About

About the Site

We focus on Colorado Springs in particular, and Colorado in general, but any beer anywhere is fair game. We also dabble in homebrewing.

When we say beer, we’re talking about actual beer here, not mass produced fizzy hop flavored water. Beer that was made with love and care by someone who wants to practice their art and make their customers happy.

Our goal is to provide down to earth, average Joe on the street, reviews of both the beers and the places to drink beer. Sure, we use some technical language, it kind of comes with the territory, but we try to keep it to a minimum.

Although the posts may have either Jesse or Mike listed as the author, that’s more an indicator of who started writing it first, and generally both of us contribute to each post.

We also hope to inspire people to pick a night of the week, invite some friends, and go have a beer. Talk, unload, laugh, cry, complain, whatever you need, just get out there and talk to the human beings that you like. Life is short, spend it with good people while drinking good beer. If your friends don’t drink beer, get new friends. Just kidding, drop us a line, we’d be happy include you on our Thirsty Thursdays. We always welcome a new perspective for the brewery visit posts.

While you’re out there, try to open your horizons a little bit. Try some styles you haven’t had before, try some styles you have had, but maybe didn’t care for, maybe they’ll grow on you and become your new favorite. It’s happened to us time and time again.

How this came about

Mike and Jesse started going to pub trivia every week, it started with a group of friends, and they jumped from location to location as days of the week, time, or trivia DJ changed. Eventually setting down at the Wednesday Geeks Who Drink trivia session at Cogstone Brewing. Friends and wives would come when they were interested, and all in all it was a good time.

They soon realized however, that answering all those trivia questions really got in the way of just talking. They talked about a lot of things, life, the universe, but mostly beer.

The idea struck them that there’s all of these breweries in town, and neither of them had visited many, so why not leave the trivia behind, and go visit them? After a couple of months of happily traipsing from brewery to brewery, the idea of starting a web site popped into somebody’s head. That’s how we ended up here. Our first post, a visit to Pikes Peak Brewing, was posted on August 17th, 2018

We really hope you like the site, we try really hard to have good and useful content, and we’re expanding on it regularly.

Where to send Feedback

If you have any feedback, suggestions, comments or criticisms, go ahead and submit a comment on the post in question. The first comment from anyone is moderated, but so long as you don’t violate any of the normal expectations of decency, we’ll approve it, even if we don’t agree with it. Keep it clean.

Failing that, or if you want more general or private feedback, you can email “info” at ColoradoBrewTalk.com and we’ll get it.

A Little more about the Guys Behind the blog

Jesse

Unfortunately, one of the “off again” cycles coincided with the rise of the craft brew revolution in Colorado so he has only recently (re)discovered how there is awesome beer is only a short drive away.

Definitely the layman of the dynamic duo known at Colorado Brew Talk, Jesse started this endeavor to not only have an excuse to drink beer, but to find the best beer in Colorado Springs and expand his palate and try some styles he normally wouldn’t. That mission has been accomplished. Initially an IPA devotee, the scales have fallen from his eyes and he now realizes that there is a whole world of delicious beer to be had. His current beer related obsession is Belgian beer, specifically Trappist ales.

Jesse has tried his hand several times over the years at homebrewing and, thanks to encouragement from Mike, has made a commitment to try turning water, grain and hops into something resembling beer again.

Originally hailing from southeastern Pennsylvania, the Air Force brought Jesse to Colorado Springs in 1990 and he fell in love with the place so he decided to call it home. He is an IT dude by trade. He has a beautiful wife that is extraordinarily tolerant of his buying, drinking, brewing, talking and writing about beer not to mention accompanying him on beer related adventures (GABF, for example) even though she is not a beer drinker. He also has two teen aged sons to whom he plans on passing on his love of good beer so they can be pretentious beer-snobs at college parties.

Here’s a link to the posts “allegedly” written by Jesse.

Mike

Mike had many craft beers at that point, but stuck to lighter stuff and wheat beers. In 2009, a coworker introduced him to homebrewing, and while reading “The Complete Joy of Homebrewing” by Charlie Papazian, he became intrigued by all of the styles that were out there, and that’s when things started to get interesting. Between homebrewing and drinking commercial beers, Mike came to appreciate and enjoy a wide range of styles.

The blog has been a huge learning experience for Mike, and he’s come to really appreciate a number of styles that in the past he didn’t care for. In July of 2019 Mike took and passed his BJCP Tasting exam, and currently holds the rank of “Recognized” beer judge.

Mike works in IT with those gosh darned networked computer things, the ones with all the bits and software and wires that get you to the interwebs. He’s been know to turn them off and then back on again. He lives with his lovely wife, two strapping sons, and a veritable cornucopia of animals in his adopted home city of Colorado Springs.

Here’s a link to the posts “allegedly” written by Mike