Beers of Fort Collins

There is nothing better than spending a summer day drinking great beers, except maybe spending the whole day drinking good beer fresh from the brewery. That’s what about five of my friends and I did in Fort Collins, Colorado last week. We went on a Fort Collins brewery adventure at three different breweries. The largest was Budweiser, and let me just say that I have a new respect for Bud. Their beer is still not that great, but their commitment to tradition and historic greatness was clearly displayed at the brewery. The brewery really showed what traditional Anheuser Busch was all about. And with doing that, they really showed up Coors. The landscape was immaculate and the tap/tasting room was pretty cool, right in front of the building, not hidden in the basement like at Coors.

New Belgium Brewing Company is in a league of its own. It’s the 3rd largest microbrewery in the nation and around the 5th largest brewery in the nation by overall sales and consumption. They have a commitment to great beer that most breweries their size just can’t manage. They are able to produce a ton of different great beers without replacing some key ingredients with corn, like Bud and Coors.

New Belgium not only has a commitment to great beer, but they have incredible respect for the environment and are committed to sustainable business practices and the community of Fort Collins. The brewery itself runs on solar, wind and methane energies that they produce themselves as a natural byproduct from the brewing process. There are so many other ways that New Belgium is able to save and even dramatically cut energy use by just being smart. Their brewing process uses about a third of the energy most other breweries use just to heat the water for brewing. One major step that New Belgium has taken to lessen their environmental impact is the construction of their own onsite water treatment facility. This facility is connected directly to the Fort Collins water system, supplying clean water to Fort Collins at almost no cost to the residents. Great stuff.

The tour of New Belgium’s brew house was not really your typical brewery tour; it was more of a slap in the face to other breweries, calling them out on how they could be producing a better product with a lesser environmental impact. Plus, we got five free beers on the tour and one more after. Needless to say, it was a great tour, and I was very glad to have a DD.

The third brewery we stopped at was the Odell Brewing Company, a great local brewery that is well known and distributed around the country. We didn’t have time to take a tour but we sat in the taproom and had our fare share of tasters (Full pint tasters. Again, very glad to have a DD.) Odell did some cool things with their beers. They had an IPA served on Nitrogen, and it was probably one of the best IPA’s I have ever had, creamy and smooth with just the right kick of hops. Hopefully I will have some time to take a real tour of Odell, and you’ll hear about it when it happens.