Boulder - A town of hippies and perhaps a brewery or two.

Colorado is known for being full of hippies but perhaps Boulder is hippie central? It seemed that way to me certainly. Apart from all the new age shops around the place, there are about 65 or more medicinal marijuana shops around the place. I passed one that was part of the same buildings as Obama's campaign office. Since my Colorado family are self confessed hippies, working for different environmental services, they fit right in.

Anyway we visited my wife's cousin's place of work for a tour of the recycling facility and then headed downtown for lunch. 

After we dropped the cousin back to work we head downtown again to find me some beer, well more beer because I had some at lunch but I wanted to visit a brewery. Time was somewhat against us in Boulder because we had family arriving in so we wanted to be back in Denver for 6pm or so.

First thing we did was find a bar to sit and have a few drinks while I waited for Allan, organiser of the Beer Bloggers Conference to meet up for a drink. We picked the rooftop garden of The Lazy Dog in the pedestrian area of Pearl street. It was very pleasant up there with enough beers to keep me happy. While I was talking to Alan I mentioned that I was going to Fort Collins the next day and I had wanted to do the New Belgium tour but it turns out to be booked out for three weeks. Alan said he would take care of it and within a couple of hours I had an email from New Belgium and a time for myself and my family. Thanks Alan. 

I also asked his advice for where to go in Boulder for my one brewery visit as that's all I had time for. We agreed on Mountain Sun because the beer is good and it also happens to be around the corner from where we parked the car.

It's a real hippie style brewpub with some of the friendliest staff I have come across. They were clearly very happy in their job for some reason....

The hummus was fantastic and well worth getting and I was sorry we had already had lunch as the menu looked great.

The beers that stood out on the sample tray were Hop Vivant which is a beautiful and balanced Double IPA packed full of orange and grapefruit citrus. Drop Kick American stout was a lovely in your face stout full of roast coffee and vanilla with a slight lemon finish.

I was talked in to trying the braggot ale by our server. It's like a cross between meade and beer. There is a lot of sweetness from the honey but it's most definitely a beer. It was interesting to try but not my sort of beer.

I loved Mountain Sun and would have loved to have stayed longer.

And that was it, time to head back to Denver and see my mouther in law and nephew as well as the rest of the family that had arrived while we were in Boulder. I did not get as much time there as I would have liked.