The Beer Capital

Every autumn Denver becomes the unofficial capital of American beer. The Great American Beer Festival has been held in Colorado since nineteen eighty-two, when the first edition gathered twenty-four breweries and eight hundred attendees in Boulder. It moved to Denver in nineteen eighty-four and has grown into the largest ticketed beer event in the United States, hosted by the Brewers Association, which is headquartered in nearby Boulder.

Colorado consistently ranks among the leading states for craft brewery density, with well over four hundred operating statewide. Clean mountain water, an early homebrewing culture, and the trade group's Front Range presence all reinforced one another over the decades. The Coors brewery in Golden, founded by Adolph Coors and Jacob Schueler in eighteen seventy-three, is the largest single-site brewery in the world and represents one end of that tradition.

On the craft end, the Wynkoop Brewing Company co-founded in nineteen eighty-eight by then-unemployed geologist John Hickenlooper opened in a Lower Downtown warehouse that most people called skid row. The Wynkoop is credited with helping revive that neighborhood into the historic Lower Downtown district. Hickenlooper later served as mayor, then governor, then a United States senator.

His political career traces directly back to a brewpub on Wynkoop Street.