I usually have pretty good luck on my beer trips. My recent trip out to Denver was no exception. I wish that I could say I was doing advance scouting for the National Homebrew Conference or the Great American Beer Festival, but my purpose was not so grand as that. I just happened to be in town and happened to be thirsty. There's something about being at high altitudes that makes me thirsty.

I've already written about Pints Pub (elsewhere) and mentioned that I did the tour of Flying Dog and Stranahan's Colorado Whiskey distillery. I teased everyone by stating I had visited several other breweries, but didn't reveal what those other places where. I'll rectify that omission now.

My first beer in Denver was at the Rock Bottom (corporate website) on the 16th Street Mall (at the corner of Curtis Street). It was just a couple of blocks from the convention center (the gravitational focus of my beer orbit) so I dashed over there for lunch on the first day. That first beer was a wheat beer, not quite a hefeweizen, more what I think of as an American wheat -- cloudy and a tad tart finessed with some bitterness -- a completely different beast from its Bavarian cousin.

The first beer of day is always the best, or nearly always. I first noticed this phenomenon when I was doing my English pub tour last September. I started hitting the pubs at about 1:30 or 2 in the afternoon and that first pint was so delicious. Oddly enough my pub companion on that trip was Pete Brown's Three Sheets to the Wind and he noted that same phenomenon -- the first beer after you get off the airplane is always the best beer in the world.

The wheat beer at Rock Bottom barely hit the sides of my throat on the way down -- I was pretty thirsty after talking for an hour and a half about subjects literary to a packed room of conference attendees. After disappearing the wheat so fast I realized that I probably should have started with a glass of water, but hell! I was in Denver and I wasn't driving anywhere for the next five days, so I felt I could splurge just a little since there was no possible way I would be endangering anyone.

The second pint was a responsibly sipped and enjoyed red ale, my kind of balance of hop and malt. It was the perfect complement to the spicy chicken and cilantro pizza that I only ate half of (I suppose I could have eaten the whole thing, but a guy has to preserve his boyish figure even through middle age).

After my two pint lunch I had to go back to the conference, but that doesn't mean I didn't get good beer. I attended an evening meeting and a banquet where New Belgium's Fat Tire was served. Being from the East Coast where Fat Tire is as common as the Dodo, having ready access to Fat Tire at the conference was a real treat. However, by the end of the week I realized that Fat Tire was even more common in Denver than megaswill.

This is already running a bit long so I'll continue with this Denver pub crawl and a future post.