Congratulations! You’ve decided to join about 14,999 fellow beer lovers in cramming into the Colorado Convention Center for at least one session of the Great American Beer Festival Oct. 6-8. Not even our beloved Great Taste of the Midwest can match its coast-to-coast diversity or pils-to-stout quantity.
I have a theory about the relationship between GABF and Great Taste, one that my friends have heard a billion times, so, sorry guys. At Great Taste, you’re being served by the brewers and brewery staff, by rule. They’re the ones who made the beer, and, more importantly, they’re the ones who lugged the beer to Madison from Cleveland or Edina or Bloomington-Normal or wherever. They don’t want to bring it back home, so they see the sign shouting “TWO OUNCE POURS, MAX” and typically zoom right by it. Better you than meeeeee, they metaphorically shout out the window of their brewery truck.
At GABF, though, the people pouring the beers are much more likely to be event staff and volunteers. What they care about, maybe more than the individual beer or even the individual guest, is not getting canned by the festival. They stick to the GABF limit almost religiously, and the GABF limit is half of Great Taste’s, one ounce. So even if you’re pretty good about dumping at Great Taste, you’re still drinking a fraction of the total volume of beer at GABF for the same total number of pours.
This means you’ve probably got a lot of sober time in Denver to see the sights, have some fun, eat some food. Some drunk time, too, and we’ll account for that, but certainly some time where you’ll actually be able to remember your vacation afterward. Allow my GABF experience to inform where you might be spending your non-convention center time.
My number one suggestion, to basically anyone who asks — and even those who don’t — is to go to The Source. The Source is a food-and-beer scenester lifestyle center, and it very purposefully has it all. There’s a butcher shop, a bakery, a florist, a coffee roaster. Acorn and Comida are two very worthwhile restaurant stops, and the RiNo Yacht Club is a bar floating right in the middle of the expansive open hall of the Source. Buy some Colorado beers to bring home with you at the Proper Pour bottle shop, and drink some there at Crooked Stave’s tasting room, if you’re down for some wild and funky ales.
That River North area is slick, if you’re looking to spend all your time in one neighborhood. One of my good friends who lives in Denver — and there’s a growing number of Madison expats in particular in the area, in my Twitter circle alone — recommends a RiNo brewery/restaurant crawl. Mockery, Epic, Ratio and even Great Divide (if you stretch the neighborhood of consideration just a bit) breweries are all walkable, just over a mile apart from end to end.
You could center all of your Denver dining on biscuits if you wanted to. The Denver Biscuit Company blows the doors off of the biscuit bakery concept, with massive sandwiches that you can also order on French toast-ified biscuits. Rise and Shine Biscuit Kitchen offers weekly beer biscuit specials on Fridays. The Southern-style menu at Sassafras American Eatery includes a fine biscuit with jam, and James Beard winner Jennifer Jasinski’s exceptional Rioja could be shoehorned into that itinerary for the tiny biscuits that are part of the bread service at brunch; all the same, you’re going to want to eat more than the bread service.
If you have room, I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention that there’s a Voodoo Doughnut outpost on Colfax, for all your novelty doughnut needs. Homesick Madisonians can experience a slice of State Street with the Ian’s Pizza on Blake, near the ballpark.
The Denver Botanic Gardens are lovely, and offer reciprocity if you happen to be an Olbrich (or other botanical garden) member. An exhibit of the Venetian Masters starts up at the Denver Art Museum this week, and my buddy has good things to say about pretty much the whole Denver museum scene. Because he’s a good dude who just wants Madisonians to come and have fun, he also recommends Red Rocks and Comedy Works; I haven’t been to either yet, but I trust him.
And it should go without saying, GABF is a beer event; tap takeovers will be going on all over town. Wander into a bar or restaurant, and not unlike Great Taste Eve here in Madison, there’s probably something fun going on. Falling Rock is the palatial tap house and sports bar of the Coors Field area; if there’s one place that you might find Russian River Pliny the Elder on tap outside of California, it’s at Falling Rock.
Should you throw caution to the wind and arrive at Denver International with no GABF tickets to your name, you can almost always find some on sale outside the convention center near (or sometimes under) face value, depending on the time. But tickets are officially sold out, and have been for a while, so I hope you already have yours. Have fun, say hi to Blucifer and the Bear for me, don’t drink anything I wouldn’t.
