The Best Brewery Hops in Denver

How do we quantify just how awesome Denver is for craft beer lovers? Could we say that more beer is brewed daily in Denver than in any other city in America? Could we mention that it’s the home of the Great American Beer Festival, which boasts more beers on tap than any other festival on Earth? Could we even point out that, due to its high altitude, you feel the effects of drinking in Denver faster than in other major beer cities? For us, Denver is on the Mount Rushmore of beer destinations in America because, well, we love brewery hopping. And few cities have the sheer volume of comfortably walkable brewery hops that Denver boasts.

As a result, this brewery hop guide is incomplete. With how quickly new breweries open in Denver, perhaps it will never be truly complete. Instead of viewing this as a definitive guide to the *only* brewery hops worth doing in Denver, view it as a jump-off point. We’ll share our experiences here, and we hope you enjoy these hops as much as we did… but there are several others in the city. We hope to return to Denver in 2019 to add to this list, so if you think we’ve left off or neglected your favorite hop, please politely nudge us in the direction of your preference in the comments, and we’ll put your suggestions atop our list for next year’s visit! But for now…

Honorable Mentions:

Black Project Spontaneous & Wild Ales:

Our honorable mentions are breweries that we didn’t do as part of a brewery hop but had so many terrific beers that we felt them worth mentioning regardless. Unlike the other two that follow, Black Project is actually part of a one-mile, 4-stop brewery hop along S Broadway. We wanted to hit the other stops– Dos Luces, Alternation Brewing Company, and Grandma’s House— but truthfully, after trying everything Black Project had on tap, we were in no condition to be trying more beer. We probably were in no condition to be walking a mile, truth be told. So we’ll hit this hop again when we return to Denver… BUT until then, we still need to sing the praises of Black Project. In a city with many elite sour breweries, Black Project makes a serious argument as the best of the bunch. Like many of the best sour breweries in America, Black Project crafts their beer through open fermentation, giving them a complexity of flavor that kettle sours could never begin to dream of achieving. The tartness of their beers varies, but nothing is too acidic and everything goes down smooth, making this a great place to introduce friends to the beautifully sour art of wild ales.

Our recommendation: as mentioned last paragraph, we tried everything they had– a choice we do not regret in the slightest. Shadow Factory was a smooth boysenberry and cranberry sour, and Reheat was a flavorful wild ale made from wine grapes; both balance the scale between juicy and tart beautifully. However, the All-Star of the night was the Magic Lantern, a passionfruit and guava salted sour. Those fruits by themselves often make for delicious aged sours, but the presence of the salt absolutely takes this one into the stratosphere, making this easily one of the best sour beers available in the city, if not the state.

Cerebral Brewing:

Many brewers often behave like mad scientists, but Cerebral Brewing is the first brewery we can recall that has a taproom that looks like a mad scientist’s laboratory. The walls are plastered with encyclopedia pages, communal tables hold grains and brewing ingredients in labeled petri dishes, and the flights are served in small beakers. It’s a great, distinctive theme for a brewery that uses its knowhow to craft some of the best IPAs in Denver. Is it ironic that you may go to a place called Cerebral to kill some brain cells? Maybe! Either way, grab a game and a few beakers, and maybe take some time to read the walls.

Our recommendation: the Cheat Code is a full-bodied New England IPA with a hefty hop profile, or, if you’d like something a bit lighter, enjoy the more medium-bodied juicy mango flavors of the Rare Trait IPA. Also, for sour fans who are feeling adventurous, Cerebral has a lactose-infused beer called Bird of Paradise, which they call a “smoothie-style sour.” It’s got great raspberry and passionfruit punch, but the light amounts of lactose balance out the acid, so even though it’s still quite tart, it’s not going to send you reaching for the Tums.

Fiction Beer Company:

Fiction Beer Company was the most pleasant surprise of our trip to Denver. We expected to enjoy ourselves, but we did not expect that it would easily rank in our Top 3 breweries in Denver— or that it would provide serious contention for Best Brewery In The City. It helps that it has one of the most distinct breweries in the city, designed to reflect a deep love of literature, from the literary quotes adorning the tables to the bar decorated with the spines of novels. It has the usual brewery tappings— games, cornhole, a patio— but it also has an extensive shelf of books that visitors are encouraged to sit and read. It’s a breath of fresh air in a city where many of the taprooms begin to blend together after a while.

Of course, all of this would merely be a gimmick if it weren’t for the fact that their beers are exceptionally delicious. Our recommendations: in a city known for its IPAs, we’d gladly hold Fiction’s against any other brewery’s best. Their triple IPA, The Recurrence, was the single best IPA we had on our trip to Denver, a quadruple-hopped haze bomb that prompted Russell to write in his notes, “Damn.” It may sound like a lot, but it’s delivered with bite and balance that’ll undoubtedly land it on our Best of 2018 list. Their other IPAs aren’t far behind— Madame Psychosis, fresh off a bronze medal at this year’s GABF, and the DDH Logic is Relative are both so good that even those who feel burned out on hazy IPAs will find their palates reinvigorated. They also boasted on our trip a gose, the Rum Barrel Aged Waves and Ripples, with considerable kick, and the simply divine Cleveland Whiskey Barrel Aged Malice and Darkness, which adorns its whiskey kick with a bit of honey to give sweetness to the boozy finish. This isn’t part of a true brewery hop– the closest nearby brewery is Cerebral, about a 7-minute drive west from here– but you could easily drink your daily quota in its entirety at Fiction and be happy you did.

3. Banded Oak Brewing –> Baere Brewing Company –> TRVE Brewing–> Novel Strand Brewing Company

Walk down Broadway in Denver’s Baker District, and you can find a number of lovely shops and eateries– but most importantly for our purposes, you can hit four breweries within six-tenths of a mile. Stop first at Banded Oak Brewing, especially if the weather is nice. The taproom itself is very small, but they have a nice patio with picnic tables for non-wintry days. As you may guess from the name of the brewery, their specialty is their barrel-aged beers. Our recommendations: the Whiskey Barrel-Aged Atomga Imperial Stout was Emily’s favorite, as she digs herself a whiskey kick in her stouts, but Russell preferred the Cabarnet Barrel-Aged Scotch Ale. It’s the beer on tap that most delivers the titular oak of the Banded Oak, with the right amount of cab aftertaste.

It’s around a block down Broadway to Baere Brewing Company. Baere is located within a strip mall, but once you step inside, you feel like you’re inside a large barrel, with rustic wood paneling adorning the walls. There’s a good amount of space and seating here– you can find plenty of people parked at the various tables with games and carry-in food. Baere has options for all drinkers, but it has a wider variety of sours and berliners than one is accustomed to seeing on tap. Our recommendations: alliteration time! We both believe in buying brown at Baere Brewing! Our favorite sour was the BourBruin, a mixed culture whiskey-aged sour brown ale, and for those who don’t like sour, the Big Hoppy Brown was our favorite brown ale in Denver, a 9.2% ABV brown with considerable bitter bite. We also recommend anything from the Duplicitous line of sours they produced, as the ones we tried were probably the most potently sour beers Baere had on tap.

Speaking of potent sours, it’s one more block to TRVE Brewing, which calls itself “Denver’s true heavy metal brewery.” Entering the taproom, you very immediately respect their commitment to their label. The imagery throughout, from the art on the walls to the designs on the merchandise, is “dark”– skulls, reapers, flames, pentagrams, demonic creatures. Black and dark grey walls make it even darker, but don’t mistake darkness for dinginess, as the taproom is quite clean and well-maintained. TRVE has a strong nationwide reputation for its mixed culture sour beers, so they’ll usually boast a good 8+ of these on tap any given day. Our recommendations: Cursed is a sour pale ale, a good jump-off point for the uninitiated. It’s got the light crispness of a pale, but it still packs a decent amount of sour kick. The Ancient Bole is a hoppy saison, with equal parts tartness, funkiness, and dryness. For the adventurous, Russell’s favorite was the Burning Off Impurities, a mixed culture amber ale brewed with coffee. The smell is strongly coffee, but the taste is predominantly sour. It’s the type of strange but ultimately rewarding concoction that makes TRVE the name it is in the sour world.

Finally, turn down 1st and go a little under half a mile to reach Novel Strand Brewing Company and end your brewery hop on a more intimate note. Novel Strand is a small coffee shop during the day turned brewery tap room by evening, so appropriately, it gives off the vibe of a friendly neighborhood hangout, the type of place where the customers are often regulars and the bartenders remember your name. The bartender on our visit was the brewmaster, who was incredibly energetic (perhaps off the coffee they serve?) and eager to educate us about the beers they had on tap. This sort of hospitality is rare at the bigger taprooms, so it’s a nice reminder that one’s beer travel list shouldn’t only include the nationally recognized names, but also some of the smaller, newer, more intimate neighborhood establishments. Our recommendations: the Udderworldly is an enjoyable, no-frills oatmeal milk stout, but we couldn’t get enough of the Green Showers, a dank, hoppy IPA that serves as a necessary counter-balance to the haze craze.

2. Black Shirt Brewing Co. —> Mockery Brewing —> Great Divide —> Crooked Stave

For this RiNo hop, we recommend starting the way so many ideal hops begin: at a place with terrific food. Ultimately, an empty stomach can cut many a brewery hop short by expediting the alcohol’s effect… so why not start your hop with plenty of tasty food lining your insides? If you agree with this approach, Black Shirt Brewing Co. is the ideal place to start. Black Shirt is a brewpub with a rock and roll theme, with mic-adorned tap handles and art depicting musicians covering the walls (Johnny Cash, from whom Black Shirt gets its name, is a particular focus). They have good beer, but the food is outstanding– plan on crushing one of Black Shirt’s terrific pizzas while you’re here. Our recommendations: Turbo Juice is a refreshing blood orange IPA, but our favorite was the Frontmaniac, a double-dry-hopped IPA that’s slightly hazy and all the way delicious.

If you’re able to stave off your pizza-and-beer coma, take the half-mile walk to Mockery Brewing to continue this hop. Mockery is a chill, funky taproom with a large patio for outdoor sipping in the summer. The exterior looks like a modified shipping container-turned-building, and it’s covered with awesome murals, setting the tone that this places marches to the beat of its own drum. Inside, they have some old stand-up arcade games, and they cut out old license plates to turn them into flight serving trays. Outside, there’s a large patio that’s ideal for summer sipping. Our recommendations: Rock the F*ck On Forever is a good, hoppy IPA that we could drink all night, but pay special attention to the stouts here. We had a Barrel-Aged Imperial French Toast Stout that tasted like a silky-smooth, boozed-soaked, cinnamon-sprinkled brunch.

According to Google, it’s a 341-foot walk from Mockery to the Great Divide Barrel Bar. Great Divide is a staple in Denver, running continuously since 1994, making it one of the older breweries in the city. Their success in the 2000s led to an influx of money and expansion, so you not only have likely seen Great Divide beers at a grocery store near you at some point, you can also see the money in their taprooms. They are large, sleek, and pristine– and it seems like its expansion into this space will continue in the future. It’s a stark contrast from some of the smaller, offbeat breweries in town, but they remain a craft operation, so they deserve a tip of the cap. Our recommendations: the Strawberry Rhubarb Sour is pleasantly tart and fruity, but Great Divide has built its reputation on the back of its delicious imperial stout, Yeti. It’d be a shame to come here and *not* order one.

For your final stop, cross Brighton and enter The Source Market Hall. Not only will you find some funky shops and eateries, you’ll find high-quality sour beer from the good people at Crooked Stave. Crooked Stave’s primary focus is wild, sour, and barrel-aged beers– they have a nationwide reputation as a sour beer destination. Their taproom is surprisingly intimate considering it’s located within a retail complex– its darkness and lack of windows could be described as “dungeon-esque,” but we found it cozy and strangely romantic. Perhaps it’d be less appealing if the beer was any less than fantastic.

Our recommendations: sour, sour, sour, sour, sour. Order a flight or two and get ready to pucker. Persica Harvest 2017 and Petite Sour Raspberry deliver sharp tart peach and raspberry kicks, respectively. Our favorite sour, however, was the Surette Reserva Blueberry. Refreshing berry flavor with a sourness so intense that it’ll leave you looking like the Warheads logo. If you don’t love sour beer, no worries– Crooked Stave offers a few options that aren’t wild ales but will still drive you wild. The Trellis Buster Double IPA is tremendously juicy and holds its own against many other heralded IPAs in the city.

1. 14er Brewing —> Our Mutual Friend Brewing Company —> Ratio Beerworks —> Odell Brewing —> Epic Brewing

In the heart of RiNo, you can find one of the best 5-stop brewery hops that America has to offer. Most places across this country, you’re lucky to find a good 3-stop hop, but here, you can hit five great breweries in a half-mile walk– and pop into several restaurants, coffee shops, and stores along the way. (It’s also a stone’s throw from Denver Central Market— for those looking for great local sandwiches, pop in to Culture Meat and Cheese and thank us later.) Having another great brewery every tenth of a mile would put any brewery hopper in a good mood.

Start at 14er Brewing Company. It seems unassuming upon initial entry, but the further back you go into the taproom, you’ll find a patio, a number of rooms, several games, etc.— it’s the nesting doll of breweries. Several of their beers are named after Colorado’s “14ers,” mountains that top 14,000 feet in elevation. Luckily, it’s far less work to drink these beers than it is to climb their namesakes. Our recommendations: the Colorado Wet Hop IPA was a fresh, hoppy treat, brewed with Neo1, a hard-to-find citrusy hop with which we were unfamiliar. If this beer was an accurate representation of this hop’s flavor profile, we’ll keep our eyes peeled for it in the future. The real star, though, was the Rocky Mountain Saison, a chili-infused saison. The promise of chili in beer is so often a disappointment, as they either crank up the heat to 11 or it hardly delivers a flick, let alone a kick, of spicy goodness. This saison manages to deliver on the chili promise, giving you enough kick to raise your eyebrows without sending you to chug milk afterward. Props to 14er for striking that balance that so few are able to manage.

Stroll over to Larimer Street, the main drag where you’ll find the next three breweries. The first Larimer stop is Our Mutual Friend Brewing Company— it’s the insanely colorful taproom with OMF written on the outside in huge letters, making it one of the harder buildings to miss on this block. It’s one of the smaller taprooms in the area, but what they lack in size they make up for in hospitality. The bartenders were kind and informative, and they told us we’d arrived on “Free Hot Dog Monday”— yes, if you go to OMF on Monday, you too may get a free hot dog. Who doesn’t love free meat? Our recommendations: not unlike Fiction, this brewery’s overall beer quality caught us slightly off-guard. We expected good and got terrific. The Neon Nail, their New England IPA is really good, but their hazy pale, Inner Light, may be even better, combining the light crushability of a pale with the crisp bitterness of an IPA. Also, stout lovers will need to mark this one down— on a hop filled with some of the best stouts in Denver, the Canela Mundo fights for a spot on the podium, a Russian Imperial with a cinnamon aftertaste that’ll warm you up on a cool Denver day.

Ratio Beerworks is just up Larimer from Our Mutual Friend. Ratio has a sleek, stylish interior and a colorful, even more stylish patio. One could describe this taproom as “trendy”– there are certainly walls and murals that make for terrific Instagram backdrops– but any brewery this focused on art and music should remain cool even when trends come and go. Besides, no matter how cool a place looks, it’s all for naught if the beer on tap isn’t up to snuff, and fortunately, Ratio is up to snuff. Our recommendations: the Major Nights is a very tart salted lime gose, the beer equivalent of a refreshing poolside margarita made from scratch. Their best, however, is their malty rye scotch ale, Hold Steady, infused with rich Novo Coffee– and as a bonus, if you want more Novo Coffee, they’re only a block away!

You can find more world-class beer right across the street at Odell Brewing. Odell is based in Fort Collins, but Denver residents are undoubtedly thankful that they’ve brought their hop-forward style to RiNo. Their taproom is terrific, a two-story hangout with couches and TV upstairs, outdoor seating near a fire pit, and a bevy of games at your disposal. You could easily kill a large part of your day hanging out at Odell– and we almost did! We grabbed a game of Trivial Pursuit and ordered tasters of nearly everything on tap. We’d be hard-pressed to find a better way to spend a Denver afternoon.

Our recommendations: Odell is another of Denver’s breweries that has terrific options across several styles. They’re undoubtedly best known for their IPAs— the Sabro IPA is a refreshing tropical option, and the Myrcenary is a tropical bitter double, one of the best in the city. However, those who are into stouts will absolutely need to seek out the Whiskey Barrel-Aged Lugene, one of Emily’s favorites of the trip, a roasty stout with significant boozy heft. The sour collective can even find some refreshment here before their trip to our next location— the Super Fruit Tart and the Manberry Tart, while not as puckeringly tart as perhaps we’d prefer, are *so* fresh and juicy that they’re worth seeking out.

End this hop two blocks down 30th at Epic Brewing. We loved Epic in our Salt Lake City visit, but while that was so intimate that it could hardly be called a taproom, this location has everything a brewery hopper could want. They have a fireplace for those cold winter nights, games for those long weekend afternoons— they even have a photobooth, which we used to delightful effect. It may lack the personal touch of the eight-seater in Utah, but the beer is still the same terrific quality that any sane beer drinker would seek out.

Our recommendations: as those who read the Salt Lake City piece know, anyone looking for sour beer will absolutely need to put Epic alongside Crooked Stave and Black Project as must-stops in the Denver area. The Sour Brainless on Pink Guava would satiate the sour-seeking palate of any sour aficionado, even those looking for intense pucker. We visited in the fall, so we were treated to the Barrel Aged Imperial Pumpkin Porter, which… tastes like fall, there’s no other way to describe it. Finally, the stout lovers are likely the ones who don’t need to be encouraged to visit Epic, but we’ll do so anyway. The Big Bad Baptista is a boozy nuke packed with Mexican coffee, cinnamon, and a stout (heh, pun) ABV. Those who need even more heft should immediately seek out the Quad Barrel Big Bad Baptist. Two glasses will warm your soul and will make you incapable of speaking. If that description makes your eyes sparkle, then you know this is a must-drink for you.

BEST PLACE FOR IPAS:
Fiction Beer (Runners-up: Odell, Our Mutual Friend, Cerebral)

BEST PLACE FOR STOUTS:
Epic Brewing (Runners-up: Fiction, Odell, Our Mutual Friend)

BEST PLACE FOR SOURS:
Black Project (Runners-up: Crooked Stave, Epic, TRVE)

BEST PLACE TO PLAY GAMES:
Fiction Beer (Runners-up: Odell, 14er, Mockery)

BEST PLACE FOR A LARGE GROUP:
Odell Brewing (Runners-up: Epic, Ratio Beerworks, Great Divide)

BEST PLACE FOR A QUIET DRINK:
Novel Strand (Runners-up: Black Project, Crooked Stave, 14er)

BEST PLACE TO EAT:
Black Shirt Brewing (Runner-up: Crooked Stave, as it’s connected to The Source)

Which is your favorite of these brewery hops? Are there any you love that we neglected to mention? Please shout them out in the comments below! Denver residents should also check out our guides to the best brewery hops in Boulder and the best breweries in Broomfield and Lafayette. Also, in case we haven’t given you enough, check out this list of the top-rated breweries in the greater Denver area, with hours of operation, food options, and more, to help assist you in the creation of your own beer travel plan. Cheers!