Fiction Beer Company owners Christa and Ryan Kilpatrick at the bar made of books. (Submitted)
Inside Fiction Beer Company, the bar sits on a stack of books, and the menu offers classics, adventure and fantasy. The tap handles are made from book spines and the east Denver brewery features a tall bookshelf and two comfy couches.
“She’s a book dork, and I’m a beer geek,” explained Ryan Kilpatrick, who along with his wife, Christa, opened the brewery in September. “Everything we do is about books.”
The Belgian dark strong ale brewed with roasted Hatch chilies is called This is Not an Exit, the final line in Bret Easton Ellis’ “American Psycho.” And the Somewhere Around Barstow experimental IPA takes its name from Hunter S. Thompson’s “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.”
It’s no secret that beer inspires writers, so it’s only fitting that writers are inspiring Colorado craft beer.
“We’ve spent a lot of time thinking about the beers that we are going to have and the stories behind those beers,” Ryan Kilpatrick said. “And the story is as important to us as the actual beer is.”
Fiction Beer is one of two newer Denver breweries to embrace a trend in the craft-beer industry of taking inspiration from literature. Four miles west on Colfax Avenue, Lost Highway Brewing opened the same month evoking Jack Kerouac’s “On the Road” in its murals and beatnik logo.
