I didn’t have time to research my trip to Colorado or even buy a guidebook. Instead I decided to see what Twitter could do for me. By chance, I’d picked one of the best tweeting cities around for my “guidebook without pages” experiment. The Denver Tourism Office has an active and informative twitter account that gives regular tweets on hotel specials, events, restaurants and even beer picks. It gave me an instant overview of the city. From there I was able to find other Colorado tweeters to follow. And yes, a theme developed quickly for my tweets and my...

A half-dozen people stared at me as I walked into the tiny Fort Collins Brewery tasting room. “I have 30 minutes to taste all your beers and buy a T-shirt!” I proclaimed and everyone let out a cheer. The bartender handed me a glass of water before he poured my sampler tray. The FCB was a long 2 miles from the Odell Brewery, and I was pushing the odds to make this final stop before meeting my ride to the airport. As I cooled off, I scanned the wall of Fort Collins memorabilia. This was the smallest brewery I’d been to. The tasting room was the size of my living room and dominated by...

With a short day left in Fort Collins before I caught my 5 o’clock flight back to Arizona, what better to do then finish the brewery circuit. I hopped on Ingrid’s beach cruiser to meet her for lunch in Downtown FC, then road the extra mile to the Odell Brewing Co. It was an overcast but warm summer day and the quaint, dark tasting room was welcome relief. I felt naive that just a few days before, I’d never even heard of Odell. I’d tried their classic 5 Barrel Pale Ale during lunch and was impressed. Now it was time for something more exotic. I ordered up the sampler of pilot...

I’ve lived in the Northwest in the shadows of the majestic Cascade range, and I’ve lived in the open desert landscape of the Southwest. But I’ve never felt such a strange sense of place as I did in Colorado where these two familiar scene blended into one. Every day, the towering Rocky Mountains created a wall to the west. To the east were nothing but flat open ranges. It was an unsettling feeling that I was very far from either coast, and even from my home only one state away. It was hard to ignore those mountains, so I took a break from my brewery tours to tackle some of...

It was just an average Tuesday afternoon as I pulled up to the New Belgium Brewing Company in Fort Collins. Neighbors were streaming in on their beach cruisers, others were picking up kegs, and everyone was making merry in the small tasting room. The brewery known for Fat Tire beer and its love of the eponymous fat tire bicycle culture, is more than just a quasi pub. The lodge-style tasting room and the expansive brewing facilities behind it is a community gathering spot for all ages. A place that hosts the Tour de Fat bicycle parade and summer movies on the lawn as easily as it makes its beverages. My...