Bars & Breweries

Colorado’s biggest little beer festival returns to Breckenridge for the second time on January 4-6, 2018, with some upgrades and improvements. Tickets for the Big Beers, Belgians and Barleywines Festival go on sale today at 10 a.m. at bigbeersfestival.com — and they will sell out very, very quickly. Here’s a…

The owner of the Stockyards Saloon says his bar has to close. But Fred Orr, who owns the building that houses that bar, says the news reports are all wet: the bar should be able to keep pouring through the next Stock Show.

Did you feel that? It was a slight breeze on a hot day, but it carried with it just a tiny hint of cold temperatures, and it made you shiver. And that shiver set off a chain reaction in your brain that let you know fall is on its way…

Brian O’Connell has never been a big fan of pumpkin beers, a popular but polarizing fall beer, and he hadn’t had time to brew a New England-style IPA, which has become one of the most controversial, most talked-about new styles to hit the craft-beer world in a  while. But the…

Maybe it’s because the United States only imports foreign holidays that involve a lot of drinking. Maybe it’s because there’s now a direct flight between Denver and Munich, Germany. Or maybe it’s because craft-beer drinkers are tired of relying on pumpkin brews for their seasonal fall treats. Whatever the reason,…

I’m not sure how I’ve never been to the Highland Tavern before. It’s at the corner of West 34th Avenue and Navajo Street, right down the block from the Bug Theatre, one of the places I used to frequent back when the local comedy show the Grawlix was still around…

A moose head on the wall, a creek out back, a biker out front: Colorado bars aren’t all about craft beer and mixology. Metro Denver boasts thousands of watering holes, but sometimes you thirst for a downhome saloon where getting there is half the fun…and the rest is all setting, history and, yes, alcohol. Here are Colorado’s ten most iconic bars.

As competition for shelf space heats up in the world of craft beer, bigger breweries are endeavoring to stay nimble, trying new things — and occasionally throwing everything against the wall to see what sticks. Odell Brewing, which is Colorado’s third largest craft-beer maker, has released a slew of new…

You probably haven’t heard of the second-largest brewery in Denver, but you definitely know the beers brewed there: Station 26 Brewing’s Citra IPA, Black Shirt Brewing’s Stringbender Saison, the Post Brewing’s Townie Ale, and the brand-new Weldwerks Brewing’s Alpha Bits New England-Style IPA, among others. Sleeping Giant Brewing, which was…

Chopper’s Sports Grill, at 80 South Madison Street in Cherry Creek, is an “old Denver” sort of place. Cherry Creek itself is sort of an old classic when it comes to neighborhoods, with parts experiencing a new development boom, while other blocks — like those closer to Colorado Boulevard — seem…

The year was 2014. The sun was shining, the flowers were blooming and Ska Brewing was getting ready to introduce a new year-round beer, Rudie Session Ale, a 4.5 percent ABV IPA made with Galaxy and El Dorado hops. Rudie — which Ska tagged with the line “Rudie can’t fail,”…

Beer can grease a lot of wheels in this country, but it’s not magic. So, members of the Colorado Brewers Guild have been hosting a program called Hop the Vote for the past four years to help get to know their elected officials in the Colorado General Assembly. The program invites legislators…

For the first time since it was founded in 1991, Breckenridge Brewery won’t have a table at the Great American Beer Festival — at least, not according to current plans. Neither will Elysian Brewing, Wicked Weed, 10 Barrel or Goose Island, which are all missing from the GABF list of participating breweries that…

For craft-beer lovers who live inside Denver’s city limits, there’s not a lot of motivation to drive to a suburban brewery. For starters, there are dozens of terrific choices close by. There is also traffic, which gets worse every week, and the fact that no one wants to drive a…

The town of Windsor lost a little piece of its history and a little bit of its soul on August 6 when someone set fire to a 118-year old former flour mill that locals had described as being like an old friend. Built in 1899, the four-story mill had managed…

While the majority of breweries in Colorado have patios — some of them open rain, snow or shine — the action of ordering a beer usually takes place inside. But in the last month, two Denver breweries have added outdoor bars, an uncommon amenity, in an effort to add some…

Milo’s Sports Tavern has come to be a neighborhood standby for the folks of Southeast Denver over the last fifteen years. The bar has been Milo’s since 2002 and was originally a part of the B.U.F.F. Brothers conglomerate. When that started to be broken up in 2011, Thomas Clark, one of…

New Belgium has been making tiny batches of one-off sour beers for years, but it hasn’t ever packaged them, focusing instead on its larger sour creations, like La Folie and Transatlantique Kriek. But last month, the Fort Collins-based brewery revealed that it had put an end to its acclaimed Lips…

You can find most Coors products everywhere, but Barman, a special pilsner named after the hometown of brewery founder Adolph Herman Joseph Coors, is tougher to locate. It’s brewed at AC Golden, and sold at only sixteen bars in metro Denver.

Bierstadt Lagerhaus is very particular about its beer…and the glasses its poured into. The brewery is the only one in Colorado to insist that its beer be sold in its own glassware….and many bars are willing to comply.

From the outside, Crazy Mountain Brewing’s path over the past few years has seemed, well, a little crazy. Founded in 2010 in Vail Valley, it expanded rapidly by packaging and distributing beer to other states and overseas, using the recognition it had earned from tourists who’d visited. Then in 2015,…