Marty Jones is the journalist’s best friend. He knows where to get beer. Good beer. Free beer.
Marty and I are part of a small club that convenes a couple of times a year to visit local brewers and breweries. Also along for the ride are retired adman Lew Cady, former Coors brewer Dave Thomas, current brewer (Dostal Alley in Central City) Buddy Schmalz, and the king of beers, Charlie Papazian, all of whom are knowledgeable about suds and sometimes enjoy drinking them.
Jones loves beer and beer people for the pure joy of it. We once passed an afternoon sampling Papazian’s homebrewed beers in his brewhouse/garage. Marty was so excited to be in the presence, and beer headquarters, of the president of the Boulder-based Brewers Association of America, that he was moved to call his brother and ask, “Guess where I am!?!”
Jones is a songwriter, front man for the good-time bar band Pork Boilin’ Poor Boys, beer writer, “lead singer/idea man” (do NOT say “spokesman”) for Oskar Blues Brewery in Lyons and organizer/emcee of the annual Beer Drinker of the Year competition at Wynkoop Brewing Co.
Jones’ good-beer epiphany took place when he had his first taste of Ballentine India Pale Ale as a young man. “It was like no beer I had ever tasted. Prior to that it was Schlitz in a can with any woman I could get to join me.” From there it was a short hop to making his own beer and from there to honeymooning with his wife, Lisa, at the 1991 Great American Beer Festival in Denver. He was hooked.
That his first good-beer experience should involve a can is ironic because since 2002, he’s been swimming upstream in the microbrew world, beating the drum for Oskar Blues, the first microbrewery to can its beers, including Dale’s Pale Ale and Old Chub. Thirty craft brewers, including New Belgium in Fort Collins, have followed suit.
His biggest obstacle was overcoming beer snobs’ mindset that only industrial beers come in cans. “One guy said he looked forward to the day we failed. Every day, we meet people who don’t understand the modern (lined) can. After all, half the beer in the world is sold in cans.”
Retailers were reluctant to take on the cans, even though they’re more portable and more readily recyclable than bottles. “We had stores tell us, ‘We can’t sell that beer.'”
Oskar Blues — thanks, in part, to its “savvy publicist” — boosted its production from 700 barrels when it opened in 1997 to 12,409 last year and looks forward to a 30,000-barrel year, thanks to a new brewery/cannery in Longmont. It will continue to brew in Lyons for its brewpub there.
A brush with his own mortality made good food and good beer even more important to Jones. His band, which leans heavily on beer-laced tunes, is back in action this summer after two years off because Jones, the lead singer, suffered a ruptured vocal chord and a blood clot. “Millions of people fully understand that life is really short — and that’s not a cliche, so if you’re going to eat food and drink beer, enjoy the best of those things.”
Now, he’s immortalized in “Ramble Colorado,” a fact-and fun- filled guidebook by free-spirited Eric Peterson, due out this month. Peterson describes Jones as “one of the nicest guys involved in Colorado’s remarkable beer culture.” “That’s pretty flattering to think about,” says Jones in his aw- shucks Virginia drawl.
Jones is looking ahead to a bright future for the craft-beer industry, despite severe shortages of hops and barley and the sputtering economy.
“There’s so much more potential for us to keep growing. We’re just scratching the surface. People have come to appreciate really good beer.”
He’s got it right. In 2007, there were 1,449 craft breweries in the United States and sales rose 12 percent.
Dick Kreck: rakreck@yahoo.com. Send mail to him c/o The Denver Post, 101 W. Colfax Ave., Suite 600, Denver, CO 80202.
