Fat Tire Amber Ale is New Belgium Brewing Co.’s flagship beer. (Helen H. Richardson, The Denver Post)
A pair of Colorado beer makers survived to the third round of Untappd’s Brewery Madness.
New Belgium and Oskar Blues dominated competition through the first two rounds of the tournament to advance to the Sweet 16.
The creators of Untappd, a mobile app that allows users to rate and catalog the beers they drink, put together a bracket of the 64 most popular breweries on the app to coincide with the NCAA Tournament.
Nine Colorado breweries made the initial list and five (Avery, Coors, Left Hand, New Belgium and Oskar Blues) had advanced to the second round.
Untappd is tracking the number of unique check-ins to each brewery for each round. The rounds coincide with the each of the rounds in the NCAA Tournament. The third round will take place March 24-25, while the quarterfinals run March 26-27.
New Belgium, a No. 2 seed, has a good chance to move into the Final Four barring an upset. The Fort Collins brewery tallied the highest vote total in the first round in the Midwest quadrant, and the second highest in round two, just 59 check-ins behind No. 1-seeded Stone.
No. 3 Oskar Blues has a bit of a climb in the West quadrant. Its third-round opponent, No. 2 Lagunitas, had more than twice as many check-ins (5,371-2,600) in the second round.
