Burns Family and Novel Strand

As you likely surmised from the previous post, these kids of ours take up a lot of time and a lot of mental capacity, dulling our senses and making prolonged coherent thought nigh impossible.  Thus, I’m trying a new approach.  I’ll present each brewery visit recap in vignette form: short, self-contained, semi-related, bulleted paragraphs.  Let’s give this approach a spin with Burns Family Artisan Ales and Novel Strand Brewing Company.

• Transpose the “U” and “R” in “Burns Family” and you get my family name.  This pleases me.
• Burns Family is located in the space Wit’s End Brewing Company vacated when they shacked up with Strange Craft Beer Company.  Burns Family didn’t make any dramatic changes but, cosmetically, it looks different.  Whereas Wit’s End kept the industrial space looking, well, industrial, Burns Family swanked the place up with some mid-century modern furniture straight off the Mad Men set.  Actually, I must confess I’ve never seen Mad Men.  If you’ve seen Mad Men and have also been to Burns Family, is my assessment a fair one?

  

  Burns Family

  
  

  

  Burns Family

• I ordered the Bumblebee Feet because I needed one more braggot to get the Hey Honey badge on Untappd but some fool categorized the beer as simply “honey beer” and that generic classification does not count towards the badge.  I’m still one braggot shy and I refuse to drink any straight-up mead to get myself there.  I have standards, you know?  Untappd is for beer, not mead, cider, or root beer; this is my decree.
• I also ordered the Ancient Art, a brut barleywine.  In the craft beer industry, every innovation will inevitably spawn more mini-innovations.  It was only a few months ago that brut IPAs came to Colorado and we’re already on to brut barleywines.  What will be the next “brutalized” beer style?

  

  Close-up of the bar front at Burns Family

• On a similar note, Colorado is one of the nation’s—nay, world’s—best places to get a beer yet we don’t have a “native” or regional style to call our own.  The left side of the country has the West Coast IPA, the right side has the New England IPA, San Francisco has the California Common and the brut IPA, even Florida has the Florida Weisse.  Colorado is a much better beer region than Florida, why can’t we introduce something new to the world?  I don’t think brut barleywine is necessarily going to fill that void, but we might as well throw stuff at the wall and see what sticks.
• I may have made a bit of a horse’s ass of myself at Burns Family.  Our friend Justin was entertaining our daughter by throwing her Koosh Ball really high up in the air when, against all odds, it landed on top of a rafter and got stuck.  Looking to be my kid’s hero, I wadded up my coat and tossed it up to dislodge the ball.  Well, I accomplished what I set out to do but then my coat got stuck up there.  The bar staff had to poke at it with a long stick to get it back down.  I got my fair share of I told you sos from Nicole after that.

  

  Here is the Koosh Ball stuck up in the rafters...

  
  

  

  ...and here is my coat stuck up in the rafters.  But notice the Koosh Ball isn't up there.  I was technically successful in getting the ball down.

• Man, Bumblebee Feet and Ancient Art are high in ABV and by the time we got to Novel Strand I was pretty much done with taking photos and paying attention to details.  I was just BSing around with Nicole and the kids and our friends from that point on.  So, I don’t have much to say about Novel Strand other than I remember all the beers being really good and I like the cozy, brick-walled taproom.

Prost!

Chris