New Belgium Brewing, Fort Collins, CO

The ride north from the Denver area to the city of Fort Collins, Colorado, where the New Belgium Brewery is located, is only a little over an hour away and passes some beautiful scenery.  My husband and I wanted to take the free brewery tour of New Belgium Brewery, Colorado's biggest craft brewery since we moved here. Colorado is known for its variety of beer producers and is home to five of the top 50 craft breweries in the United States.

(All photos, and photo collages, in this post, will enlarge for easier viewing if clicked on)

New Belgium Brewery opened in 1991 after its founder, Jeff Lebesch, decided to take his homebrewing passion commercially.  If you enlarge the photo collage above by clicking on it, you can see the brewery's logo is a bicycle, and a bicycle is permanently parked outside.  The brewery's legend is that one of the co-founders was influenced by a bicycle trip he made through Belgium and Europe, tasting craft beers along the way.  When he returned home he developed and brewed his own amber ale, and named it "Fat Tire" in honor of that trip. Fat Tire Beer is now their flagship brand and the most popular beer

Bicycles are used as decorations throughout the brewery!

Most of the brewery employees bike to work in the brewery, which is located close to the bike path along the Cache La Poudre River. All employees have a stake in the ownership of the brewery, which they earn after one year's employment, along with a limited-edition Fat Tire Cruiser bicycle. After five years of employment, the company sends the employee on a trip for one week to Belgium!

The New Belgium Brewery utilizes sustainability and recycling in its operations. You can watch a new program video about many of these methods at this Youtube link.  They use solar and wind power to provide electricity in their plant, plus methane gas created as a byproduct of their on-site water treatment plant.

The brewery also uses an energy-efficient kettle for the brewing process, that heats twice as quickly, and provides significant savings in natural gas consumption,

I enjoyed photographing the colorful mosaics floor around the demonstration kettle on the tour.

The brewery has been named one of the "Best Places to Work" by many publications and organizations, as it promotes employee satisfaction and wellness. How could they lose with profit sharing, free bicycles, trips to Belgium, paid sabbaticals, and fun slides provided for the employees to use to travel from one floor to the next?  My husband had to try one out!

At the end of the free tour of the brewery, we were treated to samples of the different New Belgium Brewery beers in their tasting room. In addition to Fat Tire, they make Ranger IPA, Sunshine Wheat, Blue Paddle, Shift, and a litany of other beers--seasonal and artisanal blends. My husband and I really enjoyed the tour and would not hesitate to go again on another visit to Fort Collins.

New Belgium Brewery is located at 500 Linden St, in Fort Collins, Colorado, Tuesday - Sunday, 11AM to 6PM. Their free tours are very popular, so it is best if you book ahead of time

New Belgium Brewery is expanding and is opening a new brewery on the east coast, in Ashville, North Carolina sometime in 2015, so that they may have a market beyond their present 38 out of 50 states.

Have you tried any of the New Belgium Brewery beers? Do you have a favorite?

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Coors Brewery, Golden, Colorado

A co-worker from the company my husband works for in Manhattan, flew in last Monday to do an audit in the Colorado office on Tuesday, and we took her around locally for a quick tour. Unfortunately, the usual bright blue Colorado skies were overcast that day and visibility of this beautiful area were less than ideal.  We drove up nearby Morrison to show her the fabulous outdoor Red Rocks Park and Amphitheater, as you can see by the collage above, but I'll save explaining more about this remarkable area for a more scenic day when I can take better photos of it.

Next, we took an exciting spin through some of the roads through the foothills...watch out for falling rocks!

The drive was very scenic, even if the weather wasn't cooperating with us.

We then entered the charming town of Golden, Colorado.

Golden lies along Clear Creek at the edge of the foothills of the Front Range of the Rocky Mountains. Founded during the Pike's Peak Gold Rush in June of 1859, the mining camp was originally named Golden City in honor of Thomas L. Golden, a miner from Georgia, United States, who was one of the earliest prospectors in the area.

The very large red Coors Brewery sign is easy to spot in town. The company is now known as MillerCoors (one word) after both companies merged in 2008. The brewery building is the largest of its kind in the world! The brewery is one of the top global brewers in the world, with more than 40 brands in its portfolio.

Tours of the Coors Brewery are free and conducted Thursday through Monday from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. and Sunday 12:00 to 4 p.m., and begin in the southeast corner of the visitor parking lot, at 13th and Ford Street. Guests under 18 years old must be accompanied by an adult.

Adolph Coors (1847 - 1929) apprenticed at a brewery in Prussia during his teens and immigrated as a penniless stowaway to America in 1868 to realize his dreams of becoming a brewer. Adolph opened the Golden Brewery (later Coors Brewing Company) in Colorado and tapped his first barrel in 1873. He specifically chose this area of the country as he felt it had the perfect water for producing a high-quality beer.

The brewery tour is around a 30-minute self-paced, walk through of the brewery. The process of making beer is described through an audio player recording we were provided with, and also through informative dioramas and picture windows looking down on the actual brewery's malting, brewing, and packaging processes.  I was fascinated to learn that Coors recycles or reuses an average of 95% of the solid waste it produces, from spent grain yeast to alcohol.

At one point during the tour a small sample of freshly brewed Coors beer or Coors Light beer, direct from the barrels, is given to each guest over 21.

The tour culminates in the hospitality lounge, where each guest over the age of 21, with a valid ID, is allowed to sample three of Coors fine products.  Non-alcoholic beverages are also available. There is also the opportunity to shop in the Coors and Co. gift shop.

We sampled Batch 19 Beer, which is an amber lager made from a recently rediscovered pre-prohibition formula. It is now available in select cities. We also enjoyed our personal favorite, the slightly sweet, orange essence Blue Moon Belgium white beer.

Afterward, we walked into town to enjoy a nice hot lunch at a local eatery and let our beers digest.  It was a good thing we did, as we took a Coors brewery tour guide's suggestion to take a drive to a nearby destination.....

....can you see it in the hazy distance? It's Lookout Mountain! At 7,581 feet, it is one of the larger foothills which overlooks Golden, Colorado, and the site of some interesting historical sights. I'll show you what we saw on a future blog post!

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