Colt & Gray 1553 Platte Street 303-477-1447 At 10 o’clock on a Sunday morning, Colt & Gray is closed, but bar manager Kevin Burke comes to the door and lets me into the darkened restaurant. We sit down at the empty bar, which was crazy busy for New Year’s Eve…
Sixteen new breweries opened inside Denver city limits in 2014, a record year that brought the total number of breweries here to 44 — and that doesn’t include beer makers like Joyride Brewing in Edgewater and other nearby suburbs that helped the Mile High City’s beer culture bubble over. At…
It’s winter; now all we need is a wonderland. Might I suggest Beatrice & Woodsley, the venerable purveyor of whimsy on South Broadway? For years, its Nosh & ‘Tails cocktail hour, every weekday from 5 to 6:30 p.m., has been a mix of sophisticated soiree and playful bar time. With…
Beast + Bottle 719 East 17th Avenue 303-623-3223 The staff at Beast + Bottle regularly visits local farms and breweries to taste fresh products, which eventually find their way on to the farm-to-table restaurant’s dinner and drink menus. One of those farms supplies watercress, which fell into the hands of…
Winter Park Resort, which turns 75 this year, has struck a deal with the state’s largest craft brewer that will guarantee plenty of Mary Jane Ale for the foreseeable future. As part of the arrangement, New Belgium Brewing will make a certain number of barrels of the beer per year…
The Star Bar in Ballpark proudly serves no food whatsoever, paying more attention to compiling a robust list of local brews and spirits — and a pile of regulars. It’s been successful enough that it seems like a decades-old juice joint despite its relative youth, perhaps because that’s exactly what…
Sean Nook is serious about making good beer. But he doesn’t take himself too seriously when it comes to marketing or selling it — which is why his place, Black Bottle Brewery in Fort Collins, takes an irreverent approach to its everyday operations. Last year, for instance, Nook came up…
Most of us can’t sing unless we’ve had a couple of pints, which means that the Fort Collins-area brewers who got together to sing this jingle at Horse & Dragon Brewing may have had a couple. The singing Christmas card was organized by the Colorado Brewers Festival and the Downtown…
RiNo Yacht Club 3350 Brighton Boulevard 720-443-1135 Much of what we perceive as flavor, say scientists who study such things, is actually aroma. We’ve all had that experience of being sucked back into a memory where we first caught the scent of a lemon, fresh-baked bread, the ocean. For McLain…
Sure, Rob and Karin Lawler know cheese. The Truffle Cheese Shop on 6th Avenue became a foodie destination with the two forces of the Lawler’s friendliness and their knowledge of good cheese and practices. But is it easier to go from being a cheesemonger to a dinnermonger than it is…
New breweries opened at a stunning rate of 1.5 per day across the United States in 2014, bringing the total number to more than 3,200 by the end of November, according to the Brewers Association, the Boulder-based trade group that covers the craft-beer industry. And there are another 2,000 breweries…
To celebrate the impending opening of its massive new brewing campus in Littleton — and all of the square footage and brewing capacity that it will have at its disposal — Breckenridge Brewery will release its first large-scale barrel-aged bottled beer this month. Barrel Aged 72 Imperial is Breckenridge’s 72…
When Marcel Templet left the Capital Grille last August to become bar manager at the Cooper Lounge, he established a bar program designed to feature products sourced from Colorado. This core value was easy to stick to until it came time to add a brandy cocktail to the menu, since…
Lower48 Kitchen has gotten a lot of attention for refined food served in an accessible way. The “Each” menu, with small bites on offer for only a few bucks apiece, helped capture our imagination and snag Westword’s Best New Restaurant award this year. In ideology and presentation, this approach isn’t…
Last July, we wrote about former Upslope head brewer Alex Violette, who was planning to leave Colorado and start an American-style craft brewery in Vietnam. And according to an Outside magazine story this week about U.S. craft breweries going global, Pasteur Street Brewing will open in Saigon on Christmas day…
If you’re stressed about traveling this holiday season, try this: head to Ace for a ticket to a remote Pacific island. That ticket is a tiki-inspired cocktail created last week by bar manager Randy Layman, who calls it the Mount Fuji. It’s his latest addition to Ace’s cocktail menu, and…
In 1919, congress ratified the 18th Amendment, which outlawed the manufacture, distribution and sale of alcohol. Fourteen long, dry years later, congress repealed that amendment on December 5th, 1933, by passing the 21st Amendment, effectively making it legal to drink again. That day, now known as Repeal Day, is being…
Even though the endlessly acclaimed Linger does beaucoup dinner business, Executive Chef Justin Cucci says happy hour is vital to his culinary mission. “I think it’s the gateway drug for restaurants. People come and “smoke” a little happy hour so they can go on to the harder dinner drugs,” he…
A lot has happened since early 2013, when three Colorado friends — Brian Wood, Rich Wisniewski and Tyler Shuey — decided to open a brewery in River North. The neighborhood has grown quickly and now includes eight breweries within walking distance — while their project, Zephyr Brewing, has suffered through…
True sophistication can be in short supply at happy hour. We usually go for early evening snacks and drinks for a taste of what a restaurant has to offer, not for an all-consuming experience. La Cour Bistro & Art Bar, a French restaurant with a distinct lack of pretension, offers…
When Denver Beer Co opened its Canworks production brewery and packaging facility last August, it also cranked up a contest in which participants could buy the newly canned beers, grab printed GPS coordinates off of the cans, figure out the 24 different secret locations and then visit them and take…
When Trinity Brewing owner Jason Yester first envisioned a series of beers designed to highlight the differences between various wild yeasts and souring bacteria, the goal was to educate consumers, brewers, beer writers, and even beer judges about flavor profiles. “There is a lot of confusion,” he said then, about…
