New Belgium Brewing (Ft. Collins, CO)

 

Sour Beer indifferent to my notepad

Ah yes, the moment you may have been waiting for.  New Belgium Brewery.  The  Mecca of micro-brews.  The New Belgium Brewery itself is something to behold.  As a company they’ve managed to reduce their carbon footprint so much that you may as well call them completely self sufficient.  The process of making beer itself produces quite a lot of waste, either in cooked barley, waste water, and CO2 from all the energy required to brew it.  But New Belgium, among other more modern breweries out there, has taken the initiative to reduce their energy use from carbon fuels by becoming completely wind and solar powered and making their natural gas usage more efficient.  By treating their waste water with aerobic and anaerobic microbes, they are able to not only clean their waste water completely, but also harness the excess methane gas to power an on site turbine that in turn produces more green energy.  They even sell their spent grain from making the wort to feed cattle.  Frickin’ awesome! 

But the beer, the beer!  To say the beer New Belgium has been producing over the last twenty years was pivotal in inspiring the microbrew movement would be an understatement.  Personally, if it wasn’t for Fat Tire, I may have grown up thinking that Amber Bock or Michelob Ultra was really good beer.  Since those fateful days of senior year in high school, I’ve been pursuing quality brews wherever they may be found, all thanks to New Belgium.  Some may argue that New Belgium just isn’t what it used to be, or that they’ve become overshadowed by other fine breweries like their neighbors Odells, but quite frankly, that’s beside the point.  New Belgium has quite possibly been the gateway beer that has attracted so many youths like myself to put down the 12 pack of PBR and spend that extra few bucks to get Fat Tire, 2 Below, Beir du Marz, 1554, Tripple, or many of New Belgium’s other craft beers.  And is it any surprise that their distribution range has expanded nearly to the East coast?  What other young micro-brewery can tout that kind of success?  For me, when I first visited New Belgium a couple years ago for the first time, it was akin to a holy pilgrimage, something that every beer enthusiast dreams of, and returning again now certainly had a similar effect. 

Elite Fat Tire assault bikes.

Fat Tire:  Just in case you haven’t had a Fat Tire in the last 20 years of its existence, I’ll do my best to critique it.  If you have, you know full well how good it is.  Maybe not the best beer ever, but what it lacks in pizzazz it impresses with in cool, collected style and taste.  It’s the kind of amber by which all others must be judged.  Sweet, caramely, and down right refreshing.  Damn, makes me wish I were drinking one right now.

1554 Black Ale:  The darkest of NB’s brews, it’s based on a Belgium dark lager recipe that the master brewer picked up on while making his historic bike tour of Belgium way back in 1989.  It was the year 1554 that it was first introduced.  Dark (duh), malty, smooth, and hypnotizing, it is one of my favorite NB beers.

Bier Du Marz:  Though Beir Du Marz is no longer made, it was NB’s “octoberfestiest” beer that they produced, and damned if it wasn’t good and deserves some space in the hall of great beers in the sky, where all beers go to die.

Kick Sour Beer:  For their in-house specials that you can’t find bottled, NB had an array of sour beers on tap.  This one was a fall seasonal sour that combined pumpkin and cranberry with the jaw-curling power of sour beer.  Its smoothest sour yet and smacking of starbursts a little.

A space bug among us?

La Folie:  Their original sour beer, this is, amongst some, the nectar by which magical space bugs travel through space and time to secretly infest our planet and suckle upon.  Personally, the space bugs can have it, but Ali thinks it’s the best sour yet.  I’ve also been a little suspicious lately that Ali is indeed a space bug.

Rating:  139 out of 203 weaponized fortune cookies.