Drink up, Durango.
Colorado makes a lot of craft beer. About 1.5 million barrels a year.
According to the Colorado Brewers Guild, there now are 232 identified craft brewers in the state, a 109 percent increase since 2009.
And Durango just got one more.
Animas Brewing Co., 1560 East Second Avenue, recently opened its doors, and on a frosty Saturday night, the place was packed.
Proprietor Scott Bickert was all over his establishment, chatting it up with customers, serving plates of food and overseeing a little bit of everything. With the brew tanks in clear sight from the open-seating layout, patrons were drinking suds right next to where they were made. The location, off the Animas River Trail and the river itself, sheds a new hue on the city’s Rotary Park riverfront.
“I kind of like the idea of being a little bit off the beaten path, outside of downtown,” Bickert said in between trips to the kitchen.
Bickert, who brewed beer with Ska Brewing and Durango Brewing companies, said he is grateful to be a part of Durango’s brewing community.
“I branched off and did my own thing,” he said. “It’s great to be part of it. We’re trying to do something a little bit different; with so many beer styles, we’re trying to cover the color scheme across the board.”
While the city and state are well known to beer lovers, Colorado ranked fourth in breweries per capita in 2013, with 4.7 per 100,000 legal drinkers, according to the Brewers Association, a trade group of nearly 2,000 brewers. California ranked first.
But those numbers change quickly.
Dave Thibodeau, co-founder of Ska and an elder statesmen of Durango craft brewing, said Durango always has held its fair share of the microbrew market.
“It’s changing so fast; it’s hard to keep up,” he said. “But Durango has always had a really positive brewing scene. We’ve all learned a lot from each other.”
Ska, whose True Blonde Ale just took first place for the second year in a row at the Great American Beer Festival, has helped set a standard in Durango craft beer. He said the craft-beer industry is a tight-knit group, locally and nationally.
“We all do everything we can to help each other out,” Thibodeau said. “And as a result of that, we’ve really raised the bar. That’s why you see the quality of beer coming out of Durango. You can’t afford to open a brewery here that doesn’t make great beer.”
bmathis@durangoherald.com
