Top 10 Colorado Craft Beers

Crooked Stave Artisan Brewing Project - Surrette Sour

Chad Yakobson, the founder and director of the Crooked Stave Artisan Brewing Project, ages his beer in barrels and massive oak wood foedres crammed into a small industrial park on the outskirts of Denver. From the outside, it feels more like a storage unit – and this being Denver, the brewery’s neighbors are marijuana grow rooms. The humble location is at odds with the sophistication of Yakobson’s operation, which grew out of his graduate-level work studying Brettanomyces (wild beer yeast) fermentations in Edinburgh, Scotland. Yakobson brings scientific rigor to each batch of Crooked Stave beer, which he refers to as a “prototype.” Surrette, named after the French word for tart, is probably the most approachable wild yeast beer we’ve ever tasted. Yakobson calls it a “provision saison” because it is slightly higher in alcohol than most saisons and aged two to 18 months before it’s readied for drinking.

Surrette is composed of four different grains in addition to malted barley, wheat, rye, spelt, and oats. The body holds up well and the flavor is rustic, earthy, and just slightly tart, thanks to aging in large French oak foudres with Brett and Lactobacillus, another souring agent. While Brett is notorious for imparting an often off-putting, horse-blanket barnyard flavor and aroma, Surrette is remarkably clean tasting and easy drinking.

River North - Unified Theory (Oak-aged Imperial Wit)

We rolled into the tasting room of River North the day after it celebrated its first anniversary party, greeted by a red-eyed staff. After working our way through a flight of the brewer’s beers, we understood its pain. Most of the brews that it produces are way too strong to drink in quantities, but also way too tasty to put down. Unified Theory, an Oak-aged Imperial Wit, was the worst offender. Like any Oak-aged Imperial Wit, it’s rippingly strong at 8.5 percent, light in color, and packed with fruity and spicy flavors layered over an understated malt base. The addition of toasted oak spirals into the fermenter adds a great mellow vanilla flavor to the beer.

Odell Brewing Company - India Pale Ale

Not every brewery in Colorado offers an India Pale Ale as part of its year-round lineup, but most do. There are English-style IPAs, American interpretations, double IPAs, and Belgian IPAs everywhere. It’s clear that brewers throughout the state are looking for a way to showcase the big hop flavors that have made IPAs such a hit.

The best of the bunch was Odell Brewing Company‘s, which emphasized all of our favorite hallmarks of an American brand of IPA: Big, citrusy, and piney hop flavors and aromas, and a malt backbone that is just pronounced enough to stand up to the prominent, but not overwhelming, hop bitterness. Best of all, Odell emphasizes the sessionable drinkability to go along with the big assertive flavors that make the beer so popular.

Ska Brewing Buster Nut Brown Ale

Nut Brown Ales are mellow, easy drinkers in the British tradition, but a glance at the zoot-suit-wearing, cigar-chomping, foot-stomping figure on the label of Ska Brewing‘s Buster Nut Brown Ale will clue you in that this one’s different. The beer is light brown with a creamy head, and the nose is a dense mix of toasted malts, caramel nuttiness, and chocolate. It’s rich and malty without sacrificing a bit of drinkability at 5.2 percent alcohol by volume. In all, the Buster Nut is representative of everything we love about the American brown Ale tradition – mingling old-world traditions with a willingness to turn up the volume and have fun.

Funkwerks' Dark Prophet, Belgian dark strong ale

Colorado has plenty of cold, snowy days – and strong, comforting ales to match. On the chilliest days in the Centennial State, we ducked into a bar called Freshcraft and ordered Dark Prophet, a Belgian-style dark strong ale from Funkwerks. This brewery earned its greatest acclaim and the title of Small Brewery of the Year at 2012’s Great American Beer Festival for its “saison,” a classic summer beer.

Funkwerks also happens to make one of the best winter sippers we’ve ever tasted. The dark strong style is all about strength and complexity, and Dark Prophet has both in spades. Raisin, plum, cloves, brown sugar, vanilla, and light hints of bourbon intermingle with the aroma and flavor profile. And despite all that, we swear we’ve never tasted a drier beer.

New Belgium - Fat Tire

Denver’s Falling Rock tavern features 86 tap handles, but one of the fastest movers is also one of Colorado’s most widely distributed and approachable beers: Fat Tire. “It’s a bit of a training-wheels beer for people just getting into craft beer, but it tastes great and it’s one of the fastest movers here,” says Falling Rock’s Chris Black. It would be easy to take the comment as damning if you couldn’t hear his obvious enthusiasm. He’s right on: Fat Tire leans a bit in the malty direction with just a hint of the fermentation flavors that brewers call esters to keep it interesting. It’s easy drinking and viciously sessionable.

Wynkoop Brewing Company - Colorojo

How much do Coloradans love their beer? Enough to elect John Hickenlooper, the founder of Denver’s first brewpub, Wynkoop Brewing Company, into the governor’s chair. Taste the beer, and you might cast a vote yourself. In general, we’ve found brewpub beer, in Denver as elsewhere, to be a decidedly hit-or-miss affair. At Wynkoop, there were more hits than misses, and we enjoyed a couple of great ones while we shot some pool in the brewery’s massive billiards hall on the second floor.

We liked its IPA, but the best beer at Wynkoop is called Colorojo – a massively hoppy imperial red that dripped with citrus and helped soothe the separation anxiety that we felt from missing out on prime Nugget Nectar season on the East Coast.

Prost - Altfrankisches Dunkel Bier

Prost Brewing company has only had its doors open since August 2012, but it’s already making German-style beers that taste as though they came from a Franconian brewhouse. And, in a sense, they do. Prost’s gleaming 70-barrel copper kettles, and the byzantine pipes and controls that connect them, were ripped from a defunct German brewery in Franconia, then shipped to Denver. “There was no manual, so it took me six months to put it all back together, but I enjoyed it,” says Prost brewmaster Bill Eye.

Eye spent the last 10 years as the brewmaster at Dry Dock Brewing, where he earned acclaim and an armful of Great American Beer Festival medals for his Hefeweizen. Prost makes a great Hefeweizen with the same yeast, but the beer that excited us most on our visit was the Altfrankisches Dunkel. The beer is an homage to the brewery that Prost bought its equipment from, and it’s as toasty and delicious as any dunkel we’ve tasted.

Oskar Blues Brewing Company - Dale's Pale Ale

The Longmont-based Oskar Blues Brewing Company became the first craft brewery in the U.S. to distribute its beer in cans back in 2002, so it’s no surprise that its Dale’s Pale can be found everywhere. That’s in part because you can take cans pretty much anywhere, but also because Dale’s Pale is a fantastically tasty and easy-drinking Pale Ale even now that canning is fairly unremarkable in the craft world. “It’s amazing that they’re keeping the quality so high even with all that growth,” says Chris Black. “They’re really doing amazing things.” It’s a hard point to argue. Dale’s Pale Ale is a bit stronger and hoppier than most pale ales and it does smudge the distinction between pale ale and IPA a bit, but when a beer’s this good we don’t quibble – we just drink it.