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KEY BEER

Trademark Pale Ale (5.7%ABV) is a clean, floral APA (American Pale Ale) with a faintly sweet body and easy, grassy hop bitterness, making it a great match for the upscale pub grub on offer. The 7.85% ABV 471 Extra E.S.B., part of the small batch series, deftly blends a roasted and slightly sweet caramel character with astringent hops.

Aspen

ASPEN BREWING

COMPANY

304 E. Hopkins Ave. • Aspen, CO 81611

(970) 920-2739 • aspenbrewing.com • Established: 2008

SCENE & STORY

Two friends not too far out of college to be irrationally optimistic about starting a brewery opened Aspen Brewing Co. in a cluttered old architect’s studio, decorating the place with hand-carved tap handles, Tibetan prayer flags, maps, and other brick-a-brack. Former Keystone Light drinkers, the roommates had discovered the incredible spectrum of flavors in craft brews on tap while going to school in Boulder. They started home brewing, and, dreamed they could bring the movement back to Aspen, local craft brewing pioneer Flying Dog having long departed. The optimism was well founded: their first batches blew out in a matter of days, a scenario they clearly still regard in awe.

The duo moved quickly to auger into Aspen’s social fabric, contributing to charities, bringing in a new brewer and partner, and scouting property for the next level—they were already thinking bigger. “We’re not just punks out of college,” says Duncan Clauss, one half of the founding team. Today, the crew has graduated to a shiny taproom closer to Main Street and the Hotel Jerome, and to the well-heeled tourists that flock to Aspen practically year-round.

PHILOSOPHY

“We weren’t interested in trying to wow people or reinvent the wheel,” says head brewer Rory Douthit, a New Englander who took over the brewing duties in the spring of 2010. “We want to make great versions of styles that people will drink and drink often.”

KEY BEER

The big, juicy, American-style India pale ale known as Independence Pass (7.5% ABV) is a grassy, floral blast of Cascade, Palisade, Columbus, and Simcoe hops, with a foundation of sturdy malt.

DETOUR

CRAFT BEER, GONZO STYLE

THE WOODY CREEK TAVERN

2858 Upper River Rd.• Woody Creek, CO 81656 • (970) 923-4585

The saying “Good people drink good beer” is not one of the best-known lines from the writer Hunter S. Thompson, whose seminal work, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas scorched the pants off the literary world in 1972, but it is—obviously—one of his best. And, although traveling in the usual manner of Dr. Gonzo is not even remotely recommended it is a good idea to visit his two most famous old haunts, one in glitzy Aspen, and one right outside it in a dustier spot.

Start at J-Bar, a Victorian gem with a marble floor and tin ceiling in the lobby of the Hotel Jerome in Aspen proper. This watering hole started hydrating silver miners in 1889 and later became the preferred liquid-rations stop for 10th Mountain Division soldiers-in-training during World War II. Thompson used the place as his headquarters for his campaign for sheriff in 1970, running on his “freak power ticket” with a pledge to regulate illicit drug sales, replace the city streets with dirt, and, more than anything else, as he would later write, prevent “greedheads, land-rapers and other human jackals from capitalizing on the name Aspen.” (He lost by only four hundred votes.) For years after, Thompson was a regular here, stopping by after the post office to eat, drink, and read his mail, generally making less of a scene than on the drunken night when he duct-taped fellow partier Bill Murray to a chair and pushed him into the hotel pool, nearly drowning him. The first of Thompson’s two memorials was held here after his death in 2005; behind the bar today, there’s a print of the poster Thompson and artist Tom Benton created for the sheriff’s campaign with its iconic double-thumbed fist clenching a peyote button. On tap, look for locally brewed Aspen Brewing Co; for dinner, there’s a good half-pound burger. Good enough for government work, as they say,