Colorado has become home to a flourishing craft culture — first with breweries, and now with an increasing number of distillers. From potato vodka and botanical-packed gins, rye whiskey and whiskey made with experimental grains, to the more niche spirits like absinthe and creme de violette, the range of offerings…
A new year brings new beers, and Colorado’s breweries have already released or are just about to unveil many of them. They include: Breckenridge Brewery Ophelia, a hoppy wheat ale; Great Divide Lasso, a low-ABV IPA made with Columbus, Centennial and Cascade hops; New Belgium Rewind, an IPA brewed with…
Avery Brewing broke ground yesterday on a $27 million, 68,000-square-foot campus in north Boulder that it hopes to move to around this time next year. The brewery first submitted plans to the City of Boulder in fall 2011 — and wanted construction to be under way in 2012 — but…
Feisty Spirits is the first distillery in Fort Collins, operating a still (named Aphrodite) that produces an interesting, often experimental lineup of whiskeys (and more) on “fermentation row,” as Feisty team member Alex Mackewich affectionately calls it. After all, Funkwerks and Fort Collins Brewery are only a stone’s throw away…
Dry Dock Brewing, which opened a new, 30,000-square-foot production brewery and packaging facility in Aurora last January, said today that it had nearly quadrupled in size over the past twelve months, going from 3,273 barrels in 2012 to 12,000 barrels in 2013. It also managed to can more than two…
Everyone’s on the Denver Broncos bandwagon right now, but West Flanders Brewing in Boulder (which made news last week for naming a beer in honor of pot legalization) manged to find the line between enthusiasm and over-enthusiasm after it named a beer for the home team — only to have…
Gardiner Hammond, a former brewer at the Old Mill in Littleton, plans to open his own brewery this spring in a space that once housed Independent Records, next to the Ogden Theater on East Colfax Avenue. Part of the space was taken over by Angelo’s CDs in August, but the…
Distilleries are popping up all over Colorado, to help quench the thirst of drinkers crowding craft cocktail bars. But smaller distillers can face a challenge as they try to get their products into the hands of the bartenders who live, breathe, mix and drink booze every day. Now a new…
One of the few cocktail innovations that Italy has managed to squeeze out in the past century, the Negroni is a proud member of the select group of iconic cocktails. Like the Martini and the Old-Fashioned, it’s now mandatory in any bar’s recipe book, and a talisman of Old World…
The Denver Bicycle Cafe — which has specialized in fixing bikes, serving coffee and pouring locally-brewed beers – will put a little less emphasis on the coffee and little more on the beer starting this week when it changes its structure and its hours. Beginning on February 1, the cool,…
Are Denver’s dives an endangered species? Over the past year, two of the dives featured on last year’s list of the dozen best dive bars have lost their divey status — one, the Hill-Top, closed and just reopened this past weekend as the Rocky Top Tavern, and the Squire, while…
Colorado Cider Company, one of the state’s cider pioneers, was founded by Brad and Kathe Page in 2011. Now, they are celebrating their success with an expansion that has enabled the cidery to triple its annual production capacity from 25,000 gallons to 75,000 gallons, and includes four new 2,100-gallon tanks…
Bud Light got the Denver Broncos-related headlines last weekend after Peyton Manning told reporters at a post-playoffs game press conference that the main thing “weighing on my mind is how soon I can get a Bud Light in my mouth. That’s priority No. 1.” But in the week leading up…
Oskar Blues has introduced a new kind of vessel for taking beer to go from its Tasty Weasel taproom in Longmont. The Crowler, a cross between a can and a traditional growler, is a 32-ounce recyclable aluminum can that can be filled, purged of CO2 and sealed within minutes. Turn…
Kokopelli Beer Company in Westminster held its grand opening last Friday with six of its own beers on draft, including a milk stout, an IPA, an American pale and an English pale, along with a couple ciders and a sour from other brewers. The new brewpub, owned by Christine Wares,…
Chocolate is sweet and sultry and delicious. Chocolate tastes great, smells great and looks fantastic. Chocolate is supposed to be fun. But Bill Beymer of Odell Brewing wasn’t having much fun in late 2012, when he was trying to figure out how to melt hundreds of pounds of chocolate into…
Golden is defining its place in the spirits market this year — first with the debut of Golden Moon Distillery, and now with the opening of State 38, a distillery that is focusing on agave-based spirits, with a name inspired by Colorado’s status as the 38th state to be admitted…
New Belgium Brewing has always represented a dichotomy. The Fort Collins company is the nation’s third-largest craft brewer, and yet it has held on to the independent-minded ethos of a garage-bound start-up. Its flagship, Fat Tire, is often seen as an entry-level example of a craft beer, and yet it…
In a city with a burgeoning craft beer and spirits landscape, craft (hard) cider continues to surface as a thriving addition to the mix. On Friday, Eric Foster and Phil Kao, co-founders of the newly-minted Stem Ciders and board members on the Rocky Mountain Cider Association, will hold a grand…
New Belgium Brewing is rolling out its new look on a wide scale this month, after having introduced bits and pieces of it last year. The “portfolio-wide packaging refresh…reimagines New Belgium’s iconic and playful watercolor imagery from the past 22 years through a modern lens,” the Fort Collins company says…
Since beer is made from grain and hops, it makes sense that Christine Wares picked Kokopelli, the Hopi god of agriculture and fertility, for the name and logo of her new brewery. But Wares, who will run Kokopelli Beer Company, 8931 Harlan Street, with brewers Todd Williamson and Rick Holt,…
It’s surprising that it took this long, but a Colorado craft brewer has finally linked a beer tapping to the legalization of marijuana sales here, which went into effect January 1. West Flanders Brewing in Boulder has changed the name of one of its its beers from Woodshed Smoked Porter…
