Raising a last glass to First Drafts (Denver Post file).
Back in spring 2012, I attended Avery Brewing’s annual Strong Ale Festival in what is now the former Avery building in Boulder, a barrel-lined labyrinth with amazing finds up and down the aisles and a crowd of informed beer drinkers.
On more than one occasion that day, I was stunned that people actually came up to me and knew who I was.
The First Drafts blog at that time was about four months old. We had formed as a collective, a group of Denver Post journalists whose day jobs were as disparate as writing about courts, city hall or anything that needed doing. Our common ground was a strong-bordering-on-obsessive interest in excellent local hand-crafted beer.
That someone — anyone — would go out of their way to say something nice about our new venture was incredibly gratifying. One of those people was a young guy in a beard, probably wearing a black T-shirt and a hat, who told me he was getting ready to open a brewery on Broadway in Denver. Would I be interested, he asked, in checking it out?
How awesome was this? Here was someone building something, talking to someone else trying to get something started, each of us playing different roles — participant and chronicler — in one of the nation’s most vibrant brewing scenes.
That was Nick Nunns and the brewery was TRVE Brewing, and I did , even if I did err in blurring the lines between black metal and death metal. (Note to self: just use the term ‘metal’).
Last year, TRVE made another appearance on the blog — that spotlights the best of the past year and what lies ahead.
You probably know where this reminiscing is headed.
The headline is a dead giveaway.
After nearly four years, 450 blog posts and dozens of print stories about the Colorado brewing scene, this is the end of the line for me at The Denver Post and First Drafts.
I’m leaving the newspaper to become the Denver bureau chief for Chalkbeat, a nonprofit news organization covering one of the most vital issues of the day, education. My last day at the Post is Friday and I start my new job Aug. 10.
Back in late 2011, Denver Post editor Greg Moore challenged staff members to think about different ways to contribute to our digital efforts. What are you interested in? Where do your passions lie? Go ahead and start a blog about it.
It didn’t take long for the craft beer drinkers in the room to find each other, and First Drafts was born. What we quickly found was a large, thirsty audience of beer lovers who otherwise might not have read The Denver Post.
People seek out information online about subjects dear to them. And in Colorado, beer is a most precious thing.
The goal from the start was to do what we do — reporting. There are no shortage of places online with beer reviews, ratings and awesome events calendars we didn’t want to replicate. So we sought to ferret out news, identify changes and shifts in the industry, and ask good questions of the people who make Colorado beer culture what it is.
Some highlights for me:
— . This is my favorite thing we do and we don’t even do it. At the end of each year, we survey brewers, brewery reps, beer bar owners and others about highlights of the past year and predictions for the future. Then at the end we pull it all together and single out those who get the most mentions for brewery of the year, new brewery of the year, future trend predictions and the like. I always learn something new. Chris Black of Falling Rock Tap House is and will always be the closer of the series, although it’d be nice if he filed a little bit earlier.
— . When the eyes of the beer world are on Denver, we try to give the people what they want. That means that is always among the most-viewed posts of the year, from in-the-know correspondents across the country, , a and more.
— . In 2013, the Post staged free quarterly events at the legendary LoDo brewpub, providing a chance for beer lovers to hear from the industry’s leading lights and sample their craft.
This is most certainly not the end of the line for First Drafts. The collective lives on, with other folks stepping up to continue traditions (GABF Week calendar!) and start new ones (giving Gorski the +1!).
. , when he began making a name for himself within the sprawling the Coors corporate family by secretly tucking away barrels in the giant Golden plant that would go on to produce jaw-dropping fruit-loaded sour beers.
The thing that struck me most about the June bottle release I covered at Casey was how chill everything was for a brewery that is so hyped.
There was no bum rush when the doors rattled open. No pushing or shoving or complaining.
About an hour in, Troy’s dad, Greg, sat down with me on a damp picnic table to talk about his son’s brewing odyssey. We talked and talked — and because it was Greg’s job to wash the empties, the empties were stacking up.
That’s when a group at a table next to us sprung up and started helping. These people who had probably driven hours, gotten up early and waited in line because they wanted to experience something that felt authentic to them.
This is what it was all about — a tribe of people connected by something shared, a proud father busing tables, a son selling bottles he corked himself, a river rushing by … a perfect Colorado day.
The Casey June release (Eric Gorski, The Denver Post).
