Some familiar trends have settled into a more calm state — constant new releases and flavored beers seem driven less by blind hype and more by actual drinking demand. For years, the world's most popular beers, pale lagers, were relegated mostly to the macro companies, but now they're gaining steam on the craft side. The marriage of newer hop varietals and the lighter, clean, smooth lager base underneath continues to grow. More brewers are embracing classic styles from a place of respect and authenticity.
The beer industry as a whole is settling in and maturing, no longer growing by leaps and bounds year after year, which has resulted in fewer bandwagon-inspired creations. You can see the increased passion from many of the breweries planning to open in 2024. This should be a welcome change for beer fans.
The following list of beers comes with a few rules. First, we only selected one beer from any given brewery. Second, the beer had to be attainable for the general public — no waiting in long lines, no club membership required, no single-day sellout. Exclusive beers are fantastic, but there are plenty of lists for that.
This is a list for a wider audience to explore. Finally, while the focus is on the flavor of the beer, the experience and story that goes along with that are impossible to separate. Drinking is more than the liquid in the glass, so while the liquid matters the most here, other factors are sometimes at play.
Here's to a continued year of fantastic beer. We're all lucky to be in Colorado at this moment in time.
Amalgam Brewing
Modern West
A fitting name for exactly what this beer is: a modern West Coast IPA. Brewers, particularly on the West Coast, have been playing around with mixing elements of lagers — all pilsner malt grain bills and lager yeasts, with elements that popularized hazy IPAs: tropical, fruit-led hop flavors. Combine that with the classic bitterness and dry finish of a West Coast IPA, and you've got Modern West.
This also happened to be brewed at Bierstadt Lagerhaus, where Amalgam co-owner Phil Joyce is working in the brewhouse. The team went a step further than most — it utilized a decoction mash, something normally reserved for traditional lagers, to add some malt structure without imparting a heaviness or sweetness to the beer.
Backacre Beermakers
Sour Golden Ale Blend 16
Backacre is a small passion-driven brewery, making one single beer and releasing batches only when the last has sold out. While that sounds pretty exclusive, it's actually not difficult to obtain. Go to some of the liquor stores around town with a high end beer selection (Mile High Wine Cellars, Molly's Spirits or Atlas Valley, for example), and you should find the most recent vintage on the shelves.
This beer absolutely tastes like an exclusive, special-release beer from one of the more exclusive farmhouse beermakers, like Casey, Primitive or Amalgam. There's plenty of bitterness in the beer, enough to let a light tartness stay in the background. It allows the infinitely complex flavors of the unique house yeast to really shine. There's a bit of malt flavor at play, too. The higher ABV allows everything to stand out as boldly as it should — this isn't a fleeting beer.
While the brewery has fans from its previous home in Vermont, the owners are Colorado-based, and I, for one, am glad that they brought the project home. If this isn't a beer that has come across your radar, it's certainly one worth trying.
A fresh helles being poured, with a contingent of Slow Pour Pils creeping in the background.
Bierstadt Lagerhaus Instagram
Helles
Many types of lager have really taken off in our state, but for some reason, helles has lagged a bit. Some point to the difficulty in brewing the style, but that hasn't stopped breweries across the country from brewing new (to them) styles before. Colorado has no shortage of region-specific styles, either. It remains a mystery to me.
The lack of top-shelf examples makes me appreciate the helles at Bierstadt even more, as have my trips to Munich, Germany, where you ask for a beer and receive a helles. Bierstadt's holds up to the homeland varieties, and I even prefer it to many of the German ones — it's a little less round and has a touch more spritzy carbonation. Bierstadt manages to thread the fine needle of crafting a supremely dry beer that still comes off as malty. It's versatile — great for drinking all day or perfect for the first of a variety of beers, plus it's wonderful with just about every type of food. The fact that it's always immensely fresh doesn't hurt, either; I've never had a bad pour of this beer over the years.
For all those reasons, and despite loving Slow Pour Pils, and the German pilsner style above all else, I find myself consuming helles more than any other beer at Bierstadt.
Call to Arms Brewing
Freedom Fries
Cherry Freedom Fries
This spot was all but reserved for Operation Steingrabber, the dark Czech lager that is my regular beer when I visit CTA. Its name change is the perfect example of the brewery's focus on fun, too: You don't have to change the name of a beer that is making fun of Putin, but it's just not as funny when he's waging war in Ukraine.
Instead, Cherry Freedom Fries won me over from the first sip. The saison had a little barn funk with some underlying cherry complexity. It was smooth and subtle yet sophisticated and interesting.
There always seems to be something going on at the brewery, whether it's puppy yoga or holiday pop-ups for spooky season and Christmas. The brewery is the type of place that makes you want to keep coming back to see what's next, and the beer there is at the top of that list.
Vladislav is a World Beer Cup and Great American Beer Fest winning beer.
Diebolt Brewing Instagram
Vladislav
This imperial stout is barrel-aged for seven months and clocks in at 10 percent ABV. It's a beer that takes you back to about fifteen or so years ago, when most imperial stouts were around that alcohol level and spent less time in barrels — only Vlad is executed with the higher level of knowledge available today. It's not rough around the edges or thin in body like so many of the earlier barrel-aged stouts were.
I was recently at Diebolt deciding which beer to enjoy as my last of the night — the local pilsner, Made There; the West Coast IPA called Electric Cowboy; the Joyeux Noël beer. They'd all been great, and any one of them would've capped off a fun visit with friends, but a small glass of Vlad was the order, and damn, was that a delicious nightcap.
Little Mo is available year-round in its regular CO2 offering, a fantastic beer in its own right. If you see it on cask, however, it is a must-try.
Elevation Beer
Little Mo Porter on Cask
I make it down to the Arkansas Valley twice a year if I'm lucky, and Elevation is always near the top of the list to visit. Because of the infrequent stops, I usually try a variety of beers when I'm there. On my last trip, I saw some words on the menu that really drew my interest: London Porter + On Cask. The beer was an epic mélange of creamy chocolate and caramel, with some woody, herbal, floral hop notes underneath. The next day at camp, I suggested we go back, and not a single person objected. We had several rounds of cask porter — sometimes a single beer is so good, you just can't help going back to it.
Fritz Family Brewers, Niwot
Fritz Export
I was afraid that Fritz Family was underappreciated and destined to be a local gem flying under the radar — until I heard so many of the out-of-town GABF judges talking about it over and over. It became the place to be for the traveling connoisseurs, and that seems pretty fitting.
Like so many of the outstanding breweries on this list, it's difficult to choose just one beer from Fritz. Owner and head brewer Cory Buenning makes a wide range of beers at a consistently high level. I'm a bit partial to the lagers, however, and the German-style lineup specifically. Fritz Export is a showcase lager, and being at export strength gives it just a little more oomph in the flavor department.
Hello Brew, Fort Collins
Oz
I never thought that I would put a beer sampled from a Crowler on a best-of list, but here we are. I haven't yet made it up to Hello Brew, but I've been fortunate enough to sample some Crowlers that some friends keep bringing back to Denver.
This delicious IPA uses a newer German hop called Hallertau Blanc, along with an assortment of New Zealand hops, to create a phenomenal beer with notes of ripe tropical fruits and white wine. Given the few beers that I've had from this brewery, it's one of the places I look forward to visiting most in 2024.
Odyssey Beerwerks, Arvada
Gold Strike Kolsch
I came for the Marzen but stayed for the Kolsch. Every year, Odyssey taps a gravity barrel filled with Oktoberfest-Marzen to kick off Oktoberfest. The mayor of Arvada does the honors, a big crowd comes out, and people line up for free pours. I arrived a little early, and I didn't want to kill my palate with IPAs before sampling the malty Oktoberfest-Marzen, so I ordered a Kolsch.
Colorado brewers keep crushing the Kolsch game, and this was a particularly memorable beer. A good Kolsch is refreshing, smooth, slightly hoppy, and rides the edges of being boring — without crossing over. It's difficult to pull off, as it is just as tempting to add too much flavor to this style and take the delicate, soft yeast component out of the beer. Some breweries just put one on the menu because they know it will sell in the summer, and that lack of passion often shows in the final product. Odyssey clearly put thought and care into this beer.
Seedstock Brewery
Czech Pilsner
When breweries change hands, you just never know what's going to happen — a new direction and a change in focus is not uncommon. So when a family health issue caused the Abbott family to move back to Omaha, I was curious to see what Seedstock's new owners would do. Subsequent trips have shown that while Adam, Jerry and Kathy McIlvenna have put their stamp on the tap list, the neighborhood vibe still shows through and through.
The Czech Pilsner has been my favorite beer on the list, with a firm bitterness that cuts through a softer profile, and a little bit of lingering malt sweetness that shows its Czech inspiration. An excellent beer to have in the cozy bar, it pairs well with friends old and new.
Westbound & Down
Westbound Select
I spent the evening of GABF Friday hanging out with local and out-of-town friends in the alley that is Westbound & Down's Denver taproom. There aren't too many places out there where you can stand in front of a brewery, in an alley or on a street, drinking beer after beer. We were sipping on an array of Westbound's IPAs, and they were all impressive. It was no surprise that the next morning, the brewery won three medals — two for IPAs — at the GABF awards.
Westbound Select was my favorite of the many fantastic hoppy beers that it put out in 2023. It was a busy year for the brewery, which took over Aspen Brewing and Capitol Creek Brewing, and I can't wait to see what's in store for 2024.
Wild Provisions, Boulder
Little Fur Cone
This was recently my beer of the week. I'm usually hesitant to try renditions of world-class beers because it's typically an impossible task, and this beer's inspiration seemed no different. Take a German brewery that has been making the same beer for over half a century, continuously modernizing its brewing system with millions of dollars and producing more of that beer than what every other brewery on this list makes in total every year combined. How could it compare?
Spoiler alert: Little Fur Cone delivers. It's not brilliantly filtered like the Rothaus Tannenzapfle that it is based on — in fact, it's not filtered at all. But as a person who has been lucky enough to visit the brewery in the Black Forest of Germany and sample the beer unfiltered, I can say this is a fantastic and worthwhile ode to the original. It's only Wild Provisions' second time brewing the beer, so hopefully it'll continue to be a regular thing for years to come.
