Drink Local: Upcoming Beer Events

Thursday, Jan. 23rd

Brewer's Broads / 2014 Kickoff / 6:30pm

Nano 108 Brewing / 2402 Waynoka Brewing

Facebook event

Colorado Springs' own women's beer club will be resuming meetings starting this Thursday. Ladies, head to Nano 108 for a talk with Keith Altemose on hops as well as some social time to enjoy their wonderful taproom!

Friday, Jan. 24th 

Passed Stout, Imperial Stout Release / 5pm

Trinity Brewing / 1466 Garden of the Gods Rd

With the cold spell that is supposed to descend on the Springs soon, this beer will be very welcome to warm bellies and improve moods!

Passed Stout , Imperial Stout. Just in time to keep you warm during the colder months of winter! Its body is huge, its dark malt character is huge, its hop profile is gigantic, and its ABV is enormous. It’s basically everything that you would expect from a noteworthy Imperial Stout, and more! We age this beer on fresh Madagascar Vanilla Beans, Dagoba Cacao Nibbs, and French Oak. 11.0% ABV; extremely rare.

Tuesday, Jan. 28th

Beer Bingo / Open Tuesdays!

Great Storm Brewing / 204 Mount View Ln. #3

Starting Tuesday Jan. 28th, Great Storm Brewing will be open one more day a week! Also, they'll be hosting a Beer Bingo on Tuesday nights as well! While you don't need another excuse to go to Great Storm other than their beer, they're offering up fabulous prizes each week for the Bingo winners.

More information on their Facebook.

Coming in February:

Firkin Rendezvous Tickets on sale!

10th Annual Firkin Rendezvous / February 22
Brisol Brewing Company / 1604 S. Cascade Ave.

From Bristol Brewing:

We are happy to host the 10th Annual Firkin Rendezvous, a fundraiser for the Colorado Brewers Guild. 25 Colorado breweries will share with us their cask conditioned ales of goodness. Cask conditioning of ales is a traditional British style of brewing that originated centuries ago when publicans lived above their pubs and made a life's work out of tending their beers. Cask ales are fermented, dry-hopped, conditioned and served in a single cask, the "firkin" being the British cask size most commonly used.

VIP tickets are $60 which includes a t-shirt and early entrance at noon. General admission tickets are $35 with a 1pm entrance. All admission includes beer, food and souvenir tasting glass.

TicketFly

Beer Dinners:

Brewer's Republic has two Beer Dinners in the month of February, starting with Crooked Stave on Valentine's Day and finishing with Odell Brewing on the 22nd.

Head to Brewer's Republic or Coaltrain for tickets!

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Great Storm Opens Expansion

Great Storm Brewing's Addition

We caught up with Great Storm Brewery after their one year anniversary, and learned they had leased space next door to almost triple their existing space. Tomorrow, after much anticipation, they will be opening their doors for everyone to see their remodeled portion of what will add to the existing tasting room space.

Great Storm Teaming Up With Brewers Broads

This afternoon brewers from Great Storm Brewery are getting together with a few members of Brewers Broads, a local women's beer club, to brew a collaboration beer. The women's beer club has been meeting monthly for educational events since they were first founded in March, but this will be the first time they are brewing together on a commercial system.

The opportunity came when Jeff of Great Storm Brewery offered to make a beer to sell at both Brewer's Republic and Great Storm. Wanting to make something fitting for summer, they decided on a Wit and are looking at splitting the batch in half for two variations.

Brewers Broads' mission is to make brewing and brewing education more accessible for women, and a big part of this is through hands on experience. After learning about malt, yeast, and water the Broads are very excited to put what they have learned to use. Many of the Brewers Broads are homebrewers, and having the chance to brew on another system is always welcomed. Any ladies in town are welcome to join the brewing process that starts at 11am and is likely to last a few hours. Look for tasty pints of this beer coming to a tap room near you in then next month.

Great Storm is located at: 204 Mt View Ln #3  Colorado Springs, CO 80907

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Summer's Sweet New Releases

Paradox's In the Spirit of Skully No. 1, in front of the towering barrels, in
their Woodland Park tasting room.

Yesterday was the first official day of Summer. This week a few breweries in town released new beers worth celebrating along with the new season.

Great Storm Brewing's successful first year, thoughts on expansion, philosophy of the nano brewer

It's been a while since we fully caught up with Colorado Springs' smallest brewery, Great Storm Brewing, and now they've been in operation for just over a full year. Great Storm is a nano-brewery, making about 1 barrel of beer each time they brew, which is about two full kegs of beer. In the beer world, that's not very much, consider that Trinity has a twelve barrel brew house, Bristol's is about fifteen, and both of these breweries are relatively small as well.

Over their initial year we've heard more and more people talking about Great Storm and we've noticed a bit of a cult following. So, we decided we better catch up with brewer Jeff Jacobs.

We also thought this would be good timing because this week on the New School Beer Blog an article was posted that took issue with the amount of nano-breweries opening in Oregon. The author is certainly writing in a tongue-in-cheek manner but when we posted this to our Facebook page many of our reader's didn't appreciate some of the things written in the article. I'd like to direct your attention to that article for a moment but I'll also mention a couple things here. In part the author questions the business savvy of nano-brewery owners and suggests that from a beer geek standpoint it isn't always worth the time and effort of seeking all the newest breweries if they aren't offering something wholly unique. In the author's scene the beers can be hit or miss, but show up so infrequently that if he happens to see them on tap at two different times, and both are bad, he will probably be unwilling to give the brewery another shot if and when he sees it on tap again.

While I might agree about the impossibility of keeping up with all the new breweries (I'm also totally happy with this impossibility), there were a number of questions I had about this article, while also keeping in mind the author's tone where we know he's not being fully serious. Considering that Great Storm has developed a large reputation in town, and the couple beers I've had from them recently were really tasty, I decided to ask Jeff his thoughts on the topic. While I was at it, I also sent him a few additional questions to see if he's growing and has new plans. He does! Check it out:

You've only been open a year and you have a strong following here in Colorado Springs, did you expect this sort of success?

We no doubt expected success, or we would not have ventured into this. But, no, we thought we would have had a much more modest success our first year. We thought things would calm down after a few months when everyone who was interested had a chance to come check us out, but it’s never really let up. We ended our first year beating our most optimistic financial projections by about 50%, and that took us all by surprise.

Things seem to be going well for our newest brewery

The other day I emailed with Jeff at Great Storm Brewing and he let me know that things have been going quite well over at the new brewery. They've been keeping pretty busy and things seem healthy. That's wonderful news. Great Storm, if you haven't already heard, is Colorado Springs' newest brewery, they opened in March. They're a nanobrewery, producing one barrel batches of beer at a time... Here's the latest from Jeff:

Congrats Great Storm Brewing

I'm late on this but I lost my camera, and now it's found! Saturday night was the opening for Great Storm Brewing. We arrived to a packed house, there was a line at the bar about 20 deep and there were a few new beers on tap that hadn't been available during the soft opening. Overall, I enjoyed the Nitro Seven Wolves IPA, which was very mango-y, and the roasty Black Bear Zwartbier. A lot of people said they liked the Rum Raisin Stout, but there was too much alcohol heat for me. Another favorite with our facebook readers was the Shine On Belgian Golden Strong Ale, which was aged with oak. Here's a review from our pals at the CS Indy. Most of the beers overall had sweet, fruity esthers that were distracting, something that I think will get worked out in time.

Great Storm Brewing Grand Opening!

That's right, it's offical! Great Storm Brewing is set to open their doors in the next couple weeks. I've got all the information for you right here, so have a read. I'm copying directly from their press release:

A New Brew on the Block: Neighborhood Microbrewery Opens Its Doors
Great Storm Brewing, a production microbrewery and tasting room, starts serving up pints and pretzels March 24th. With eight beers on tap, ranging from a light, lemony witbier, to a hearty oatmeal-rum-raisin stout, the taproom features ales across the suds spectrum.

New Brewery Series: Great Storm Brewing

This week we are showcasing some new breweries that are set to open soon in the area. We are very happy to welcome three new breweries to Colorado Springs and one in Poncha Springs, just outside of Salida. We'll post one or two a day for the first couple days of February. This post will be dedicated to Great Storm Brewing...See the whole New Brewery Series here.

I am pleased to announce what seems very likely to be Colordado Springs' next brewery - Great Storm Brewing. This will be a little place to start out, a true mom and pop shop. The folks behind the scenes are Lynn and Jeff Jacobs. They've got a location picked out and it looks as if they'll be opening up before you know it. I'll let you read what they're planning to brew and how they've gotten to this point. We'll definitely keep all of you posted on when they open up officially. The questions below were just a series of questions I fired off to Lynn and Jeff in a couple emails.