Paul McMorrow – Snappy Title TK TK

This time last week, I was sitting in DIA, waiting to take the red-eye back to Boston. We’d spent the long weekend skiing, gawking at the Rockies, and drinking tons of great beer. After the jump, you’ll find a recap and a scattershot collection of photos. Read on! Or not.

We started out in Denver, where I got to sit down with Great Divide’s founder, Brian Dunn. Brian showed us some incredible hospitality – especially for New Year’s afternoon. The brewery’s a couple blocks from Coors Field, though when Great Divide opened in 1994, the neighborhood was full of empty warehouses and the homeless, and not much else. I had some brewery-fresh Old Ruffian and Hades, interviewed Brian for the March issue of Beer Advocate magazine, and afterward, Brian was good enough to show everybody around the brewery.

It’s in an old dairy facility, which means sloped floors, drains, and a few less headaches at startup time. It does not, however, mean that big-ass fermenters go into the building easily: To accommodate one expansion, Great Divide had to knock out a first-floor ceiling. Line of the afternoon: While walking past the bottling line, Brian glanced at a lonely plastic chair – there’s just one guy working on the second floor – and said, “It, uh, takes a special type of person.”

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The next day, we got up to Boulder, and after some gut-stuffing breakfast at Lucile’s, hit the Boulder Beer Company. I’d spotlighted Boulder brewmaster David Zuckerman for the July ‘08 issue of Beer Advocate, but that’s no reason not to grab a sample of everything on tap and wander around the brewery. Which – again, thanks to some amazingly gracious hospitality – David let us do.

There were a couple dozen hopheads on the civilian tour, and David was nice enough to hustle us in front of them and take us around the brewery himself. His reward: incessant hectoring from a co-worker from the marketing department, who would like you all to know that this is Boulder’s thirtieth anniversary. Guess those ten reminders paid off.

Two floors of the Boulder brewery are crammed full of fermenters and bright tanks. There’s no place to expand but outside. And that’s the centerpiece of the Boulder tour – their kinda new 300-barrel tank. It takes 24 hours to fill it with Hazed and Infused. That’s time well spent. We didn’t grab a shot of it, but there’s a decades-old photo hanging inside the brewery’s pub of Boulder’s founders alongside Michael Jackson and Charlie Papazian. They’re all sporting some rather excellent mustaches. And the relationship lives on: Boulder’s Cold Hop IPA is a Papazian recipe, in addition to being awesome.

On to Aspen. Didn’t make it to the town’s new brewpub, but I did get to taste some of their Independence Pass IPA. Whoa. Real good stuff. You’ll be hearing a lot from these guys soon.

Last stop was the Coors plant in Golden. The scale of the place was impressive – they’ve got dozens and dozens of massive copper kettles, and a mind-numbingly vast packaging room – though the tour wasn’t the world’s greatest. After having two brewmasters show us around their plants themselves, wandering the Coors hallways while some robot handset dude droned on and on about nothing – uh, yeah. Plus, Coors is curiously quiet about the better aspects of its operation, like its Blue Moon SandLot brewery. You’d think that if your brewers are consistently winning gold medals, they’d merit more mentions than Keystone Light.

But, all in all, way to be awesome, Colorado. We’ll be back soon.