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Crooked Stave’s Sour Rose
3350 Brighton Blvd., Denver
While a number of beer traditions have come and gone, one style that continues to grow is sour ales. According to Nielsen data, the wild beer style is up close to 43 percent from last year and is considered the fastest growing style in the industry. One of the most cherished breweries focusing on sour and funky ales is Denver’s Crooked Stave.
Chad Yakobson first began the creative pet project in 2010 as his master’s thesis, which he coined “The Brettanomyces Project.” Brettanomyces — also known in its abbreviated form as Brett — is a wild yeast used in sour beers for flavoring and aroma. As Yakobson often mentions, a beer can contain Brettanomyces but not be sour. For the majority of Crooked Stave’s portfolio, Yakobson uses Brettanomyces yeasts as well as the process of maturing them in oak to create some delightfully wild, sour and barrel-aged beers.
The wooden slats of a barrel are commonly referred to as staves, giving rise to the name the brewery took as an homage to the barrels it uses to age beer. Crooked Stave represents the brewery’s dedication to every barrel that helps to create each unique beer.
Crooked Stave and Yakobson are passionate about their community and often work with local farmers and other businesses that produce the ingredients the brewery uses on a regular basis in its beers. Colorado-grown hops and malted barley and locally grown fruits help create some of Crooked Stave’s most admired brews.
One of the brewery’s best-loved releases is the Sour Rose, a wild ale fermented in oak with raspberries and blueberries. Coming in at a very sessionable 4.5 percent alcohol by volume, Sour Rose is one of the most accessible sours currently on the shelves. This unfiltered ale is fermented with mixed-culture wild yeast and bacteria, and is the first 100 percent oak-aged sour beer on the market available in cans.
Sour Rose is available at select Acme Fresh Market, Mustard Seed Market & Cafe and Fishers Foods locations, as well as your finer craft beer stops like Lizardville and 101 Bottles of Beer on the Wall.
