Author Archives: Chad
No Holding back! Planning on visiting any Colorado breweries during GABF week? I would make sure you get out to come visit us in our taproom at the Barrel Cellar. Starting Monday We’ll be extending our hours for the week and tapping a new barrel-aged sour beer each day at 12 noon. We’ll be open [...]
For the past two months we have been quietly readying the Crooked Stave Barrel Cellar, located just north of Denver’s Highlands neighborhood at 1441 W. 46th Ave. Unit 19. On Wednesday September 5th at 2pm we will officially open our doors for the first time welcoming guests into our small intimate tasting room. The Barrel [...]
We are fresh back from the 2012 Craft Brewers Conference held in San Diego, California. This year was a World Beer Cup year with the competition being held every two years. As we have only been making beers for a short time this was our first chance to enter our beers into any type of [...]
Greetings friends, fans and craft beer enthusiasts! With the details in place and the website infrastructure hopefully taken care of, we are pleased to announce the inaugural formation of Crooked Stave’s Cellar Reserve Membership. We mentioned previously that we had been working on the details to our annual membership and after putting a lot of [...]
DRAFT Magazine recently published it’s annual list of the top 25 beers of 2011 in their November/December issue. To our surprise Wild Wild Brett Rouge was selected as one of their top 25 beers of 2011. We were extremely honored to be listed amongst so many other great breweries and their beers. Below is the [...]
A few weeks back we were featured in an episode of New Brew Thursday. Stephen, Dr. Bill, Matt and the whole crew were out visiting for GABF and stopped in to pay us a visit. It’s a pretty in-depth interview covering many aspects of Crooked Stave and barrel-aged beers. Sit back, pour yourself a glass [...]
We were fortunate enough to be showcased in a recent article by Serious Eats on their drinks blog. Their write up and review titled: Getting Wild with Two Brett Beers from Crooked Stave is of Pure Guava Petite Sour and Wild Wild Brett Rouge, the first two beers we released in bottles. We are always [...]
This is a beer that will tickle the senses..and is best summed up by our friend Nathan Zeender of Desjardin Brewing baroque beer: of, relating to, or having the characteristics of a style of artistic expression that is marked generally by use of complex forms, bold ornamentation, and the juxtaposition of contrasting elements often conveying [...]
…This blog, which is meant to be a way for us to be able to keep everyone reading updated on our happenings, has been seriously neglected. What can I say? We’ve been busy…very busy! From here on out I plan to be better about posting updates. So much has happened over the past three months [...]
Starting today at 4pm Euclid Hall Bar and Kitchen will be tapping Good Glory a beer we brewed exclusively for the restaurant. It was a really fun project, working together with some of the beer experts at Euclid Hall, specifically Ryan Conklin who was instrumental in setting up the collaboration, working on recipe development and [...]
Slightly animist title for this post, but it is truly deserving given our first major equipment purchase is a 25hl foeder, or large oak fermenter. Maybe not the most sound decision by most breweries standards.. Then again, Crooked Stave is not the conventional brewery so to us it’s the best first piece of equipment that [...]
Wow! It’s about time I got around to up dating this blog to reflect where Crooked Stave is at this time. With three batches now in barrels souring, it’s time to get a 4th batch brewed and fermenting. This has been difficult due to working around brewing schedules and being a one man show. Now [...]
With the previous batch transfered into barrels, I cleaned the fermenter and readied the brewhouse for batch #3. The following morning of February 16th I mashed in for the golden base beer which will over time become L’Brett d’Or. This beer is our Golden Sour, but with a twist. It is a 100% Brettanomyces primary [...]
On February 11th a big group of Colorado brewers got together for a collaborative brew called Buddha Nuvo to be released on April 16th at the 2011 Saison Festival held at Trinity Brewing in Colorado Springs. This years batch draws on the experience of many and is a unique collaborative effort. The idea behind the [...]
Historically oak casks were a critical part of daily life. They stored everything from dry goods to liquid goods and were used extensively for shipping. Coopers were an important part of the community, and skilled craftsman who’s trade took years to perfect. Nowadays oak casks are no longer widely used, they are mostly for aging [...]
With the barrels in house and readied for beer, we decided to produce a batch that could condition all the barrels with our house sour cultures. The idea was that we brew a beer that finishes with a higher amount of unfermented sugars after fermentation giving a good environment for all the various souring critters [...]
Over the past couple of months we’ve slowly amassed a considerable collection of oak barrels. We had two big hauls of Red and White wine barrels which came in from Napa during the month of January. The recent additions to our barrel cellar has since brought the total count up to 50 barrels, giving us [...]
On January 10, 2011 we brewed our inaugural batch of beer. The idea behind our first batch was to produce a beer primary fermented with 100% Brettanomyces yeasts. We thought why not take it a bit further and have the fermentation occur completely in used red wine oak barrels with a few strains of Brettanomyces [...]
The Photo above gives a little indication of the barrel load we hauled from Denver to Fort Collins at the end of December. In all we loaded up 13 red wine barrels on the trailer and 4 into the vehicle while still managing to find room for eight barrel racks. I then made the glorious [...]
Now things are really starting to pick up for us. On the heels of receiving our first oak barrels, we now have one of the two licenses we need in order to start brewing batches of Crooked Stave beers. In very timely fashion, I showed up on Friday to find a piece of mail had [...]
As the weeks go on we are getting closer to our first anticipated brew day. While we don’t yet know exactly when it will be, we have been going over the recipes and contacting suppliers for raw materials. We have just purchased our first oak barrels, seven Makers Mark Bourbon Barrels. The barrels came from [...]
After a few weeks of working with Travis Olsen our graphic designer, we finally have a finished logo. I think the logo turned out very well and embodies the idea behind Crooked Stave and our mission. Thanks to Travis for his hard work getting the logo ready quickly, yet still providing a quality design. There [...]
Starting any new business involves lots of planning and filing of documents. During the first week of November we filed all of the necessary state and federal documents to operate as a business entity in Colorado. That was only the first step. In order to produce and sell beer there is a whole other application [...]
A lengthy meeting this morning with Travis Olsen our graphic designer proved to be an eventful way to round out this week. The preliminary logos looked great and it was hard to chose just one design. I think my second favorite will be saved and made into a T-shirt desing. Travis is designing the brewery [...]
I’m freshly back from the week long trip which took me through Wisconsin, Illinois, and Michigan visiting a total of 11 breweries. I’ve had some time to digest my notes and think about the conversations I had with the numerous brewers throughout the trip. By far the greatest experience was visiting with Dan Carey of [...]
I’m off to Chicago for a week with fellow AC Golden brewer and friend Troy Casey. More accurately we’re flying into Chicago, immediately picking up our rental car and driving out to New Glarus, Wisconsin to meet with Dan Carey. We’ll be returning to Chicago just in time to judge for the Festival of Barrel-aged [...]
Today we completed the first steps in becoming a brewery in Denver, Colorado. We received our documents which formally register Crooked Stave LLC as an entity in the state of Colorado. We signed and completed our Operating Agreement as well as receiving our Federal Employer Identification Number and filing our Federal Entity Classification. This was a big first step [...]
This is the beginning of Crooked Stave Artisan Beer Project. We are an artisan brewery in planning that is based in Denver, Colorado. Who are we? Well actually, we are just one person… For those of you who don’t already know me from the Brettanomyces Project let me introduce myself, I am Chad Yakobson and [...]