New Belgium Brewing is a great place for twenty- and early-thirty-somethings to find a job. The Fort Collins brewery — Colorado’s largest craft beer maker — was named one of the best places to work for millennial employees in America. To create the list, the Center for Generational Kinetics partnered…

With hundreds of craft breweries already pouring beer in Colorado and dozens of new operations planning to open, it’s important for each one to find a way to stand out. “Everybody is always trying to do something different,” says attorney Robert Runco, who specializes in liquor laws. But “something different” can…

There’s been a rumble rising from deep inside the Oskar Blues headquarters in Longmont over the past few months, but it’s been difficult to figure out what, exactly, is making all of that noise. It’s certainly not the beer. The answer may lie in a financial arrangement between the craft…

“There’s plenty of money out there. They print more every day. But this ticket, there’s only five of them in the whole world, and that’s all there’s ever going to be,” Grandpa George said in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. “Only a dummy would give this up for something as…

Pug Ryan’s has been a Summit County favorite for four decades, evolving slowly, ever so slowly, from a restaurant and bar into a brewpub in 1996. In 2004, Pug’s became one of the first Colorado breweries to begin canning beer, and this month, the spot began distributing its first-ever canned…

As we reported last week, the historic El Rancho restaurant and conference center, which closed in 2012, is set to reopen later this year under new ownership as a brewpub; the iconic log-cabin building, which sits just off of I-70 at the exit for Evergreen, has a storied history. The original…

Denver Beer Co wants you to get outside. When the brewery began canning last year, it kicked off an unusual program in which a variety of GPS coordinates were printed on its cans. The coordinates corresponded to locations throughout the state. Whoever found them, took  pictures there and then turned…

Some of Oregon’s best breweries — including Breakside, Oakshire, Gigantic and Cascade — have invaded Colorado over the past year, delighting beer fans here and further crowding bulging tap menus and store shelves. But the newest Oregon arrival is likely to cause a little more controversy. Earlier this month, Bend-based…

River North Brewery is growing fast — and is currently looking for a new location to expand its production — but it continues to keep a focus on experimentation. For the past three years, the brewery has channeled that experimentation into its series of Wayward Wednesday tappings, which typically put…

One third of the small businesses that opened across the country in 2010 closed by 2012. Half of them will be gone by the end of this year. Those numbers, which are kept by the U.S. Department of Labor, stay roughly the same year in and year out. So when…

American Craft Beer Week plows forward over the next few days, and while the designation is hardly needed anymore in Colorado where every week is essentially an American Craft Beer Week, the nationwide festival — which celebrates small and independent brewers — is certainly important in other states. Which is…

Chain Reaction Brewing, which will celebrate its one-year anniversary next month, gave itself an early present last week when it installed a seven-barrel system that it bought from friends at Lone Tree Brewing. The twenty-year-old system has no bells or whistles and has been used by at least three other…

Colorado’s independently-owned breweries and liquor stores love the fact that supermarkets and convenience stores here aren’t allowed to sell full-strength beer at most of their locations: the decades-old system, they say, protects small and medium-sized businesses and allows for a much wider selection of beers on store shelves. It’s a…

Golden City Brewery — which was founded in 1993 as Golden’s “2nd Largest Brewery,” has been slowly changing and expanding over the last year, eliminating the kitchen, renovating the taproom, adding new fermentation and serving tanks and walk-in cooler capacity, expanding its distribution and ramping up its packaging with a…

River North Brewery, which opened at 24th and Blake streets in February 2012 as the first new beer maker in the district, may become a victim of the neighborhood it is named after. But that isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Brewery founder Matthew Hess says that the owners of his…

TRVE Brewing (2015 winner of Westword’s Best Brewery Tap Room — Beer) cranked up its new production facility for the first time last week, brewing a saison that will be released later this month. Until now, TRVE, which was founded in June 2012, has made all of its beer at…

When a wall of water surged through downtown Denver at around 8 p.m. on June 16, 1965, it destroyed hundreds of homes and businesses and changed the course of the city’s history. One of the businesses that was wrecked in the flood (the subject of this week’s Westword cover story,…

Oskar Blues and residents of Longmont, Colorado, and Brevard, North Carolina, raised $7,000 last week at fundraisers designed to help Michelle Wilkins, the Longmont woman who was attacked by Dynel Lane, who was pretending to sell baby and maternity clothes on Craigslist; that story made national and international headlines because of…

The Colorado craft-brewing scene is growing — which means that several head brewers are going. There have been several high-profile changes recently at the area’s top breweries. The first took place when Great Divide head brewer Taylor Rees, who had been with the brewery for ten years, teamed up with Austin…

The 32nd annual Craft Brewers Conference just wrapped up, and if things seemed a little quieter in Denver last weekend, that was because hundreds of local brewery-industry folks were in Portland, Oregon, to participate in the trade show. At the CBC, OvalOptions for Conflict Management, a Denver firm, announced that…

Tommyknocker Brewery, whose logo and location in the Colorado foothills have given it a rustic, mountain-town image over the past two decades, has begun exporting that image overseas — to Helsinki, Finland. In March Captol Invest, a Finnish restaurant-investment group, opened the Tommyknocker Craft Beer Bar in Helsinki, serving eight different…