36 hours in RiNo part 2

Part 1 is here

I didn’t manage to fit as much into the evening as I’d hoped, partly because the jetlag was catching up and partly because I’d already knocked off the low-hanging fruit. One place I did want to go, because I visited the brewery a dozen years ago and wanted to catch up, was Great Divide. They’re down-town, but fortunately they also have a site now in RiNo where their barrel-ageing and packaging takes place. Of course there’s also a taproom there, and it’s within walking distance of a few more breweries, so that was target number one.

In hindsight, perhaps I didn’t need to walk everywhere. As well as city buses – for a US city, Denver has a very good public transport system – there’s the inevitable Ubers and Lyfts, and a free shuttle looping between the various arty nexuses. Walking gave my brewery crawl a focus though, plus you see more, and I think I only saw the shuttle once, so I’ve no idea how long the wait might have been!

The walk over to Great Divide reminded me just how much this isn’t a walking part of town, however. Run-down low-rise business premises, dusty and sun-bleached old houses – and roadworks, lots of them. Then you suddenly reach a regenerating area: the side roads are still dirt and gravel, but the scruffy yards surrounded by chainlink fencing are interspersed with well-lit new buildings, with more still under construction.

Like most of the other buildings, Great Divide’s barrel store is just a box, but one with large windows through which you can see – yes, barrels, lots of them (though it is by no means full, not at all). It’s a warm and easy place, though its location away from the main population clusters may explain why it closes at 10pm most nights. The bar itself is quite typical, with a long row of taps along the bar-back, and a list that includes several Farmhouse ales/Saisons and sours, reminding me that the sour beer fashion is still in full swing.

My curiosity piqued, I ended up trying three Saisons – Colette, Apricot Colette and Nadia Kali, the latter including hibiscus, ginger and lemon peel – and the Strawberry Rhubarb sour, before finally tackling the brewery’s flagship Yeti Imperial Stout, in this case in its 9.5% Espresso Oak-Aged version. I wasn’t wowed by the latter. Compared to the regular Yeti which I’ve had before, this version was just too much – especially too much bitter coffee and burnt bitterness. In hindsight it’s possible my tiredness had affected my palate, but still, I’d love to try blending a bottle of this with regular Yeti to see if it would integrate everything a bit better.

All the other four were rather good, with the funky-spicy and peppery-bitter Colette at 7.3% winning for me. It’s a great example of a style that’s already complex and interesting, without the need to tart it up – although to be fair the apricot version did run it a close second!

Mockery Brewing, a short walk away down an unpaved street, is rather different. Set up just three years ago when this area was taking off*, it pitches itself as a bit of an iconoclast (hmm!) and sure enough its beer list is eclectic. There’s the usual IPA, Blonde and barrel-aged, but there’s also Bretted and fruited beers, a salted Scotch ale, and what was meant to be a smoked Weizen, although it wasn’t a patch on the Schlenkerla Weizen which for me epitomises this “style”.

Best of the bunch were a well-made peppery and estery Rye Saison, and Funken Stupor, a dry and spicy Bretted pale ale that was a collaboration with Novel Strand. The latter is a Denver brewery so new it isn’t even open yet – no signs of a saturating beer market here yet, eh?

The funny thing is that although Mockery ought to feel pretentious, it didn’t. Arty and modern, yes, but the vibe was friendly and fun, and the beers were all decent or better. Yes, there was one that was also a bit confused flavourwise (Stuck in Rumination, their rum barrel-aged DIPA), but that’s true in so many Denver taprooms, and the overall feel was more that they were having a bit of fun messing with beer styles and treatments.

By now it was well past 11pm, still early for some but sadly way too late for the nearby Crooked Stave taproom. So it was time to wend my tired way back via yet another route, thanking 3UK for free data roaming and Google Maps as I went. I genuinely did a double-take on walking past a darkened building, glancing in, and spotting what was very obviously a shiny steel brewery of some size. It turned out to be the new Blue Moon brewery-restaurant – the original Blue Moon Brewery in the Denver baseball stadium may well have been the first of the ersatz "crafty micros” when it was set up by Coors just over 20 years ago.

Tomorrow would be another busy day – into the city, sadly too early for the downtown taprooms, to get the bus up to Boulder. It was only a short time in Denver, but an interesting one – a view of how much modern beer and brewing can help regenerate, but how it also is at risk from pulling in what we used to call yuppies. Maybe that's just the way this process works, and we've all failed to spot – or have just ignored – that the next step in the so-called regeneration process is yuppification. Sad.

*They have a 3rd birthday party set for 4th November. 

36 hours in RiNo part 1

Earlier this year I went to a conference in Boulder, Colorado. Much as I like Boulder itself, this meant flying into Denver, and it’s been many years since I explored that city’s beery pleasures. So I arranged to travel out a couple of days early and have most of a weekend in Denver. Rather than stay in the centre or south, where I’d been before, I decided to explore the northern side of town, more specifically the up-and-coming arty area of RiNo, or River North.

Some of 'old' RiNo survives

Five or ten years ago, I don't think there wasn't much reason for most people to visit this part of northern Denver – especially not after dark! Flat, dusty and sun-baked, like much of the south-western US, it was an area of railway sidings, light industrial units and warehouses. There were local residents, but mainly poorer ones.

With time, that included artists and hippies as they were priced out of other areas, and following them came the hipsters and the semi-curse of arty areas everywhere – gentrification. I say semi-curse because while it's driving property prices up and by the look of it pushing industry out, it's pulling in infrastructure investment – I haven't seen so many building sites and roadworks in ages.

Black Shirt: less Moseley, more metal

And of course what infrastructure expansion is complete these days without a craft brewery or brewpub? One RiNo brewer said from almost nothing four years ago, he now has 13 other breweries within a mile, and I can well believe it. There's even more downtown, of course, but that's more like two miles away and they've been there rather longer - since 1988 in the case of Wynkoop, Colorado's first brewpub and craft brewery.

RiNo had the advantage for me of being on the train line from the airport to the main station, so with a bit of planning (and a 3-UK SIM card for free roaming data in case I needed to re-check the map) I could get off a couple of stops early and walk to the room I’d booked through AirBnB.  On my walk I heard cheerful noises and spotted Black Shirt, one of the local brewpubs. So after dropping off my bag, I headed back there.

It’s a friendly place, with modern art for sale on the walls and a crowd that seemed more grunge and arty-local than hipster. The beer was the usual ‘craft’ mixture of styles – a very nice Saison alongside assorted IPAs, a Porter, a Stout and of course something barrel-aged, in this case a sour ale aged in bourbon barrels. Most were rather good, even the inevitable Kölsch, a style that’s everywhere now and has emerged as a gateway beer, not just for lager drinkers exploring ale but for ale brewers looking for an easy way to produce something lagery.

Epic's airy and bright

Waking the following morning, I made coffee and started planning my afternoon. Epic Brewing's tap-room was in the right direction and opened earlier than some of the others, so that was my first target. Walking in, it was clear that a lot of money had been spent here – a theme that was to flow through the afternoon. After a couple of excellent beers chosen from the dozen-plus taps serving the clean and airy bar area, it was time for their first guided brewery tour of the day.

It turns out this isn’t the original Epic – it’s an offshoot of a Utah brewery, which opened a Denver branch in 2013 to get around Utah’s strict alcohol laws. For example, in Colorado you can sell packaged beer direct from the brewery.

Old foeders too

When it opened in an old high-roofed auto workshop, Epic was one of the first in the area; it’s now 50% bigger than its parent and while its brewlength is still a ‘micro’ 20 barrels, they’re brewing 24 hours a day, five days a week, and its array of fermenting vessels (FVs) includes ones holding 120 and 180 barrels. These are for the biggest sellers, needless to say. Having as many as nine brews go into one FV also helps with consistency, as it smooths out batch variation.

Like most micros Epic also does barrel-ageing, but unlike most they have foeders too – tall wooden vessels that tower over the bar area. They do some kegging and bottling, but most of the beer that goes offsite is canned on an automated microcanning line. Sadly, while they do export to a few countries, none of them’s this side of the Atlantic.

By now it was starting to get a whole lot busier, and the food truck had opened for lunch – Colorado might be relatively relaxed about brewing and selling beer, but apparently it’s a pain getting the permits to sell hot food as well. So most brewery taps and brewpubs skirt around it by inviting mobile canteens to park up outside and then allowing patrons to bring their food inside.

Industrial chic at Ratio

It was the same at my next stop, Ratio Beerworks, a brewpub where the Texas BBQ truck served up a paper plate of excellent pulled pork for just a few dollars. Ratio was an odd one otherwise – all the beers were well made and tasty, yet somehow it felt like there wasn’t any great inspiration and it was trying just a bit too hard to be fashionable. Then again, while its ‘industrial chic’ concrete and sheet-steel styling would be pretty drab in another climate, in the Colorado sunshine it worked pretty well. The terrace in particular was cheerful and bustling with groups of friends, most with lunch in mind and several with dogs in tow.

Respite from the heat

Our Mutual Friend was a bit of a shock at first. After the airiness of Epic and the sunny terrace at Ratio, it seemed, well, gloomy! Before long though I came to welcome the cool shade inside what felt almost like someone’s front parlour, albeit a very large one. Beyond the bar, I could see into the space behind where the 7-barrel brewkit lives, and above the bar was an eclectic list of beers – a few of the craft-standards you see almost everywhere now, such as IPA and Saison, but also a Mild, a Winter Warmer (in the Colorado summer?!?) and a Smoked Pumpkin Ale – I assume it was the malt that was smoked, not the pumpkin, but you never know.

The OMF beers were more variable – the Smoked Pumpkin and the Raspberry Sour were excellent, for example, but the Mild was a bit odd – notes of toasted fruit and rye bread don’t say Mild to me. I liked the place though, and would have stayed longer, if not for the jetlag catching up. It was time for a siesta, before the evening part of the crawl…. 

Public omnibuses, in the land of the car? Yes – and A-very fine beer too!

Part 2 of my touring Boulder's breweries and brewpubs, back in October. Part 1 is here.

I think I must have visited Boulder's Avery Brewing Company 10 years ago on a pre-festival breweries tour ahead of the Great American Beer Festival. My memory's a bit vague, but I have a recollection of a typical “microbrewery in an large garage” type of set-up in a generic industrial unit. If I remember rightly, what made it different from the others we visited was it did sour and barrel-aged beers at a time when those were far from fashionable.

An hour or two before the hordes descend...

Anyway, somewhere along the line they got my email address and have been dutifully sending me their monthly newsletter for pretty much an entire decade. I almost unsubscribed a couple of times, but then a few weeks ago I was glad I hadn't done, because they invited me (and presumably a few hundred others) to a launch party and a free pint of this year's 8.3% Old Jubilation winter ale. And for the first time in a decade it was going to be while I was not only on the right continent, but in the right town!

So after a bit of breakfast, it was into town to find the bus station. Yes, pretty much every US city I've been to has a viable public transport system – if you're willing to put in the effort needed to figure out how it works in terms of fares, stops, etc. It helped a little that Boulder comes under the Denver Regional Transportation District (RTD), and I'd used Denver buses in the past, but really it wasn't that hard to scope out the routes on Google Maps, check the RTD website for timings, and so on.

So there I was just after lunch, waiting for bus 205 with coins in hand – the ticket machines don't give change. Sure, the bus carried a little age, but it was clean and comfortable, and like many other bus companies they've adopted the system of giving a recorded announcement ahead of each stop. (When London Transport did this, they found it greatly increased travellers' confidence, and no wonder!)

When I got off and headed into the industrial estate that Avery moved back in February this year, I was over an hour early though. That's because in the process of checking the route I'd found a second brewery resident there that I'd never heard of before, and where Avery didn't open until 3pm, this one opened at 2…

Asher Brewing Company's main claim to fame is that when it opened in 2009 it was the first all-organic brewery in Colorado – I presume there's been others since then. Tucked away among workshops and offices, the taproom was cool and bright, with at least half a dozen beers on draught. It was an unusual mix of a clean space with cheerful service and a sense of activist grunge. I liked it, but I can see it wouldn't be to everyone's taste.

The beers were certainly well made, the best being the Green Bullet IPA which had a nice balance of chewy dry-sweet malt and aromatic hoppy bitterness. The others I tried – I had a flight of six tasters, including a properly (but not overly) bitter Kölsch and a chewy Double IPA – were almost as good. The one exception was a slightly insipid and over-gassy brown ale.

From there it was a short walk back to Avery, where there was already a small crowd on the terrace outside the bar. As I walked up, I had to marvel a little at the purpose-built structure in front of me – it combines brewery, packaging plant, barrel ageing stores, restaurant, bar, shop and of course offices, and it's hard to imagine that it had only been in operation for eight months.

My pint of Old Jube

The bar was already getting busy, even though it was the middle of Monday afternoon, but I was able to get a seat at the bar. The gimmick for the Old Jube launch was you had to wear a sweater to claim your pint – it being sunny and pretty warm outside of course – and there were several on view besides mine. I wouldn't normally start an afternoon session with an eight percenter, but hey, needs must… I just had time to enjoy the rich and lightly toasty brew, with its hints of toffee, cola and apple, before heading upstairs to join one of the regular free brewery tours. More on that in the next post in this series….

Rockin' the beer in Boulder

They do like their boulders...

Last week I spent a few days in Boulder, Colorado. I was there on non-beer related business, but these days you can't go to Colorado and not drink beer – even if it isn't exactly the capital of American craft beer, it is certainly a heartland for it.

And Boulder, just a few miles outside Denver, is in turn one of the top places for beer within Colorado – along with Fort Collins up to the north, home to New Belgium Brewing and one of the main Anheuser-Busch breweries, and of course Denver itself. In addition, while Denver is home to the Great American Beer Festival, Boulder is home to the US Brewers Association, which organises GABF – and is also the source for that much argued-over US definition of Craft Beer.

West - very west! - Flanders

So on my trip to Boulder, there was plenty to explore – even after I decided to focus my spare time specifically on brewpubs and brewery taps. I started with Sunday brunch at West Flanders Brewing Company, a brewpub which as its name implies does quite a few Belgian-inspired beers. It's conveniently located on Pearl Street, Boulder's old high street which is now mostly a pedestrianised boutique shopping mall. The pub followed a pattern that became familiar – far deeeper that it is wide, stretching far back from seats on the pavement past serving tanks of beer, the brewery itself and the kitchen.

I was slightly surprised to find myself the only one ordering beer at 10am – it was Sunday, after all! – but was pretty pleased with my breakfast omelette and my tasting flight, which included an excellent Saison, a tasty Wet Hop Pale Ale, a decent Belgian dark ale and an OK abbey Tripel. Plus it's a cool, modern place with lovely staff and a relaxed vibe.

Next, it was off to the other end of Pearl to Mountain Sun where I was meeting a friend via Untappd who'd come up from Denver for the afternoon. Mountain Sun is part of a small group of brewpubs and has a hippyish ambience, with tables packed close enough to be cosy without being crowded. The mixed crowd produced a buzz of conversation.

Colorado Kind Ale

Again, I chose a tasting flight, this time of six beers. Most of these brewpubs will pour you several small measures – typically four to six quarter-pints, so 4oz or 5oz each – of your chosen beers, and charge you not much more than the cost of a pint or a pint and a half. Particularly good here were the Colorado Kind Ale (an excellent interpretation of Fuller's ESB) and the Java Porter.

Our next destination was Twisted Pine Brewing, a little bit out of town. It's probably about 20 minutes walk, but we – like many of the other visitors we found there – drove instead. I'd had a few of its beers on a previous visit to Colorado and was curious to try more, so it was great to see the list of over a dozen regulars and specials on the brewery tap's blackboard.

The brewery tap is mostly natural pine, unsurprisingly enough. It was about half full and there was American football on TV – this is a Sunday afternoon thing in bars, apparently – with a couple of groups cheering fairly raucously.

We did find a couple of duds – a strange watery alleged Grätzer that tasted more like smoky Lemon Barley Water, and a spice-laden murky grey-brown soup of a pumpkin pie spice beer. Guys, I know America is the land of excess, and that this is even more true in craft beer, but trust me: when it comes to spice in beer, less is more!

On the plus side, Eleven Birds – a chewy and hoppy beer in the Belgian brown ale mould – was excellent, as were a Saison called 20 To Life (celebrating the brewery's 20th anniversary) and a powerful 8% Bretted and barrel-aged IPA called Funk In The Trunk.

From here we headed back into town and Walnut Brewery, a spacious and airy brewpub which is part of the same organisation as the extensive Rolling Rock chain. More like a converted warehouse inside, there's huge brand images of its house beers on the walls, and the brewery is visible above and behind the bar on a sort of mezzanine level. All the usual American craft beer styles were on offer and well made – Pale Ale, IPA, brown ale, stout, Irish Red, etc. The IPA, Red and Pale Ales were notably good. The one exception to an otherwise predictable range was a Black Lager that turned out to be a decent interpretation of a Schwarzbier.

My friend had to head home at this point for family dinner. It was still only mid-evening, so after bidding him a safe trip I decided to walk back to West Flanders to try some more from its extensive range. This time I picked from the higher end of the strength and flavour spectrum, where the IPAs live. The star was actually the one non-IPA – Recreational Smoke Porter, rich, dry and complex, though with no dope but lots of woodsmoke. The others were heavily hop-forward, without enough of anything else to carry it really well. The Black IPA and the Imperial IPA were pretty good regardless, but in the 'regular' Third Kingdom IPA it was just too aggressive.

And so to bed, with jetlag still lurking and a case of the munchies!

Part 2: Public omnibuses, in the land of the car? Yes – and A-very fine beer too!