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Exploring Denver and the Great American Beer Festival

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The Colorado Tourism Board had scheduled Thursday as my free day to explore and I did just that, taking in as much of Denver as I could and spending some time at the biggest beer festival in the world. It had been a total coincidence that I ended up in Denver (with an unscheduled day) at the start of the Great American Beer Festival . The truth is, everyone knows about all of the breweries in Colorado and I was there to write about the spirits. There was also one other little detail…. I don’t drink beer. It’s not that I haven’t tried. An unfortunate incident years ago left me unable to even let it get to my lips. I’m working on it (anyone know a good hypnotist?), but despite the fact that I’m not a brew fan, I wasn’t going to miss a chance to check out the Great American Beer Festival, dubbed by everyone I know as the greatest in the world. Julia Herz, Craft Beer Program Director for the BrewersAssociation , took me around the convention center before the festival even s

Colorado Spirits Through Denver

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My third day in Colorado  was spent tasting a multitude of spirits -- and enjoying more of the state's farm fresh food. I was picked up in the morning by JoAnne Carrelli-Stevenson, who is in charge of the Colorado Distillers Guild . We had a nice talk on our ride through Denver to Leopold Brothers about the growing distilling industry in Colorado , a state which now has 250 beverage producers. She also filled me in on the Great American Beer Festival, which happened to be starting the next day in Denver. I was thinking that I may just have to stop by there, but first it was spirits time. The tour at Leopold Brothers had already started as there was a group of distributors from Kansas I was joining. Todd Leopold took us through the fermentation and distillation process, and into both the bottling and barreling rooms.  This company is one of the few that distribute their products out of state and it’s quite a complex production center as they make a huge variety of prod