It's a great time to come together

With Collaboration Fest on the horizon, local Colorado Springs breweries are collaborating like never before...it's a wonderful sight to see.

Feb 02, 2024

I feel like collaboration beers are sometimes better than the parts—something extra special that maybe those brewers wouldn’t normally make.

This week has been chock full of different collaborations around town, and I wanted to highlight a few so you can keep them in mind as their releases happen in a few weeks.

Collaboration Fest is coming up at the end of March, so get your tickets…it’s being held at the Westin in Westminster (Westinminster?) again, which was a top notch location for a fest that’s struggled to find an adequate home for the entirety of its existence.

Buy Tickets

Make sure you head to Batch Slapped’s 2nd Anniversary party this Sunday! More details on their FB event.

PnP x RS

Claude from Red Swing texted me a week or so back, alerting me to a collaboration brew day with Peaks N Pines at his downtown brewery. The brew is for Collaboration fest, which in my opinion has lacked a healthy amount of COS involvement for the past few years. Brewers Jonathan Vieira (Peaks N Pines) and Peter Hall (Red Swing) were hard at work on their dry-hopped Green Tea Czech lager.

Does that make it a Eurasian Lager? Just wondering.

Hall and Viera were adding some of the later hop additions, which feature Triumph and Elani hops, both picked to help accentuate citrus and tropical flavors and pair well with the green tea. Hall tells me that they’ll add the green tea in the brite tank after doing a 5 gallon steep, mostly to avoid any tannins.

FH X 108

I wasn’t present at this other collaboration (let me know next time, guys!) but Nano 108 owner Michael Kelty alerted me to their social media post touting the brew day. For those of you keeping score, Nano hasn’t been one to collaborate with other brewers with past brewer regimes, so it’s a marked change to see head brewer Keith Hernandez and Kelty teaming up with their cross-Powers neighbors FH Beerworks.

Kelty tells me they made a double dry-hopped hazy IPA which will be available in about a month. We’ll have more on that with Kelty and FH owner Travis Fields when the time comes (podcast too?).

Fossil X Media

In just a little over a week, the Colorado beer media group, comprised of Focus on the Beer, along with other outlets like Porchdrinking, Colorado Brewery List, The Bain Marie, Thirst Colorado, Paul Myhill (or one of his many alter egos), Chris Curtis (@foodingdrinkingcolorado) and others. I won’t spoil what we’re brewing just yet, but it will be served at Collaboration Fest alongside the Fossil crew.

Josh and I have been traveling to these Media collabs for years now, so it’s fun to have one in our backyard, and will help highlight Colorado Springs for some media outlets who may not set their sights on our town that often!

Here’s some of the past collaborations the beer media has been a part of: