The link.

“People need to get out from behind their phones, go to a bar and talk to each other,” (David Keene) said. “The Toronado has been a place where anybody from a punk rocker, a Deadhead, a strip mall developer, a motorcycle enthusiast and a conventioneer who’s a doctor could sit and start having conversations.”

Link No. 1.

The paragraph:

The first Latina-owned brewery in Colorado stormed onto the Colorado Springs scene in 2018 after home-brewer Jess Fierro took home the top prize in the six-episode docuseries “Beerland.” Following her win, Fierro took over ownership of Great Storm Brewing Co., and it evolved into Atrevida. The word is the feminine form of the Spanish word “bold.” After nearly eight years of “shared laughter, late nights and clinking glasses,” however, Atrevida will close its doors at 204 Mount View Lane, off North Nevada Avenue.

Link No. 2. This is behind a paywall, but I was able to read the story on my first visit.

The paragraph:

The brewery has also been a staunch advocate for representation in the craft beer industry, where women and Latinos account for 23.7% and 2.2% of brewery owners, respectively, according to a 2021 survey by trade group the Brewers Association. Atrevida’s motto is “Diversity, it’s on tap.”

If Atrevida was two steps forward for beer, this is three steps back.

The paragraph:

Of all the (non-alcholic) beers in our panel tasting, Sierra Nevada Trail Pass Hazy IPA was the most divisive. That’s because, quite simply, it smells like a glass full of weed and tastes a bit like chewing on a weed gummy. That’s not an experience for everyone, but for the right kind of hophead, it’s heaven. (It contains no THC.)

The paragraph:

At other times we think it’s a sort of miracle. That altered landscape we mentioned has, in fact, ended up just about where we need and want it to be, and we’re more often spoiled for choice than disappointed these days. Even bog standard pubs often have something we can get excited about and enjoy, which was rarely the case in 2010.

My apologies, because I don’t usually link to the last paragraph of a post, spoiling the ending, so to speak. It’s been more than 40 years since Vince Cottone used the phrase “craft brewery” to describe the dozens of small breweries that were about to alter the US landscape. Most of them are “microbreweries,” making fewer than 15,000 barrels a year.

The taplist from King of Wings in Golden, Colorado, is not quite up to date but it represents what is on hand every time we go in. The beers are all brewed in Colorado, and except for the ones from Coors (which occupies more land than you can imagine only a few blocks away) they all come from “microbreweries.” The board displaying beers on tap at the King of Wings in Wheat Ridge is from Saturday.

Things are pretty good here among the trees.

The paragraph:

Amid these waves of profound transformation (in Vietnam), the Bia hoi côc (beer glass) has remained unchanged. Cheap and easy to acquire, the glasses continue to be made by hand with recycled glass in small village factories near Hanoi. Conceived in the midst of socialist austerity, it has persisted in the face of imported glassware, shifting design trends, changing tastes, economic reforms, and globalisation. China’s mass-produced crystal products now flood the Vietnamese market. But, no manufacturer, at home or abroad, has yet successfully replicated or replaced the low-priced, unprofitable, “unpretty,” côc.