Denver is in a frenzy over both tonight’s debate and next week’s beer-soaked Great American Beer Festival . And sometimes the two obsessions even come together! To check out all the GABF-inspired events, go to our Great American Beer Festival 2012 Calendar of Awesome, which we’re updating regularly. (The regular…

Los Angeles-based Golden Road Brewing, an upstart craft brewer that’s managed to make waves in a town that sees them every single day, will release its latest canned beer, Burning Bush, in Denver during the Great American Beer Festival. But the beer — and the one-year-old brewery — won’t be…

Malt, water, hops, yeast…and bull testicles. That’s the recipe for the ballsiest beer that Denver’s Wynkoop Brewing Company has made in its 24-year history, and one that it will start serving on October 8 during Great American Beer Festival week. Rocky Mountain Oyster Stout, which started off as an April…

Harry Smith, who has been making beer for Breckenridge Brewery for eleven years, will open his own place early next year — just a block away from where he now works. “I can go to work, and then go to work,” jokes Smith, who will stay with Breckenridge until he…

President Obama has been making a point of drinking beer on the campaign trail this year, from Pennsylvania to Iowa to Florida. It was a sore spot for him in 2008 when he was seen more as a wine-slurper than an an everyday beer-drinking kind of fellow, but it’s a…

The Great American Beer Festival is coming, and you want to make sure you’re properly tubbed and scrubbed, but ordinary ablutions aren’t going to cut it — not for the biggest beer festival in the world. For that, you are going to have to put beer on your body as…

Updated with new events: Tourists may go to Rome to see the Coliseum, but it’s the side streets, the adventures and the hidden cafes that typically fill their cameras and their post-trip stories. The same is true of the week surrounding the Great American Beer Festival. The event is the…

Former Mountain Sun brewers Brian Hutchinson and Jason Stengl have left the company to open their own place in Golden later this year. Cannonball Creek Brewery will be the second craft brewer in a town that sits in the shadow of the Coors plant. Hutchinson, who was the head brewer…

Earlier this month, President Obama’s designated the 4,700-acres Chimney Rock Archaeological Area in southwestern Colorado — an area that is sometimes called “America’s Stonehenge” — as a national monument. The move means that the area between Durango and Pagosa Springs (which was home to thousands of ancient Native Americans) should…

Mayor Michael Hancock: beer geek. Okay, that might be a slight exaggeration. Still, Hizzoner will make his second appearance at a Denver craft brewery in as many weeks when he kicks off Prost Brewing’s three-day Oktoberfest celebration this Friday and taps the first keg of the brewery’s new Märzen lager,…

Update, September 28: Crooked Stave is now serving draft beer again after having come to resolution with the Department of Revenue’s tobacco and liquor enforcement division. It turns out that Crooked Stave owner Chad Yakobson, who has researched Colorado’s odd liquor rules, had asked Funkwerks Brewing in Fort Collins, where…

Can craft beer be an ingredient in a cocktail, or should it stand alone? That is the question that dozens of bartenders around town have tried to answer over the past few years as Colorado’s world-beating craft-beer industry intersected with the resurgent cocktail movement. It’s a question that still hasn’t…

The Update, September 28: Crooked Stave is now serving draft beer again after having come to resolution with the Department of Revenue’s tobacco and liquor enforcement division. It turns out that Crooked Stave owner Chad Yakobson, who has researched Colorado’s odd liquor rules, had asked Funkwerks Brewing in Fort Collins,…

The Alpha King Challenge, a low-key hoppy-beer contest that takes place every year during the Great American Beer Festival, will move this October from the Falling Rock Taphouse, which has hosted it for thirteen years, to the Rock Bottom Restaurant. The move seems like a strange one for Hopunion, the…

Beer cocktails have found a niche at bars across Colorado over the past two years, as mixologists look for new ways to blend flavors. On Sunday, September 23, eight of the city’s finest bartenders will gather at Ghost Plate & Tap and do battle with one another in the Beer…

Jeff Griffith, who has been making award-winning beers for Golden City Brewery for the past eight years, will head up Highway 93 to take a new job as head brewer for Fate Brewing, which plans to open in Boulder in December. Fate Brewing owner Mike Lawinski says Griffith brings “an…

It’s Oktoberfest season, and you can find out about all of the parties on the next few pages. But in the meantime, more news: Elevation Beer Company in Poncha Springs announced yesterday that it plans to double its brewing capacity — just four months after opening. The brewery, which specializes…

Great Divide will celebrate the seven-barrel pilot brewing system it acquired last December by tapping eight different small-batch beers today. The Denver brewery bought the system as a way to allow its brewers to experiment with one-off beers, special releases and new recipes. The equipment complements Great Divide’s existing fifty-barrel…

As evidenced by the name of the restaurant, Hops & Pie has considered beer as important as pizza since the spot opened two years ago, serving up the best or the rarest stuff beers it can find, from Colorado and around the country. And by this time next year, Hops…