As gardens around Colorado begin to overflow with tomatoes, growers and cocktail enthusiasts may find themselves crossing paths at a unique version of that particular morning drink, whether the hair of the dog or a jump-start to the day, the Bloody Mary.

In a state bursting with home gardens, farmers markets, fresh produce and a DIY spirit, it seems inevitable that the drink would move beyond syrupy, heavily processed tomato juice out of a can. A couple of Colorado establishments offer their own versions of the drink and they stepped up with tips and tricks for the home bartender to try their hand.

Visitors to the juice bar at Mt. Princeton Hot Springs near Buena Vista have come across the freshly juiced Bloody Mary this summer, recently returned to the menu after some years of absence. The Mt. Princeton version of the cocktail relies on extremely ripe local hothouse tomatoes — grown on a neighboring property that makes use of the same geothermal activity that powers the springs — juiced along with a small handful of additional vegetables, according to Tom Warren, general manager at the hot springs.

For each 16-ounce drink, he said they juice five to six tomatoes along with half a lemon, a touch of fresh garlic and three local carrots, the last of which vastly improves the texture of the juice.

“With the tomatoes only it’s very thin, but when you squeeze the carrots it’s a thicker juice,” he said. “I think in the mouth it feels better than just the really really liquidy tomato juice.”

Warren rounds out the flavor profile with a touch of Japanese oyster sauce, which takes the place of traditional Worcestershire sauce in adding a touch of savoriness to the whole package, along with a sprinkle of salt and pepper and the customer’s choice of vodka. They experimented with oyster and Worcestershire, and Warren said the Worcestershire was too strong for the milder, freshly-juiced version of the cocktail. 

“We thought with the oyster sauce, it tasted very, very good. I did taste a sample with the Worcestershire sauce, it was not bad, but it almost overwhelmed the taste of the tomato,” he said. It’s overall a relatively low-sodium approach, though they rim the glass with Tajin, a blend of chile, lime and salt.

When it comes to garnishes, Mt. Princeton sticks with its minimal approach, offering bacon as an add-on. There once was an option to add three chilled shrimp, but that became “just a nightmare to prep” because of its popularity, Warren said.

For the home enthusiast, he recommends finding high-juice tomatoes, such as the fresh local ones used at the resort. “This is a very low-structured, soft tomato that’s full of liquid content,” he said. Some varieties and underripe tomatoes, liked the ones in the big box grocery stores that are “as hard as an apple,” will have too much flesh and yield less juice. “You would juice 20 for a (cocktail).”

Warren’s biggest recommendations for making a home-juiced Bloody Mary were to buy a good juicer and be prepared to spend some time making and perfecting the cocktail. It’s a “very simple, very wholesome” drink that relies on a few quality ingredients. “The real joy to it is that none of it is from a can or a bag.”

“The best Bloody Mary I’d ever had”

In Colorado Springs, Mother Muff’s owner Susan Hirt says her menu of Marys was informed by an older, more complex version of the Mt. Princeton cocktail that she enjoyed almost 20 years ago. Inspired by “the best Bloody Mary I’d ever had,” she experimented with different vegetables and different proportions to put one on the menu years later when opening Muff’s.

Because Mother Muff’s can serve hundreds of Bloody Marys in a day, the restaurant relies on a high-quality commercial tomato juice for its base, and blends it with a “concentrate” that consists of other juices and ingredients. The concentrate is made by juicing carrots, celery, cucumber, green and red bell peppers, beets (for color), jalapeño and a secret seventh ingredient in big batches using heavy-duty Breville juicers. They pass the initial pulp through a second time to ensure that they’re getting as much juice as possible for their effort and then freeze the concentrate

“At first we juiced every couple of days, because it only stays fresh for three or four days,” Hirt said. “I wanted to keep it as fresh as possible, and as veggie as possible. We came up with making it in big batches and freezing it.”

Vegetables get cleaned and chopped for ease of processing, but none are peeled. Once everything is processed, the vegetable juice is dosed with Tabasco and Worcestershire sauces and is ready to be added to the tomato juice.

For the home mixologist, Hirt recommended the approach she took to develop the Mother Muff’s recipe: juicing a few cups of a variety of vegetables, then playing with the proportions. She had a cucumber-heavy version that she liked, but it was less popular with tasters, so she dialed down the cucumber and turned up the peppers, carrots and other ingredients. “The beet helps to give it that juicy, earthy flavor, but it’s also for color,” she said. Without it, Muff’s mix is more brown than red.

Removing the seeds from the jalapeños or other peppers can impact the flavor profile and the level of heat, and she suggested substituting poblanos for the home mixologist who prefers it mild. She’s used Anaheim peppers in a pinch, as well.

“Don’t be afraid to try different things if it’s for yourself, for a party,” she advised. “It really is endless, the things you can juice. I think apple might be a really great minor ingredient if you’re looking for something different.”

Muff’s offers a variety of additional customizations that customers can explore or the home bartender can take inspiration from. There are choices that stray from vodka or house-infused poblano vodka — with offerings that include gin, rum, whiskey and tequila — and garnishes that range from the typical olive and celery stalk to bolder choices such as a pickle spear, bacon, blue cheese-stuffed olives and pepperoncini. 

Other tweaks, often based on regional interpretations, include Clamato instead of tomato juice, or augmenting the drink with olive juice, pickle juice, sriracha, wasabi, porter-style beer, and even beef broth. 

“There are different kinds of Bloody Marys depending on where you are in the United States,” Hirt said. “Where I grew in in Illinois, they put beef broth into ‘em, which I think is kinda gross, but it’s on there. Years and years and years ago, I stole a recipe from a bartender at The Keg Lounge in Manitou — who is now a regular, by the way, which I love — he put a little bit of porter beer in his Bloody Mary. It was something really unique that’d I’d never tried. It was really good, so it’s on there.”

So whether or not it includes clams or beef, Mother Muff’s illustrates the diversity of the drink. There are countless roads that the tender of a Bloody Mary bar can explore to make the drink their own, and the next great iteration might just come from a basket of fresh farmers market ingredients.

A basic tomato juice recipe

3 pounds very ripe tomatoes, cored and roughly chopped
1¼ cup chopped celery, including leaves
⅓ cup chopped onion
2 tablespoons sugar
1 teaspoon salt
1 pinch of black pepper
A couple of shakes of Tabasco sauce (6-8 drops, to taste)

This recipe can be made using the cooked method, recommended by simplyrecipes.com, or using one of these no-cook methods (including putting the ingredients through a countertop juicer) recommended by alphafoodie.com.

We tested the recipe using the blender method using extremely ripe field tomatoes and substituting two carrots for the sugar.

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Many consumers of craft beers and spirits pride themselves on being able to draw a clear line from their beverage to a local brewer or distiller. But a Colorado nonprofit is trying to help extend that line further up the supply chain, so consumers can trace their drink all the way to the farmer.

The Colorado Grain Chain has funded a small number of beer and spirits projects with the idea of promoting Colorado-grown grains, like wheat, barley and quinoa, while helping consumers to broaden their view — these beverages aren’t just made locally, but sourced locally.

Despite being in a state that’s a leader in the craft beer and craft spirits industries, the vast majority of grain used by Colorado brewers and distillers comes from out of state, sometimes even from Europe and Canada, Grain Chain project manager Lisa Boldt said.

“There are a number of breweries that dabble,” she said. “There’s a couple that use a majority or all Colorado grains. But it is by-and-large commodity grains being used by brewers and distillers in the state, because it’s what everyone did, and it’s easy, and it’s cheaper.

“There’s no story to it, and you don’t know who you’re supporting. It’s probably not a small family farm like your brewery is a small family-run brewery.”

She’s speaking on the topic as someone with skin in the game. Her work at the Colorado Grain Chain is in addition to helping run Primitive Beer in Longmont, where she and her husband, Brandon, use all Colorado grain, grown within 30 miles and malted in Fort Collins. She said the benefits range from lower transportation costs and a smaller shipping carbon footprint, to the ability to work directly with the farmer and the maltster to get a product dialed in to the brewer or distiller’s particular needs.

“If we as brewers and distillers want the local community to support us, to buy our products and come to our tasting rooms, I think it’s important that we support the local ingredients that go into our products,” she said. “The flavors are incredible, we get such a high-quality product, and you’re supporting local farmers who are running businesses just like you. By keeping them in business, you’re keeping the whole food system working.”

It’s connecting you back to where you’re living.

Audrey Paugh, Grain Chain’s marketing and networking specialist

Support for growers is becoming essential as the pressures of commercial development and the commodity grain market continue to squeeze out small farmers who can’t match the razor-thin margins of a large farm leveraging greater economies of scale, said Audrey Paugh, marketing and networking specialist for the Grain Chain. 

The nonprofit is member-supported and, among other things, helps small-scale farmers to network and market their products. Many of them include heritage varieties of small grains in their crop rotations and produce high-value types of barley, wheat and rye that are appealing to artisanal brewers, bakers and distillers who, in turn, can charge a bit more for products that have a local story attached.

“It’s connecting you back to where you’re living,” Paugh said.

She also noted a 2022 survey by Colorado State University that showed an overwhelming level of support for local food and agriculture among Coloradans. 

“Nationally, we’re losing farmland every day, and the more we can have local farms in Colorado profiting, being channeled into our local food and beverage industries, the more they’re going to be able to survive,” she said.

Win-win

Sometimes the level of support that drinkers want to offer to producers and producers want to offer growers runs up against financial constraints, Boldt noted. This can be reflected in higher prices for ingredients grown locally at a smaller scale, or in the increased risk when using new ingredients that a brewer or distiller may not be as familiar with.

“Everyone has to watch their bottom lines, and there are pressures from all sides, and you can only raise your prices,” she said. “We decided, let’s take away the risk, let’s give people these microgrants, let’s see what kinds of beverages they come up with using all Colorado grains. We’ll help market it, they’ll help market the Grain Chain in return, so it’s a win-win that way.”

LEFT: WeldWerks Brewery in Greeley. RIGHT: Jordan Wheeler monitors beer canning at WeldWerks on Nov. 10. (Jeremy Sparig, Special to The Colorado Sun). (Photographer credit)

TOP: WeldWerks Brewery in Greeley. BOTTOM: Jordan Wheeler monitors beer canning at WeldWerks on Nov. 10. (Jeremy Sparig, Special to The Colorado Sun). (Photographer credit)

To that end, the Grain Chain used part of a $109,000 grant from the Walton Family Foundation to support four beverage collaborations — two beers and two spirits — with $4,000 microgrants.

The selection committee prioritized grain-forward products and different grain types and sources when choosing which projects to fund. They also considered other factors, such as collaboration among multiple producers or with other supply chain members, and assessed aspects of the projects that may contribute to sustainability.

The breweries and distilleries are able to leverage free ingredients toward a profitable product, while the Colorado Grain Chain receives free advertising and marketing, and the grantees will report back on information regarding the grain itself, handling and yield, customer feedback, with write-ups available for members.

“If another brewery or distillery wants to take a risk and use quinoa or a specific type of special wheat, they have this report they can turn to and say, ‘Let’s see what their experience was,’” Boldt said.

The two beers were the first to hit the market, starting with Foamies, a Czech-style lager that came out of a collaboration between Denver’s Cohesion Brewing and WeldWerks Brewing in Greeley. Eric Larkin, brewer and founder at Cohesion, said the project with WeldWerks’ head brewer Skip Schwartz had been long in coming. 

“I’ve been wanting to brew with Skip and the WeldWerks crew. We’ve been colleagues going back five years or so,” Larkin said. “It was an easy fit with some of the core values that we started Cohesion with and want to do, and he was on board.”

They’d been discussing a collaboration for a couple of years, Larkin said, but the effort was delayed with the installation of a new brewhouse at WeldWerks. He had gotten used to brewing with local grain when he worked at Odd13 Brewing in Lafayette, and when he started Cohesion to focus on Czech lagers, he began working primarily with Troubadour Maltings. Like other malting companies, Troubadour prepares grains for brewing, steeping, germinating and sometimes roasting the grains used in the fermentation process. The malting process differs depending on the type of beer.

“We built a custom base malt with them, we work with them a ton,” Larkin said. “When we do collaborations, I try to advocate for local malt, craft malt. I think there’s a variety of benefits — economic, relationship, diversity of flavor profiles.”

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Schwartz had also worked with Troubadour while at the now-defunct Black Project Spontaneous and Wild Ales in Denver. WeldWerks uses more malt than a craft maltster like Troubadour can provide, but he jumped at the opportunity to connect with owner Chris Schooley on this project and use the bespoke Cohesion base malt.

“We always like when we get the opportunities to work with smaller craft maltsters,” Schwartz said. “I’m always excited to work with him and his team and his malts. It was really cool to be able to pull that in and do something that we don’t normally do with the craft stuff.”

The recipe they created, like all Cohesion beers, is designed to showcase the more intense flavor that Troubadour created for Larkin. “If I’m paying a premium for the malt, if I’m building something for malt-forward beers and beers that aren’t really showcasing hops in the way that an IPA might, I want as much flavor as possible,” Larkin said.

Their special base malt, dubbed Super Pevec, isn’t proprietary for Cohesion, but it’s not a big focus for Troubadour. It’s designed to mimic a more robustly flavored, traditionally made European malt, and Larkin said he’s pleased with any opportunity to share the malt and their methods with other brewers.

“I love that we have a malt that we can say, ‘Hey, you don’t need to bring in a European malt.’ There’s more options now than when we opened Cohesion just two years ago,” he said. “The more customers and brewers can learn about this style and use as close to the correct ingredients as possible, the better off we are, because we’re already seen as a leader in this.”

Compared to commodity malt, he said he’s sacrificing a certain level of consistency for that additional level of character. He said he enjoys the technical aspect of having to tweak his recipes or processes based on the variability of an agricultural product, rather than sacrifice flavor to make processing easier.

“For us, it’s not about replicating exactly the same flavors to a T every time,” he said. “If the malt changes, my beer is changing, and that’s OK. That’s something that we embrace.”

The two breweries may seem like strange bedfellows. While Cohesion is so heavily focused on traditional, malt-forward lagers, WeldWerks is known for experimental and hoppy beers, such as their flagship Juicy Bits hazy IPA.

“I prefer hoppy styles, personally. I’m more of an IPA drinker than a lager drinker, except for Eric’s lagers,” Schwartz said. “At WeldWerks we don’t make a lot of malt-forward beers that often, even our stouts are kind of adjunct focused.”

They made some adjustments for using Schwartz’s yeast, upped the level of hops a little from Larkin’s normal range, and decided to give it a shot. If something went wrong, if they skewed a little from target, he said, it’s just a learning experience. They made a 30-barrel batch — a little more than 900 gallons — but came in shy of their targets. Once it came out, they set to work almost right away making a second batch to iron out the kinks.

“It’s a really cool project to have the Grain Chain linked into, and something different to talk about,” Larkin said. “There’s a little bit more of a story to this beer.”

Foamies first came out in mid-August, with the batch split between Denver and Greeley. Cohesion sold out in five or six days, and WeldWerks in two weeks. A second batch was packaged Nov. 10, with more put into cans than the first time; Schwartz said the release should cover WeldWerks’ entire Colorado footprint.

A link to Southwestern Colorado 

In Cortez, WildEdge Brewing Collective leveraged its microgrant to partner with Root Shoot Malting to make a German dunkelweizen-inspired beer for the fall. 

The Front Range malthouse had reached out earlier in the year to ask about collaborating with the brewery, according to brewer and owner Tucker Robinson. He said he talked to the staff about what they were excited about at the malthouse, which turned out to be a new Munich-style wheat malt — slightly darker and richer than regular wheat malt, made in the style of a traditional Munich barley malt that forms the backbone of German Oktoberfests and other malt-forward beers.

“Whenever I work with producers, I always like to take inspiration from what inspires them as far as what I’m going to create,” Robinson said. They set a brew date for late summer to have a fall release, and he crafted a recipe inspired by the amber to brown German wheat beer, using all Root Shoot malts and substituting a large portion of Munich-style wheat for what would normally be malted white wheat.

The nontraditional malt addition “contributed some pretty cool notes of honey and crusty bread, a little bit of cocoa powder,” he said. “It just made it kind of a more interesting beer. As with many of my beers, I take inspiration from traditional recipes, but then modify them, trying to make them unique.”

In keeping things as local as possible, Robinson also sourced a German weizen yeast from Denver yeast lab Inland Island. He targeted a milder version of a beer that can have strong — and for the beer novice, possibly unexpected — flavors. It yielded a beer with notes of crusty bread, a touch of cocoa, stone fruit, and some baking spice character.

The brewery, which opened in 2017, has long focused on local grain, sourcing about 15,000 pounds of grain each year from in-state (as well as developing a relationship with local hop farm Billy Goat).

“I saw a need in our small town here in the southwest corner of the state for a community space built around high-quality, creative, locally made craft beer,” Robinson said. “It is a core tenet of our business, to source a majority of our grain from Colorado producers. We’ve worked with Root Shoot, we’ve worked with Proximity, we’ve worked with Colorado Malting Company. Pretty much all of the base malt that goes into our beers is Colorado grown and malted. That’s something we’ve done since day one.”

WildEdge also offers local wine and runs a small kitchen, and Robinson said it’s been humbling how the business has been embraced as a local hub. 

“The thing I’m most proud of about the brewery is that we have been adopted by the community, between groups of friends gathering after work, to board meetings, people hosting birthday parties, we seem to be increasingly in the fold of Montezuma County here.”

Another link in the chain

The brewery, in turn, is getting more involved with the Grain Chain. Robinson has met up with another local producer in the area, a farmer who just opened a bakery, and the nonprofit held its Grain School in the Field, an immersive field-to-consumer program, in Cortez this year.

“It’s been a great experience working with the Grain Chain, to be honest I didn’t even know they existed prior to applying for this grant,” Robinson said. “It’s been cool to get into that community of like-minded people a little bit more.”

The beer itself — dry, refreshing, and drinkable, a little darker without going into the realm of a heavy winter style — also fits into WildEdge’s embrace of seasonality. With 12 taps, 11 for the brewery and one for a local cidery, Robinson only keeps two beers available year-round, a pale ale and a porter. The rest rotate frequently, with a new beer on at least once a month. “I’m a very seasonal drinker myself,” he said.

From the Fields was released Oct. 6, and Robinson said they threw a big release party with live music and local baked goods.

“We just tried to make it a good community event, and it turned into a nice Wednesday night. We got to spread the good word about what the Grain Chain is, its mission and how we worked with them over the last six months or so,” he said.

The first of two spirits funded by a Colorado Grain Chain microgrant that will hit the market is a sloe-style gin made by Routt Distillery in Steamboat. The distillery has been open for about a year and a half and was focused on developing clear spirits — gins and vodka — followed by whiskey, until they caught wind of the Grain Chain program, owner Brad Christensen said.

Inspired by the tradition of infusing gin with sloe berries, the ripe fruit of the blackthorn tree, he applied for support to create a gin built instead around locally foraged sarvisberries, aka serviceberries, which grow bountifully in the area.

“The sarvis gin was a project we’ve been thinking about for a while. This was my kick in the pants to get it up and running,” he said. “People use them for baking, for making jams, lots of things, and I wanted to make something out of it. The first thing that came to mind was a version of a sloe gin.”

He partnered, along with the Grain Chain, with local nonprofit Yampatika, which focuses on environmental stewardship via educational programs in the area. “They do nature hikes where they teach about wild and edible plants, and they also do lots of kids outdoor education programming,” he said.

Christensen went out with their foragers and harvested about 50 pounds of berries, then froze them to help break the fruit down to facilitate infusing the gin.

While harvesting berries was the most labor intensive stage, he also had to work out his grain source. The neutral spirit — which is the base for the distillery’s winter and summer gins and its vodka — is a 50/50 blend of wheat and malted barley.

“I really like the flavor there, it has a unique grain character that you don’t get from other grain sources for vodkas,” he said. “I love barley as a crop. It’s a great Colorado crop, it’s great to work with, it’s easy to work with, I’m familiar with it. We make a single-malt whiskey here at the distillery with it.”

Barley for the gin came from pilot projects that Proximity Malt in Monte Vista was doing with farmers in Montrose this year. While the barley was ultimately blended with other San Luis Valley barley sources for malting, he said he worked with the malthouse and waited for a batch that had the highest percentage of Montrose barley possible.

“For all of our products, we use 100% Colorado grain and really try to embrace Colorado agriculture,” he said. “I think our grain and our grain supply chain is awesome here.”

Once he got that special batch of neutral spirit done, and the base gin distilled, he soaked the berries in it for five weeks. He yielded 93 bottles of gin — at more than a half-pound of berries per bottle — that that recently received federal label approval and are sold for $42 in the tasting room. He said the berries bring a hint of sweetness, but not to the level that sloes provide. “I’d probably call it an off-dry style.”

Along with the sarvis gin, which might only be sold through the tasting room but which Christensen plans to make an annual fall release, they harvested “a bunch of other stuff” including crabapples and sweet anise root that he extracted in vodka. They’ll be standalones for people to try, and potential ingredients to use in the future.

LEFT: Routt Distillery owner Brad Christensen picks sarvisberries for his Grain Chain collaboration. RIGHT: Routt Distillery’s Sarvisberry Flavored Gin, which sells in the tasting room for $42 a bottle. (Photos courtesy Brad Christensen)

TOP: Routt Distillery owner Brad Christensen picks sarvisberries for his Grain Chain collaboration. BOTTOM: Routt Distillery’s Sarvisberry Flavored Gin, which sells in the tasting room for $42 a bottle.. (Photos courtesy Brad Christensen)

Quinoa! It’s not just for dinner.

In Mosca, Dune Valley Distillery sits at a crossroads of agriculture, tourism, the local food system, and Colorado wine and spirits history. After operating Valley Roots Food Hub for several years, Nicholas Chambers started the distillery earlier this year. The distillery space shares part of an old community events center and school gymnasium with potatoes and quinoa, feedstock for his current and future spirits and inspiration for the venture. “The valley is second in the nation for potato exports, and we’ve got this wonderful quinoa stock,” he said.

White Mountain Farm, also in Mosca, is “essentially the farm that brought quinoa to North America,” Chambers said. “This is really the seedbed for the field trials, genetics, the trial and error to develop a good seed stock from the Andes that works well for us.”

Many years later, he now sees semitrailers of quinoa going out of the valley. He sat down with Paul New, whose father, Ernie, first brought quinoa to the San Luis Valley in the late 1980s, in his White Mountain office one day. New pulled out a quinoa vodka from France. “We poured it in dirty coffee cups, and it was, at that point: ‘This we must do.’”

Chambers has a family history in Colorado wine and spirits that traces back more than a century. He said his great-grandfather had the first wine and liquor license in Colorado after Prohibition ended, in 1933, and prior to that the family had set up shop in Denver in 1903 to sell their wine and distribute spirits.

I think our grain and our grain supply chain is awesome here.

— Brad Christensen, Routt Distillery owner

But he’s “really from the soil.” Chambers is well tied into the local food vein and already very familiar with the Colorado Grain Chain. He has a store in the gym that sells local food, and a revived family wine brand, Carbone Wine, that is produced in Palisade. The distillery was opened as an extension of that embrace of local ingredients. He focused first on dialing in his potato vodka, and will eventually expand that to multiple vodkas and gins.

“Given what our feedstocks are, we want to showcase potatoes. I’m doing a russet as our flagship, but I want to do a purple, and a fingerling,” he said. “Quinoa would be our standby, always available, we’ll just continue to optimize it, get the process better and better.”

He’s using the Grain Chain grant to work through a series of lab-scale quinoa maltings to dial in starch conversion, then scaling up the malting and producing a 35-gallon batch, and finally scaling up to a 395-gallon mash for a final run in an 80-gallon spirit distillation. “It’ll be foundational,” he said, describing a product line that relies on quinoa vodka for fruit infusions and an “apothecary line.”

“By next summer we’ll have this baby bottled up and ready to go,” he said.

He’s using local quinoa varieties that don’t have a fancy name. “It’s probably something scientific like A1234,” he said. Multiple varieties and blends are going into the trials, whatever White Mountain has some excess of. A lot of it is a blend named casually “McCamant Special Blend,” after University of Denver professor John McCamant, who first helped to bring quinoa to Colorado.

“Quinoa is such an amazing crop,” Chambers said. “It truly is a superfood.” It’s high in protein, minerals and vitamins, with 58% to 68% starch that can be converted for fermentation and distillation. “I think for the yeast, too, it’s going to have a very diverse diet, just a well-balanced environment for yeast to thrive in.”

While the distillery opened in June, he said they’re still working on the steam system and the building overall. It’s a renovated adobe building from 1933, “a tremendous construction project,” he said. Dune Valley has partnered with guest chefs for occasional five-course dinners and closed out the season with a big producer appreciation event, serving about 150 people at the end of October.

“We’re probably only using 30% of the facility, so we have a lot more to open up and be able to accommodate more people, more events,” Chambers said. Along with building out the distillery, he’s working to develop the campus as a renewable energy park, using methane gas, solar and thermal energy and a biodiesel plant.

“I really want to be that sort of eco-destination resort, where people can come and we’re showcasing what our region has to offer,” he said.

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Colorado’s craft beverage producers are tapping into a best-in-class source of flavor. And it’s coming from the farmer up the road or the next county over, from the Western Slope to the Front Range.

A handful of small Colorado farmers grow and supply hops, the pungent flower that lends its punchiness to IPAs — and to a lesser degree other beers, hopped ciders and even a Chaffee County gin.

Some of those farmers are tapping into deep roots in Colorado agriculture. Colorado Hop Company, located in Platteville, just east of Longmont, is on a 65-acre family farm.

Childhood friends Scott Ziebell and fourth-generation farmer John Rademacher first put hops into the ground in 2013, officially forming the company in 2016 when those plants began to mature. Alongside the farm’s staple alfalfa crop, the company currently has 10 acres of hops planted and also runs a small co-op helping other small growers in the area with processing, including harvesting, drying, pelletizing and packaging.

Ziebell said the market for local hops continues to boom, noting a recent Colorado-centric harvest festival at Stodgy Brewing in Fort Collins. “We’re continuing to see the tide go in that direction. We’re continuing to see breweries open and be all Colorado, or as much Colorado as they can,” he said. As a result, their current 10-acre hop plot grows every year. By the 2024 harvest he said they should have 12 acres planted, and more the year after that. “We struggle supplying the demand every year.”

To be fair, it’s a small market compared to other crops grown in the state. Colorado’s agricultural industry produces a wide variety of offerings, from vast fields of corn and wheat, to wide swaths of potato fields, to fruit and vegetable crops denoted by their origin (Rocky Ford melons, Palisade peaches, Pueblo chiles).

Tigo Cruz, head cider maker at Fenceline Cider in Mancos, left, sinks bags filled with hops from Billy Goat Hop Farm in Montrose into a batch of Catkin Cider. (Corey Robinson, Special to The Colorado Sun)

Compared with the states that dominate hop growing in the U.S., the Colorado hop market is even smaller, a poorly researched footnote in the wider world of hops. The industry group Hop Growers of America, in its 2022 statistical report, lists total U.S. hop acreage at 61,177 acres, down from just over 62,000 acres in 2021. The top hop-producing states are Washington (42,762 acres), Idaho (9,267) and Oregon (7,756).

The same report lists Colorado as growing 10 acres of hops in 2021 and 2022, down from 147 acres in 2018, 2019 and 2020. The data is obviously incorrect, but the message is clear: The Centennial State is an afterthought in the broader industry, producing a fraction of 1% of the entire U.S. market.

It’s too small to regularly feed the demand at Colorado’s largest craft breweries — places like Odell, Left Hand or Great Divide — but enough to supply smaller breweries, and that’s exactly where hop growers like Audrey Gehlhausen and Chris DellaBianca, founders of Billy Goat Hop Farm in Montrose, find their customers.

They bought a property in January 2017, then built out the processing side and put up trellises for the hop bines to climb. (Similar to vines, where the main stem of the plant sends out tendrils to support its vertical growth, bines rely on the main stem to grow around the supporting structure in an upward spiral.)

While building the business — which now encompasses 32 acres consisting of nine varieties of hops that range from wild southwestern native hops called Neomexicanus, to traditional hops such as Cascade and Nugget, to newer experimental varieties such as Michigan Copper — they pounded pavement to meet all the small brewers they could. Depending on the variety and a host of other variables, hop flavor and aroma can range from subtly spicy and floral, to piney and resinous, to intense citrus or tropical fruit, or just extremely bitter.

“We’ve gone door-to-door to easily over 800 breweries, in the van going to most breweries in Arizona, New Mexico, Texas, along with Colorado,” Gehlhausen said.

Before choosing Montrose, they looked at locations around the Pacific Northwest, but felt they would struggle to separate themselves from the crowd when surrounded by 2,000-acre corporate hop farms. There were hops already being grown in Montrose and elsewhere in the state, which was reassuring. Paired with their love of skiing, their love of craft beer, plus DellaBianca’s degree in environmental biology and long history of “playing with plants,” she said the area was a perfect fit.

“We really enjoyed the craft beer industry, the people in it, the community around it. In general, Colorado cares about supporting local and Colorado-grown,” she said.

Billy Goat’s efforts to harness that local character paid off in February, when they entered their Cascade hops, a cornerstone variety in craft beer production, in the Cascade Cup. Hosted by the Hop Quality Group, a nonprofit advocacy group, the competition pitted their hops in a sensory competition against some of the biggest farms in the country.

And for the first time, the cup left the Pacific Northwest to reside in Montrose with the winners at Billy Goat.

“It turned some heads up there at the convention,” Gehlhausen said. “It says to me that hops can be grown in places other than the Pacific Northwest. Sure, we’re not sixth-generation farms like a lot of places, but we had put a lot of time and energy and research and been in the industry, and are really going for quality.”

The win is a boost not just for Billy Goat but also for other hop growers in the state, according to Ziebell. It validates their work and lends credibility to the local industry.

“That’s absolutely huge. We grow some amazing Cascades here, a lot of great hops here,” he said. “I think a lot of the farms just haven’t entered in, so to see a farm enter into the competition and go up against the guys in the Northwest, it was brave of them and I’m proud of them for entering and showing that we have good soil here and a great climate for hops.”

Hops can be grown in places other than the Pacific Northwest.

— Audrey Gehlhausen, founder of Billy Goat Hop Farm in Montrose

While brewers are the primary market for hops, other craft beverage producers have learned to tap into the flavor and aroma they offer.

At Wood’s High Mountain Distillery in Salida, co-founder P.T. Wood said they’ve been using a small amount of Cascade hops, about 1,500 grams, in every 30-35 gallon batch of Mountain Hopped Gin they distill going back to 2014 or 2015.

“I was thinking about what we could do that would be different,” he said. “I got some hops and started to experiment with them. Originally I thought we would do a bierschnaps kind of thing, with whiskey and hops, but we couldn’t really get that to where I liked it, but it worked really well with the gin.” He originally sourced the hops from a farm in Paonia that transitioned to provide exclusively to a larger brewery, but it was right around the time that Billy Goat was opening.

“We bought hops from them the first year they harvested,” he said. “They run a really cool operation and it’s fun to work with the farmers.”

Working with Billy Goat fit right into Wood’s existing approach — buying local grain and local malted barley, as well as potatoes from the San Luis Valley. They buy a relatively small amount of fresh, unprocessed hops known as “wet hops” (not dried yet or pelletized into a shelf-stable form resembling green rabbit food), less than 50 pounds every year, and divide them up into zipper-top bags to be frozen. That way they’re using whole, wet hops throughout the year.

Pellet hops would be unworkable with the method Wood uses, suspending the hops above the liquid level so that only the vapor being distilled makes contact with them and the other botanicals, which include cardamom, coriander, star anise, grains of paradise, and elderflower, the last of which also helps to reinforce “that earthy, floral quality” he’s after with the Mountain Hopped Gin. He said the approach extracts the citrus and floral qualities he’s looking for from the hops, “without the bitterness and the IPA notes that you get with hops.”

“I think it’s important to not macerate the hops. We experimented with that originally, and it made for a really bitter, horrible liquor, so just having those open flowers for the vapor to run through is critical,” he said.

Not just for beer

Colorado’s cideries are also getting in on the action. Colorado Cider Company in Denver, opening in 2011 as the first commercial cidery in the state and one of the early entrants in the country, has been sourcing ingredients such as cherries and apricots from around the state depending on the year’s harvest. Founder Brad Page followed up by purchasing property on the Western Slope and started planting trees in 2012. He’s been making an annual fresh-hopped cider for several years, originally with a now-defunct hop farm in Paonia and currently with Billy Goat.

Page said his history as a pub brewer helped to inform the original decision to use hops in a cider. “It was an ingredient that I had experience with, and it just seemed to work,” he said. “Up in Yakima (Valley, Washington), the hop region and the apple region are the same. It’s the same in Europe.”

Colorado Cider used the Montrose farm’s Comet hops on a fresh-hop version of their staple Grasshop-ah hopped cider, producing about 150 gallons this year of the fresh-hopped variation. He said the base might be the same, but the change in hops makes a profound difference.

“Fresh hops are definitely a different animal,” he said. “This year, the Comets are pretty fantastic. It’s almost a tropical fruit character, a little bit of citrus.”

In the southwestern corner of the state, a few hours’ drive from Billy Goat, Fenceline Cider has been leaning on hops as a bridge to the beer drinkers who pass through their tasting room, located in Mancos, between Durango and Cortez, since it opened five years ago.

“We’re in a small town in Montezuma County where there used to be a really rich cider industry,” head cider maker Tigo Cruz said. “The apples that came out of this county used to outproduce Washington. There’s a lot of trees here that, over the last century through drought, through Prohibition, were pushed to the wayside and not taken care of, but they’re still there.”

When opening their tasting room in early 2018, aiming to tap into a local resource with a rich history that was largely going to waste, the Fenceline staff formulated a hopped cider, called Catkin, to have something that craft beer drinkers could relate to.

Cruz measures hops to add to the Catkin Cider. (Corey Robinson, Special to The Colorado Sun)

“As I’ve been here the last five years, I’ve seen the need for a gateway cider for beer drinkers,” Cruz said. “It’s heavy beer country here. It was a good in-between, making the connection between beer and hops, something that they might already be a little knowledgeable about.”

Because the cider isn’t heated, the hops don’t imbue it with any bitterness, lending it a more delicate character, and it’s been popular enough to keep available as a year-round product.

“It’s one of my personal favorites,” Cruz said. “I’m not an IPA guy whatsoever, but I love the floral aspect in our hop cider.”

There have been different iterations of it over the years, starting with commercially available domestic hops, at one point using German hops, and moving to locally sourced Cascade and Cashmere hops from Billy Goat when Cruz moved into the head cider maker role. 

Cruz said they approach sourcing with a conscious desire to keep it as local as possible as the cidery works to produce about 15,000 gallons of cider a year, with about 80% of that coming from Montezuma or La Plata county apples. Fenceline works with the Montezuma Orchard Restoration Project. Pears and other fruits used in their brews are local, too. And a bourbon-barrel cider is made in barrels sourced outside of Durango. Fenceline also operates a food truck that offers local meat and produce.

This story first appeared in
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“Where we actually press our apples, there’s a small orchard that was planted in 1890 that is actually one of our best producers,” he said. “We’re trying to keep it in Colorado as much as we can.”

For farmers and producers like him, that choice will ultimately trickle down to the consumer experience. Gehlhausen, from Billy Goat, describes it as a return to centuries-old principles, and said she hopes the Cascade Cup win brings some attention back to an element of brewing rooted in local agriculture.

“Traditionally, every town had their brewery and their beer, and the hops that grew in that village. That’s what they used. That’s ultimately how we came up with different styles of beer to begin with,” she said. 

“This is farming and agriculture, we’re not mass-producing these things in a factory. That’s the joy of hops being grown in different regions, with different summers and different seasons and amounts of rain or sun. They put these little nuances in the flavors and aromas of the hops.”