-celebrated brewery in the greater Los Angeles area. Its Fundamental Observation barrel-aged stout with vanilla beans is widely sought after; Intrepid Observation is a blend of the brewery's Intrepid Orchid English-style barleywine and Fundamental Observation. Madagascar vanilla beans are layered into the final blend.

Burns Family Artisan Ales
Denver
Artemesia and Prince's Cellar
Rare Beers is a festival made for a brewery like Burns Family. Wayne Burns and Laura Worley are often pouring some of the brewery's best beers at vaunted festivals like Rare Beer, Big Beers, Brewers Rendezvous and the Avery Invitational. Artemesia is an English-style old ale aged for almost three years in Buffalo Trace barrels, while Prince's Cellar is a 14.9 percent ABV biere de garde that spent a year in a chardonnay barrel.

Casey Brewing and Blending
Glenwood Springs
Barrel Aged Wrong Answers Only Variant
Casey Brewing and Blending is always a popular stop at this fest, as well as any event in which it participates. With Barrel Aged Wrong Answers Only, Casey originally teamed up with Horus Aged Ales in Oceanside, California, for the initial release; the batch at Rare Beers will be a special variant that includes two types of Brazilian vanilla beans.

Comrade Brewing
Denver
More Dodge Less RAM
With so many barleywine, stout and wild-style beers at the festival, you might want to grab a high-quality IPA here or there. Comrade's More Dodge Less RAM is the perfect IPA to sip on, named for the infamous incident when a truck crashed into the building in 2016. The beer has since gone on to win multiple awards.

Forager Brewing
Rochester, Minnesota
Double Barrel Nillerzzzzz
Forager was a popular booth at last year's festival, making a lot of best-beer lists during informal discussions throughout the day. Double Barrel Nillerzzzzz is a hefty imperial stout aged in rye whiskey and bourbon barrels for fifteen months before receiving a large infusion of freshly scraped vanilla beans from five different regions.

Jester King Brewery
Austin, Texas
SPON Three Year Blend
Jester King is well known for its spontaneously fermented beers, and SPON is one of the brewery's most heralded. It's a blend of three different vintages of 100 percent spontaneously fermented beer, taking inspiration from Belgian gueuze but using local water, grain, hops and yeast to make the beer localized to Jester King.

Odyssey Beerwerks
Arvada
Barrel Aged Brown Sugar Barleywine
Arvada-based Odyssey will be back, debuting a beer at the festival before it's released. Stop by the Odyssey booth and be one of the first to try Barrel Aged Brown Sugar Barleywine, a strong, British-inspired ale that saw time in Breckenridge PX sherry cask finished barrels before being infused with a brown sugar reduction.

Verboten Brewing and Barrel Project
Loveland
Double Oaked Cognac Grow Old With You and Barrel Aged Others in Darkness: Cocoa and Vanilla
Verboten won three medals at the 2023 World Beer Cup Awards. Known for making delicious barleywine and stouts, Verboten is bringing the heat to the fest with a double-oaked cognac version of its lauded English-style barleywine: Grow Old With You. The Loveland brewery is also pouring a barrel-aged stout called Others in Darkness.

Wise Man Brewing
Winston-Salem, North Carolina
Bourbon Barrel-Aged The Deepest Dream Oud Bruin
This six-year-old brewery, located in a gorgeously restored, nearly century-old building in North Carolina, has made its mark with a slew of competitions medals. Wise Man will be pouring one of the more unusual beers of the festival, a Belgian-style Oud Bruin, a Flemish dark sour. Wise Man's version, like so many of the beers at the festival, is barrel-aged.

The Denver Rare Beer Tasting will run from noon to 4 p.m. on Friday, September 22, at the McNichols Building, 144 West Colfax Avenue. Tickets are $200 and include unlimited beer samples, lunch, a tasting glass and a T-shirt.