Avery Brewery (Boulder, CO)

Slightly less serious beer country.

We left Paonia two giant zucchinis richer, but now that we were clearing the grandeur of the I-70 mountain pass and heading for Denver, we knew that two zucchinis or not, we were heading for serious beer country.  Serious.  The larger Denver metropolitan area; including Boulder, Longmont, and Lyons, is host to enough breweries to either get all the cattle in Texas drunk for two nights or support a small pod of mythical beer dolphins for life.  And I’m not even talking about the Coors or Buttweiper breweries, I mean microbreweries only.  Serious beer country.

Well ahead of our arrival, we had been mapping and planning our conquest of this beer Mecca, and on the menu for the night was Avery Brewery in Boulder.  Avery had come highly recommended by numerous trusted sources, my older brother amongst them, who would be personally escorting us to the brewery.

Jeff about to explode with Bacchanalia

Our first impression of Avery was a mixed one.  At first I was intrigued by the twenty-odd taps along the wall and a beer list that could be confused for a novella.  Then I was confounded by what looked like a fraternity rush taking place at the bar.  Our waitress even had to excuse herself to go chug a beer with the boys before she could take our order.  Hmmm…

Fortunately another waitress stepped in to do some damage control, but either way we were left feeling slighted.  It got me thinking though of how we interact with beer.  The noisy, cursing patrons inside were doing exactly what most college kids do with beer: consume it to get drunk fast and maybe hook-up with someone…or something.  We on the other hand were there to snob the snobbiest of breweries, but it seemed our snobbery was grossly out of place!  What gives?  Does no one respect self-proclaimed and unqualified critics in this town?

This is good beer...except that one.

It just goes to show that despite the high quality of any beer, it’s only as good as the people drinking it.  As with food, cinema, music, and art in general, it all comes down to taste.  Some people either appreciate the subtle notes of caramel and coriander in a beer, and some people just don’t give a rat’s ass about it.  But no matter what it does for you, so long as you enjoy it, who’s to say whose taste is better than another’s?  Well, I guess I could:

Imperial Oktoberfest:  What?  Imperial?  Oktoberfest?  Beer?  Again, everyone wants to be hip and chic, and of course Avery’s got to one-up everyone and get the royal Czar of Oktoberland to piss in their beer.  Magical piss or not, its still good.

Brown:  Tastes like a drunken, wet dog.  Seriously.  Don’t ask me how I’d know what a drunken wet dog tastes like.  I drank the beer.  I know. 

A toxic cloud o'death's view of our beer

Salvation:  Tastes like the usual promises the clergy make when trying to win over converts:  bile. 

Mark of the Beast:  6 hops, 6 sugars, 6 barleys.  Six pints of this extraordinarily strong beer and you’ll need six days to work it off.  Black and potent. Be warned, this bad boy will eat your soul.

Eremite:  This was our first encounter with a sour beer.  At first I didn’t know what to think of it, but after a few sips, you come to enjoy it.  It’s brewed in old white wine barrels over the course of a few years, giving it a sparkling, sweet yet potently sour and tart champagne-like taste.  Good.

"EWWW! Get a room!"

Old Jubilator:  Despite of the cloud of rotting death that blew in from the Greenly feedlot in the East, this beer still managed to stand out as exceptionally good.  That’s kind of a big deal.  I mean stinking, thick, nightmarish cloud of death stench.  Satan’s diarrhea foul.   Yeah, that’s good beer.

Rating:  67 out of 89 sorority girls grossed-out by public displays of affection.