Where to go for Great Craft Beer

A friend sent me a link to an article in “The Street” titled “10 Best Craft Beer Vacation Destinations”. I anxiously loaded the article and started stepping though the destinations. The article did have one glaring omission though, not a single destination was in Colorado! Can you believe it?

Yes, I’m a little biased, living in Colorado, but there are so many great breweries here, how could you leave us out?

The article isn’t without its good suggestions though, there are several that I would strongly agree with:

• Hood River Oregon – Full Sail Brewery, Deschutes Brewery, Widmer Brewing, Bridgeport Brewing, etc…
• Escondido California – Stone Brewing. California is also full of great breweries / brewpubs, so it wouldn’t be hard to find something else to drink.
• Asheville, North Carolina – Huge list.
• Portland Maine – Allagash Brewing Company and Shipyard Brewing.
• Boston Massachusetts – Sam Adams and Harpoon Brewing.

Those aren’t the only good choices mentioned in the article either, and I’m not trying to say anything bad about the breweries / locations that I didn’t mention. However, if you’re planning on going on a vacation to a beer destination, you would probably want there to be more than just 1 brewery around, right?

According to Spork Marketing, and this handy graphic:

Colorado has 115 Breweries and produces more beer per capita than any other state.

Denver alone has Great Divide, Avery brewing, Wynkoop Brewing, Dry Dock Brewing, Breckenridge Brewery, Del Norte Brewing, and many more.

Then, about an hour or so up the highway in Fort Collins is CooperSmith’s, Equinox, Fort Collins Brewery, New Belgium, and Odell Brewing Company. It seems like Fort Collins has new breweries opening all of the time, so I’m sure I missed some (let me know if I did, since I’ve hit all of those already).

OK, so I’ve enticed you with a vast yet incomplete list of breweries, since they are literally all over the state. Now it’s time for the hook, Colorado is an easy place to get someone to visit even if they don’t like beer. Skiing, mountain biking, purple mountains majesty, hiking, camping, old west history, there’s something for everyone. How much easier can I make this?

What prompted me to write this post was that yesterday, someone in my homebrew club sent out an email with a link to an article titled “10 Great Places to Get a Craft Beer” which appeared on USA Today Travel.

The article was written by Larry Bleiberg, but it sounds like the list of places came from Andy Crouch, one of the Authors of “Great American Craft Beer: A Guide to the Nation’s Finest Beers and Breweries”. Can you guess why I was inspired, that’s right, nothing in  Colorado.

I do have less of a problem with this article because it only listed cool places to get good beer, not areas that you should base an entire vacation on, but really, have they been to Colorado. I haven’t read the book, so maybe they redeem themselves. I’ll give them the benefit of the doubt.

Either way, if you’re planning on basing a vacation on craft breweries, or even just vacationing where there is some really good beer, you have to come to Colorado.