Day 77 (Wednesday 9/5/12)- Fort Collins, CO

　
If you read Saturday's blog you already know that we have good reason to love New Belgium. Today we got several more reasons. (Yes, Kurt we went back to Fort Collins. Yes, we are aware that it is in the opposite direction).

We have found two types of beer tours. The first- breweries with good beer and cool people, but people too cool to give legitimate tours. The second- breweries that are possibly too big to make interesting beers, but who can put in a little money to train their employees on public speaking and company history.

I doubt New Belgium will be surpassed on its excellency on the tour/beer/samples trifecta. Perhaps this is the zenith, but don't worry, we'll keep trying.

I'll start from the beginning so you get the full effect. To get anyway near a tour at New Belgium you have to make reservations in advance. On our first trip through town they were booked for days. We had the foresight to get our reservations, but still almost missed another tour. Running late again and again literally running, we picked the closest door, which happened not be the main entrance or the door to the tour check in, but one that led to the brewhouse, which happened to be the first stop of the tour already in progress. Had we chosen another door we would have probably been turned away. Another piece of luck was getting Lauren as our our tour guide. She reminded us of our friend Addy. She was cool, yet enthusiastic. Informative if not professional. Describing the company's genesis: the founder, when in Belgium, having found an old Brewmaster to teach him beer secrets, "geeked out hard." On the topic of their Belgian tripple: "drink tripple til you see double and start acting single." Exhausting in her exhaustiveness, she talked for an hour and a half, served us 4 sample beers in as many buildings and breathed maybe 3 times.

If the camera had been working we would have more pictures than necessary, but since it drowned I will try my best to describe New Belgium. Each area we visited had some sort of cool addition. In the brew kettle room the floors were lined with multi-colored tile murals, the barrel-aging area was equipped with a climbing wall (a present to employees on the brewery's 10-year anniversary. Very cool, but more ornamental than functional, as Lauren explained, in order to climb it employees must wear safety gear and be sober and thus it "gets used very little"), the ceiling of the bottling room was lined with a beautiful beer bottle light fixture and the packaging area had chandeliers made of Fat Tire beer cans. At the end of the tour we even got to go down a slide built right into the brewery. It was fast, in tight spirals, and made of unfriendly metal. Apparently here you don't need safety gear or sobriety.

The bar itself had a nice laid back vibe, so much so we spent a good chunk of the afternoon there, Isaiah sipping on exclusive specialty beers. Sour beer (not a bitter hoppy beer, but a full on, purposeful, spent years souring sour beer) and a chocolate mole jalapeno pepper beer were favorites (Yes, favorites). As DD I was stuck with seltzer water. But even that tasted like the best apple cider of my life. It came out of a self serve dispenser and I dispensed with multiple glasses. All the employees were super helpful and friendly (likely because as co-owners they get paid well enough to send their bar tips to charity. After 10 years with the company they are sent on a 6-week paid sebatical).

New Belgium is also clearly committed to the environment- they were the first brewery to get 100% of their electricity from wind power.

Following our visit to New Belgium we stumbled next door to the Odell Brewing Company. Even ignoring the great fun of New Belgium, Odell's was nothing much to talk about but we got a tour and a beer and they've doubled their size in the past few years.