Bars & Breweries

I’m not sure how I’ve never been to the Highland Tavern before. It’s at the corner of West 34th Avenue and Navajo Street, right down the block from the Bug Theatre, one of the places I used to frequent back when the local comedy show the Grawlix was still around…

A moose head on the wall, a creek out back, a biker out front: Colorado bars aren’t all about craft beer and mixology. Metro Denver boasts thousands of watering holes, but sometimes you thirst for a downhome saloon where getting there is half the fun…and the rest is all setting, history and, yes, alcohol. Here are Colorado’s ten most iconic bars.

As competition for shelf space heats up in the world of craft beer, bigger breweries are endeavoring to stay nimble, trying new things — and occasionally throwing everything against the wall to see what sticks. Odell Brewing, which is Colorado’s third largest craft-beer maker, has released a slew of new…

You probably haven’t heard of the second-largest brewery in Denver, but you definitely know the beers brewed there: Station 26 Brewing’s Citra IPA, Black Shirt Brewing’s Stringbender Saison, the Post Brewing’s Townie Ale, and the brand-new Weldwerks Brewing’s Alpha Bits New England-Style IPA, among others. Sleeping Giant Brewing, which was…

Chopper’s Sports Grill, at 80 South Madison Street in Cherry Creek, is an “old Denver” sort of place. Cherry Creek itself is sort of an old classic when it comes to neighborhoods, with parts experiencing a new development boom, while other blocks — like those closer to Colorado Boulevard — seem…

The year was 2014. The sun was shining, the flowers were blooming and Ska Brewing was getting ready to introduce a new year-round beer, Rudie Session Ale, a 4.5 percent ABV IPA made with Galaxy and El Dorado hops. Rudie — which Ska tagged with the line “Rudie can’t fail,”…

Beer can grease a lot of wheels in this country, but it’s not magic. So, members of the Colorado Brewers Guild have been hosting a program called Hop the Vote for the past four years to help get to know their elected officials in the Colorado General Assembly. The program invites legislators…

For the first time since it was founded in 1991, Breckenridge Brewery won’t have a table at the Great American Beer Festival — at least, not according to current plans. Neither will Elysian Brewing, Wicked Weed, 10 Barrel or Goose Island, which are all missing from the GABF list of participating breweries that…

For craft-beer lovers who live inside Denver’s city limits, there’s not a lot of motivation to drive to a suburban brewery. For starters, there are dozens of terrific choices close by. There is also traffic, which gets worse every week, and the fact that no one wants to drive a…

The town of Windsor lost a little piece of its history and a little bit of its soul on August 6 when someone set fire to a 118-year old former flour mill that locals had described as being like an old friend. Built in 1899, the four-story mill had managed…

While the majority of breweries in Colorado have patios — some of them open rain, snow or shine — the action of ordering a beer usually takes place inside. But in the last month, two Denver breweries have added outdoor bars, an uncommon amenity, in an effort to add some…

Milo’s Sports Tavern has come to be a neighborhood standby for the folks of Southeast Denver over the last fifteen years. The bar has been Milo’s since 2002 and was originally a part of the B.U.F.F. Brothers conglomerate. When that started to be broken up in 2011, Thomas Clark, one of…

New Belgium has been making tiny batches of one-off sour beers for years, but it hasn’t ever packaged them, focusing instead on its larger sour creations, like La Folie and Transatlantique Kriek. But last month, the Fort Collins-based brewery revealed that it had put an end to its acclaimed Lips…

You can find most Coors products everywhere, but Barman, a special pilsner named after the hometown of brewery founder Adolph Herman Joseph Coors, is tougher to locate. It’s brewed at AC Golden, and sold at only sixteen bars in metro Denver.

Bierstadt Lagerhaus is very particular about its beer…and the glasses its poured into. The brewery is the only one in Colorado to insist that its beer be sold in its own glassware….and many bars are willing to comply.

From the outside, Crazy Mountain Brewing’s path over the past few years has seemed, well, a little crazy. Founded in 2010 in Vail Valley, it expanded rapidly by packaging and distributing beer to other states and overseas, using the recognition it had earned from tourists who’d visited. Then in 2015,…

There’s no bigger power couple in craft brewing than Kim Jordan and Dick Cantwell. Jordan co-founded New Belgium Brewing, the nation’s fourth largest craft brewery, and is now the executive chairwoman. Cantwell helped start Elysian Brewing in Seattle in 1995 before selling it to Anheuser-Busch InBev in 2015; he left…

Beer has always been one of Canada’s best-known exports, thanks in part to Molson, Moosehead, Labatt and the movie Strange Brew. But over the next two years, Canada will export an entire brewery — to Colorado. In May, Vancouver’s Red Truck Beer Company revealed that it had purchased Fort Collins…

I just learned today from Google that the neighborhood surrounding Regis University in Northwest Denver is actually called Regis. I always thought it was somehow part of nearby Berkeley, but I stand corrected. In this stretch of residential blocks, with a few small businesses here and there along the swath…

Earlier this summer, the Brewers Association unveiled a new seal that it hopes independent craft breweries will add to the labels on their bottles and cans in order to distinguish themselves from large corporate-owned breweries, or small breweries that have been purchased by mega-brewers. The seal, which depicts an upside-down…

The store has been on Larimer for three decades.