GABF Day 3

Not everything goes according to plan. Sometimes, you just have to be flexible and roll with the punches. A huge part of hanging out in Colorado for us was spending time with our hosts Bonnie and Mike. I’ve known Mike about 16 years now. We met in Phoenix while attending a trade school together. A huge part of why we get along is because of our common sense of humor. It’s important to find people you can laugh with because when the end of the world is drawing nigh, it’s always good to crack a couple of off-color jokes before it all goes downhill.

Bonnie was kind enough to set up shooting lessons for us to start the day. I have only been shooting once, at a bachelor party. I found it terrifying at first and a little too comfortable towards the end of the session. At the time, I mainly shot hand guns but today we would be shooting a combination of Mike’s shotguns. The night before we prepped all of the equipment. Sammy and I got a crash course on how to hold shotguns as well as how to tear them down for transport. Needless to say, I was excited. Sammy, not-so-much but she was game.

As I said, it helps to be flexible. The guy who would be hosting the shooting lesson (we would be shooting clays) had an unexpected family emergency and called to reschedule. Unfortunately for us, Friday was our only open slot. Had we felt good by the end of our lesson, we would’ve gone pheasant shooting as well. I’ve never had pheasant before and it’d be interesting to have something for dinner that I killed earlier in the day. There is a huge disconnect between people and our food. We stroll down the butcher aisle of our supermarkets and see all this meat neatly packaged in plastic wrap and Styrofoam but we forget that someone had to kill the cow/pig/chicken/fish/squirrel/whatever, process it, and wrap it up nicely for public consumption. While this was a minor setback in our plans, it just accelerated our drinking schedule.

If I were to believe all the promotional commercials and marketing, I would’ve expected Colorado to be a state with no straight roads, everything would be covered in snow and mountains loomed above your head in every direction. Sure, the Rocky Mountains are still there and some peaks are covered in snow. For the most part, metropolitan Colorado is situation a few miles to the east of the Rocky Mountains. There are some rolling hills but for the most part, you are in the plains portion of the United States. Not wanting to disappoint Sammy and myself, Bonnie and Mike took us the long way on our brewery tour. This route took us past Horsetooth Reservoir, up to Estes Park and back down into Longmont. Even though the trip reminded me of my youth when the family would hop into the conversion van and just drive, it was well worth it. The natural rock formations and gorges we saw were awe-inspiring. It’s incredible to think that a tiny stream is capable of gouging the earth in such a dramatic fashion. We were even fortunate enough to run into a small group of bighorn sheep. According to Mike, bighorn sheep sightings are rare. Judging by the amount of people pulled over to the side of the road, I would have to agree. While in Estes Park enjoying the views of the Aspen as they’ve changed color, we managed to see white-tail deer and a herd of elk. Mike brought along a few elk calls and started bugleing in an attempt to get one of the males to respond. If those elk calls are to be believed, I find it humorous to know that an animal as large as a fully mature, bull elk sounds like a kazoo. I’m thinking that Mike should return his elk calls for a refund as we attracted more attention from fellow tourists than from any actual elk.

As beautiful as the scenery and animals are, this is BetterBeerBlog and not BetterBighornRamBlog. So let’s get to the beer!

Estes Park Brewery, 470 Prospect Village Drive, Estes Park, CO

Estes Park Brewing Company is located in the little mountain town of Estes Park. The town itself is more of a summer town with access to nearby Estes Lake and Rocky Mountain National Park. From the outside, Estes Park isn’t anything to write home about. According to their website, Estes Park Brewery is the result of a combining of High Country Brewery and the Event Center. Estes Park Brewery is more of a brew pub as it has a restaurant as well. If you stay down in the brewery store area, you’ll find a small tasting counter. The tastings here are free but I believe they have a few more beers upstairs than they do downstairs. A sign outside said that they have a “beer garden” which got Sammy all excited because she’s into gardening. Apparently having a “beer garden” is the equivalent of a tasting room.

The four of us got to sample a few of their beers. Here are my notes on the beers I liked:

• Wapiti Brown – Aged with oak spirals. Wood notes in aroma and flavor. Sweet, malt flavor. Caramel notes, toasty.
• Pumpkin Ale, 6.4% ABV – Brewed with roasted pumpkin and corriander, allspice and nutmeg. Smooth, creamy texture. Pumpkin notes are subtle but noticeable.

We tried a few other beers in our time there but nothing stood out when compared to those two. If my memory serves me, the Wapiti was their most balanced and flavorful while the Pumpkin Ale was also balanced and had more pumpkin flavor than pumpkin pie spice character. I don’t particularly like my pumpkin ales to taste like pumpkin pie. If I wanted pumpkin pie, I’d buy the damn pie instead of drinking it.

Left Hand Brewery, 1265 Boston Ave., Longmont, CO

As with many other breweries, Left Hand is located in an industrialized part of town. Pulling into their gravel parking lot you can’t help but notice a huge, red silhouette of a left hand. Left Hand also has a beer garden but unlike Estes Park, this is actually outdoors but not very garden-like at all. The place is buzzing. There are more than a few people from GABF in attendance. GABF people are easy to spot because they’re loud and usually yelling things like, “Yeah, we came for GABF” or “We’re going to the Friday night session”. The group to our right ends up being the 21st Amendment crew. I didn’t say “hello” or anything because with the time crunch we were in, I knew striking up a conversation with them would’ve ended up with me in conversation and Mike, Bonnie and Sammy waiting for me to finish.

Their tasting room resembles a small bar. The main feature, of course, is their bar. Mike, Bonnie, Sammy and I stroll up to a few empty seats and stake our claim. We are given a menu and pick out the 6-beer sampler. Sammy and I order our set while Mike and Bonnie order theirs. Here are my tasting notes, quick, dirty and surprisingly not as informative as they should’ve been:

• Haystack Wheat, 5.0% – Wheat malt character, banana and clove phenolics in both the aroma and flavor. Hazy.
• Juju Ginger Ale, 4.0% – An honest to God ginger ale, not that sweet, slightly ginger-ish, fizzy soda you can find next to the tonics. I actually like ginger ale (the soda) but it’s just not worthy of the “ale” designation, but I digress. Brewed with ginger. Slight sour yeastiness and ginger in the aroma. The ginger notes are noticeable with a sweet, Munich and Vienna malt backbone. Tastey but not my cup of tea.
• Milk Stout, 5.2% – The 2008 GABF Silver Medal winner in the Sweet Stout category and object of my brewing intentions. This beer pours black with ruby highlights. Creamy, sweet malt flavors with coffee, roasted grain and chocolate notes. Awesome, creamy body without the use of nitro. This was Bonnie’s favorite and definitely worth the honors.
• Jackman’s APA, 5.2% – Strong citrus (orange) notes. Clean malt flavors with a medium-high level of hop bitterness and flavor. Well balanced for the style (pale ale). Bright, clear amber in color. This was my personal favorite.
• Terra Rye’zed – Not on their website, this is a brewery only beer, maybe. As the name implies, it is a rye beer. Dark brown with cola highlights and an off-white head. Sweet malt aroma, slight roastiness. Definite grain flavor, borderline toasty/roasty with coffee flavors. Medium/medium-high hop bitterness. I am not familiar with rye beers so I have nothing to compare this to. Just tasting as many rye beers as I can to acclimate my palette.
• 400 lb Monkey IPA – Another special brewery-only beer. Pale caramel in color with amber highlights and an off-white head, hazy. Floral, slight spicy and earthy hop aromas. Sweet malt backbone with slight alcohol notes. Medium/medium-high hop bitterness.

Overall, Left Hand Brewery is a great little brewery making some very good beers. I would recommend visiting them if you find yourself in the area.

Pumphouse Brew Pub, 540 Main Street, Longmont, CO

Pumphouse was an unexpected stop in our brewery tour. We all had an early breakfast in anticipation for some clay shooting that morning. We skipped out on lunch, opting instead to drive around and check out the sites. By the time we finished up at Left Hand Brewing, Mike was famished and needed to eat. It wasn’t until I took a seat at the bar that it started hitting me as well.

There’s a front entrance off of Main street but we enter from the back as it’s closer to the parking lot. There’s a long hallway we need to get through to get to the main dining area and bar. All along the wall are shelves of beer bottles. There were hundreds of bottles on the wall, easy. Almost makes me want to break out in song.

Right behind the bar apprears to be the brewing area. It looks like their mash tun and boil kettle are below while a steel, i-beam frame construction holds their conditioning tanks above their kettles. It looks like a 10 BBL system. If I remember correctly, the four owners all used to be firemen and as such, the firehouse/firemen theme is liberally applied to most aspects of the brew pub ranging from the fire hydrant shaped tap handles to the names of the beers themselves.

While there, Sammy and I split one of their burgers. I didn’t take any notes on the thing but I remember that we killed it and the fries. I even ate the pickle and I don’t like pickles. I guess we were hungry. Anyway, we order a 5-beer sampler. Here are my notes:

• Blackberry Wheat – Seasonal brew. Blackberry aromas, sweet, dark, berry aromas. Slightly tart and fruit sweet. Medium-low/medium body with high carbonation.
• 4-Alarm Copper, 4.2% – Supposedly an altbier, Dusseldörf-style. I get a bready malt flavor up front with a medium hop bitterness in the finish. When I compare this to my own altbier, I find that my altbier is pretty damn hoppy. I also like the malt flavor of my altbier a little better, slightly more complex.
• Espresso Porter,  – Another seasonal beer. Noticeable espresso and roasted malt aromas. Really creamy body with robust coffee flavors. I find it hard to believe this is a porter as it tastes a lot like black/espresso coffee, just cold and carbonated.
• Hotshots Harvest Ale – Another seasonal. Smooth and creamy texture. Clean malt profile with medium/medium-high hop bitterness. Fruity (star fruit and guava) fruit esters with an earthy hop aroma. The weather in Colorado is not conducive to growing hops, or many other vegetables and fruits for that matter. The growing season is just too short. To make this harvest ale, they had 40 lbs (per 10 BBL) of Simcoe hops flown in a day after they were picked.
• Igniter Pale Ale, 5.8% – Sweet-ish, slightly grainy and toasted malt flavors with medium/medium-high hop bitterness that lasts into the finish. Flavors seem muddled and not as distinct as the others.

Overall, Pumphouse is reminiscent of many other brew pubs like Gordon Biersch or Rock Bottom. Their beers are pretty standard with some standouts. What I find pretty interesting though is the placement of their brewery. Usually the brewhouse is kept separate from the restaurant and I guess in this case they are separated enough. But, if I wanted to, I could walk right up to either their mash tun or boil kettle to get a really good look, there’s no real separation between customer and brewery other than common sense.

ODell Brewing Company, 800 E. Lincoln Avenue, Fort Collins, CO

Our self-guided tour of Colorado breweries ends back in Fort Collins at O’Dell Brewing. By the time we arrive at O’Dell, the place is packed. There are dozens and dozens of people in the place and finding an empty table is a bit of a challenge. Despite that, the O’Dell tasting room is very nice. The bar is the centerpiece of the place. You place your order at the counter closest to the door and pick up to the left. It keeps the flow of people moving.

One of the things that I find really cool about O’Dell brewing is the labels on their beers. They are all drawn in a similar style but not necessarily templates. There’s an “old world” feel about the artwork, as if they were printed using woodcuts. The type and style of the art also gives the sense of what I would call “Victorian fantasy”. Think along the lines of Lemony Snicket: A Series of Unfortunate Events books with a touch of Harry Potter. They are beautiful and would make amazing posters on their own.

Within the tasting room is their retail store where they sell their O’Dell branded clothing line, glassware and things. Sammy really took a liking to their artwork and picked up shirts for the both of us. I ended up getting the 5 Barrel Pale Ale shirt which is part bamboo. I never thought of bamboo as a plant worthy of being spun into a fiber. The plant itself is tough and I image a whole lot of work went into making the fibers pliable enough to use in clothing. Surprisingly, this is one of the softest and most comfortable shirts I have ever worn.

Here are my tasting notes:

• Easy Street Wheat, 4.6% – Hazy, gold in color with a white head. Wheat malt flavors up front with low hop flavor and bitterness. Medium-low body, high carbonation.
• Levity Amber Ale, 5.1% Brilliantly clear copper with white head. Medium-low/medium body, medium-high/high carbonation level. Creamy texture yet crisp, sweet-ish malt flavor and medium hop bitterness.
• 5 Barrel Pale Ale, 5.2% – Pale amber/copper color with off-white head. Citrus, floral and earthy hop aromas and flavor. Malt flavors are clean and enough to support. Medium hop bitterness that persists into the finish but isn’t harsh.
• 90 Shilling Scottish Ale, 5.3% – Caramel brown, clear with amber highlights and off-white head. Malt forward beer with medium-low hop bitterness and flavor. Medium body, medium-high carbonation. This beer is one of Mike’s favorites and it is pretty tasty for a Scottish Ale.
• India Pale Ale, 7.0% – Pale amber, bright and clear with white head. Citrus, piney, grapefruit, floral hop aromas. Assertive hop bitterness with citrus and piney hop flavors. Malt backbone is sweet and enough to support the hops, very balanced for the style. My favorite so far.
• Cutthroat Porter, 4.8% – Very dark brown with amber/caramel highlights and tan head. Roasty with a sesame seed oil aromatic character. Slight coffee. Seasame seed character continues onto the flavor and I’m finding it to be overwhelming. There are some roasted grain notes as well. Slight nuttiness. Medium-high hop bitterness masked by malt dominant flavors. This is one of their more popular beers but I can’t see why. The sesame seed oil character is a huge distraction for me.
• Hand-Picked Ale, 6.0% – Harvest ale with Colorado grown Cascade, Nugget, Red Vine and Chinook hops. Hazy, pale amber with creamy, white, lasting head. On nitro. Fresh, earthy hop aroma. Sort of bland finish, actually, flavors are kinda muddled.
• Isolation Ale – Bright, clear, caramel color with off-white head. Tastey, bready and biscuity malt aroma. English-style malt character in flavor with American hop flavors and bitterness. Medium-low/medium hop bitterness.
• Cutthroat Porter, 4.8% – On nitro. Same as above, just creamier.
• Cup of Joe, 8.1% – Imperial stout, cask-conditioned, brewed with fair-trade organic decaf. Opaque black with brown highlights (is brown a highlight?) and brown head. Roasted grain with chocolate notes and a touch of sourness underneath in the aroma. Sweet, roasted malt flavor with coffee notes and slight acidic sourness in the finish. Medium-high body, medium-high carbonation with slight acidic finish. Alcohol present in flavor, slight warming.

About halfway though my tastings, a Greyhound-type bus full of people pull in. It seems they’re all part of GABF and they’ve showed up for a beer and food pairing dinner they would be having once the tasting room was closed to the public. Sammy and I finish most of our tasters and we head out. Bonnie and Mike are a bit behind schedule as they’re stuck in traffic. It’s colder than anticipated as we wait outside for them. Sammy and I sneak back into the tasting room planning on staying until Mike and Bonnie show up but we instead get invited to the brewery tour. The tour was meant to be for the folks that are part of the beer and food pairing dinner but they were nice enough to let us tag along.

O’Dell is a has a combination mash/lauter tun with a 50 BBL brew kettle. Their fermentors are about 100 BBL but I believe they may have a few fermentors that can hold more. Some of the people on tour are brewers and owners of breweries themselves and they ask some pretty good questions, at least according to Sammy. I didn’t hear them because I was being a jerk.

At the time of the tour, one of the tour goers strikes up a conversation with me. I think the guy’s name is Steve. Anyway, me and Steve start to chat it up, he’s asking me homebrewing questions and I’m obliging him by answering. What I don’t realize is that I’m actually talking pretty loud. While I didn’t mean to, I’m sure I ended up a distraction for the other people on the tour. Being as dense as I am, I didn’t even note the subtle cues Sammy was giving me to “shut the fuck up”. I really feel bad about my actions as O’Dells was kind enough to let us on the tour even though we weren’t part of the “official” GABF tour. Plus, there were probably some really good questions being asked that I completely missed out on. I have to learn to keep my mouth shut sometimes while imploring Sammy to be less subtle and more overt with her hints.

We end the evening by hopping into Mike’s off road jeep. The thing sits on 37″ tires and has a monstrous V8 engine. We cruise around town and get a few more beers at CooperSmiths before taking a walking tour of downtown Ft. Collins. It was a pretty good way to end what had been a very good day.

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