Day 4 Colorado Beer Trip

(click pics to make 'em bigger)

Sunday, May 24th, 2009 Here it is June 22nd and I’m still writing about May! I will try to finish this trip up so I can write about more current events. We arose famished, however The Oxford has no complimentary breakfast and downtown Denver is a ghost town. I guess this is normal for a Sunday morning. We find a coffee shop across the street with a good looking breakfast menu. Of course on Sunday there is a different more limited menu. We had to settle for a couple of rock hard dry breakfast paninis and an average cup o joe. We began the touristy day with not a beer bar, nor a brewery, nor a beer pouring coffee shop but Red Rocks Amphitheatre. This place is like a shrine to live music. Most people have heard of this concert venue in the foothills. We both enjoyed the architecture, history and landscape very much. We even took a 1.4 mile hike. It’s true what they say… the altitude really makes a difference. Probably didn’t help that the previous three days really dehydrated us. After Red Rocks we made it to Golden, Colorado.

Yep, you guessed it, the home of brewing behemoth Coors Brewing Company (Now MillerCoors). Carolyn and I toured Miller in Milwaukee in 2006 and while the beers leave something to be desired, I am always impressed with the sheer size of the facilities and the process. As a homebrewer I am familiar with the brewing process. It’s quite fascinating comparing and contrasting the similarities between producing 2.5 gallon batches and 20 million beer barrels. Many of you have been on brewery tours before and know that a lot of places still utilize the copper kettles. At Coors there are more than fifty of them, all in one large room and it’s almost hard to fathom. It’s easy to visualize Summit and Leinie’s where there are just two. I almost wondered if there were mirrors or some other creative illusion trickery. I was quite impressed. I also enjoyed watching the packaging room in progress. It’s amazing how many 30 packs of Coors Light can be packaged in sixty seconds. About half way through our self guided tour we were offered a fresh beer sample of either Coors Banquet Beer or Coors Light. The gimmick here is that the beer is supposed to be a day or two old. “Fresher than you’ll find anywhere else” they claim. Like the Silver Bullet tastes any different after a month or two. Whatever. I wasn’t going to just walk by so I grabbed a Banquet Beer and continued on the tour. I gotta tell you, nothing makes Coors Banquet Beer sound so good as when it’s being advertised by Sam Elliot. “Coors… The Banquet Beer” Can you hear it? At the end of the tour we were offered three more samples. We could chose from any of the Coors line of products, Coors, Blue Moon, Killian’s, etc. These were by far the biggest sampling glasses of any brewery tour I’ve ever taken; probably 8 or 10oz each. I regrettably went for the Blue Moon Honey Moon first. I’d never had it before and I foolishly expected a wheat beer. It turned out to be a bland tasteless mess. I choked it down and went back for a Killian’s Red. Again, major disappointment. I always remembered this beer to be more flavorful. It seemed more like a light lager with a little color. Not cool. The lines for the samples were quite long so we opted for the gift shop instead of our last sample. I think this was the first time I’ve ever done that on a tour. Turn down free beer? Blasphemy. Now I must say, even though I didn’t necessarily enjoy their products, I still think they are doing a good job. It really is hard to make a beer with that little color and that little flavor and do it consistently over long periods of time. For the style of beer they produce, they do a very good job. This guy just doesn’t find them quite to be all that inviting.

After the Coors tour we returned to Denver. I had heard good things about a brewpub in Boulder, the Mountain Sun. They have a second brewpub in Boulder called the Southern Sun and recently (about a year ago) opened another brewpub in Denver called the Vine Street Pub. I don’t think they make their own beer on premise yet but you can get their famous Boulder options on tap here. We showed up at 3:15 only to find out that the place doesn’t open until 4pm. You have go to be kidding me! What kind of pub isn’t open on the weekend for lunch? It was raining and we were getting wet so we returned to the car to assess the situation. I don’t think it makes good business sense to open at 4pm seven days a week. I did hear later in the trip that it’s not uncommon for people to start hanging out a half hour to an hour before opening. Wouldn’t you want to let these people in and take their money? Oh well, I am biased and bitter. We decided we didn’t want to sit in the car and wait for 45 minutes so we returned to the hotel. I needed to get the bad taste out of my mouth (literally from Coors and metaphorically from Vine Street). I finished the last of the Odell Red while we started discussing dinner plans. Being a fan of our local Rock Bottom I suggested we go to the one in Denver. I usually avoid chains while on holiday but since this was the original Rock Bottom Brewery we decided to make an exception. The atmosphere is a lot like ours in Minneapolis. I’ve been to Rock Bottoms in Des Moines and Chicago and they seem to have their own unique touches but the Denver one is a lot like ours. Long bar, dark wood, vessels behind glass above the bar. What I liked about this one is that the brew house was visible in a small room on the other side of the bar. In fact, our booth was situated against the windows looking into the brew kettles. I returned to form and ordered the sampler which consisted of six beers. I hate to say it but I felt like all these beers tasted pretty much the same. I’m not sure if my mouth was experiencing palate fatigue or if they use some kind of house yeast in all the beers or what. I was truly unimpressed. I felt they were all similar versions of each other, only the color varied. Now of course there were more differences than just color but nothing really stood out or excited me all that much. Upon completion of the sampler, I followed it up with a pint of the Falcon Pale Ale. I should have been more aggressive at asking about any special or seasonal brews but I was too preoccupied with the Twins game that just happened to be on National TV. We certainly had our share of good food here, however. The chips and guac were great as were the potstickers and I finished the evening off with the half rack of ribs. Mouthwatering, fall off the bone good! We were both so full we could barely move. On the way out we talked briefly to the host about the novelty of being “the first”. It could just be folklore, but we were told where the name came from. The building that houses this restaurant used to be called the Prudential Building and the symbol for Prudential is, of course, the Rock of Gibraltar. Situated in the bottom of the building, the name became Rock Bottom. Personally, I like to think of drinking beer as the place I go to when I’ve hit Rock Bottom but whatever. Not a great day for beer, but as they say… a bad day of beer drinking is better than a good day working. No truer words were spoken.