Bars & Breweries

Frisco’s Backcountry Brewery, which closed last November before being sold to a new owner, will get a new name, a new look and new beers when it reopens sometime this spring.

Two words for you, as you contemplate what to order at Señor Bear’s hora loca, or happy hour: Gordo Crunch. The Gordo is a flour-tortilla-swaddled crispy taco shell filled with juice-oozing chorizo and topped with shredded iceberg lettuce, jack cheese and a couple of racy chilies. It’s served embedded in…

Craft breweries have been experimenting with IPAs for decades, adding and subtracting hop varieties and malt bills, as well as changing up yeast strains and adjunct ingredients like fruit and spices. There have been Belgian-style IPAs, Cascadian (black) IPAs, red IPAs, wild IPAs, oak-aged IPAs, fruited IPAs (which was a…

You may have seen a saucy pink can decked out with a woman with a citrus smile and the name Ramona blasting out in bold lettering. What is this jazzy beverage and who is responsible for such a creation? Ramona is a canned spritz made with Sicilian grapefruit juice and Italian…

This is part two of our three-part Beermuda Triangle series, which explores the Beer Depot, Tennyson’s Tap and the Berkeley Inn, three bars at the corner of West 38th Avenue and Tennyson Street that are as easy to get lost in as the mysterious waters of the Atlantic Ocean. Read…

High Hops Brewery in the northern Colorado town of Windsor just got its own canning line, and the beer makers there are wasting no time putting it to good use. The brewery plans to become one of the first — if not the very first — craft brewery to sell…

Coffee beers are nothing new. Breweries in Colorado have increasingly focused on coffee as an ingredient over the past few years, widening the breadth and deepening the depth of their knowledge — and then producing some seriously geeky concoctions based on the origin, variety and local roaster of the beans…

Most craft brewery owners thought Oskar Blues was idiotic back in 2002 when the company became the first to regularly package its beer in cans. They said it destroyed the image of good beer and that it wouldn’t work. But those brewers have all since come around to idea that…

A new restaurant can wow first-time visitors with flashy food; a chef can pull out all the stops for a one-time tasting menu. But can they keep it up over time? Quality and consistency over months and years are what separate the great eatery from the flash in the pan…

February comes pre-loaded with two beer-friendly holidays: Mardi Gras and Valentine’s Day (or Anti-Valentine’s Day, as the case may be). But the shortest month of the year is also special in Colorado because of Stout Month, which was started by the Mountain Sun Pub 25 years ago and which is…

So complete was the transformation of Union Station that it’s hard to remember a time when it was once not much more than a forlorn depot for AmTrak and the Winter Park ski train. Today, thanks to a soup-to-nuts restoration of the building’s former glory — and a development plan…

The Beer Depot (4231 West 38th Avenue) is not, as I thought when I first heard the name, a liquor store. It is one of three bars that form part of the Berkeley neighborhood’s “Beermuda Triangle,” something I learned about at the Beer Depot itself. When a friend and I stopped…

With names like Cox’s Orange Pippin and Esopus Spitzenburg, the sparkling beverages pouring from Champagne-like bottles at a new Aurora tasting room might be hard to identify — unless you’re an apple aficionado. Both are the products of Haykin Family Cider, which opens to the public at 12001 East 33rd…

It’s often difficult to find a seat at 105 West Brewing in Castle Rock, which has been growing in popularity since it opened in late 2015. But that will change over the next few months as the brewery expands. Immediate plans call for moving the adjacent Castle Rock Homebrew Supply…

In the beginning, at the dawn of the craft-beer era in Colorado, there was free beer. And it was good. Anyone who was interested in checking out breweries like New Belgium, Odell and Great Divide could stop by, learn about the brewing process and sample the beer for free. If…

Westword writers just poured out a list of the fifty bars we can’t live without, and readers respond.

If you’re a recent transplant, you’re probably tired of longer-time Denver denizens remarking with wide-eyed wonder at the changes this city has undergone in the last decade. But forgive us the earnest indulgence, because whether we were born and raised here or just moved 10 years ago, we still can’t…

It’s been a while since Ron Tarver first announced plans to open Denver Distillery (244 South Broadway), but after almost six years, the time has finally come. “This is all my design from out of my head from over five years ago,” says Tarver, as he shows off the finished…

Next Door Lounge (not to be confused with Next Door American Eatery, which has several locations around town) is a small but mighty bar that you might just miss if you aren’t paying attention while driving along East 17th Avenue in Uptown. Sandwiched between sister restaurant Bread-N-Butter and Jack’s Uptown Grille,…

There have been big changes recently among the ranks of Denver’s brewers. Among them is the temporary departure of Little Machine Beer’s co-founder and head brewer Brett Williams, who is taking a leave to live in Mexico with his wife. Although Williams will work remotely on several aspects of Little…

Bars have played a big role in Westword‘s forty-year-history, too. In fact, our offices were once over the Wazee, which will soon close.

Charlie Papazian, the man whose energy and words inspired tens of thousands of homebrewers and helped create the craft brewing industry, has said he will step down from the Brewers Association in exactly one year, on January 23, 2019, his seventieth birthday. Papazian made Colorado the center of the world for…