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Crooked Stave Artisan Beer Project
Crooked Stave Artisan Beer Project was founded by Chad Yakobson, who built the brewery's entire identity around wild and sour beer fermentation — a genuinely specialized, technically demanding corner of brewing that requires working with wild yeast strains and extended aging rather than the faster, more controllable fermentation most breweries rely on for their core lineup. Yakobson's academic background in brewing science, including dedicated research into Brettanomyces (the wild yeast strain central to most sour and funky beer styles), gave Crooked Stave a level of technical grounding that's rarer in a beer category often associated more with experimentation than rigor. That research-driven approach to sour beer helped establish Crooked Stave as a reference point for the style well beyond Denver. The brewery operates out of The Source, a converted historic foundry building in the RiNo Art District that's become a genuine food-and-drink destination in its own right, housing multiple vendors under one roof — a setting that puts Crooked Stave's specifically technical, patience-demanding beer program inside one of Denver's more design-forward, high-traffic food spaces. For a Denver breweries list, Crooked Stave is the essential "sour and wild, done with real technical rigor" entry — the counterpoint to the hop-forward IPA breweries that dominate most of the rest of Denver's scene, built by a founder who treated wild fermentation as a genuine research subject rather than just a trendy style to chase.
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Wynkoop Brewing Company
Wynkoop Brewing Company opened in 1988 in what was then a fairly rough, underdeveloped stretch of LoDo, founded by John Hickenlooper along with Russell Schehrer, Mark Schiffler, and Jerry Williams. Hickenlooper would go on to become Denver's mayor and later Colorado's governor, giving Wynkoop a genuinely unusual claim among American brewpubs: its founder ended up running the entire state. The brewpub was one of the first of its kind in Denver, combining a full restaurant with an in-house brewing operation at a time when that combination was still a novel format rather than the standard template it's since become across the country. A large billiards hall on the top floor added a social, hangout dimension beyond just food and beer, reinforcing the brewpub as a genuine gathering spot rather than a purely food-and-drink stop. Wynkoop has also built a specific piece of beer-world tradition around itself: the brewery sponsors the annual "Beerdrinker of the Year" competition, a genuinely odd and specific event that's become a small institution of its own within craft beer culture, run out of the same LoDo building the brewery has occupied since 1988. For a Denver breweries list, Wynkoop is the essential "the original brewpub, run by a future governor" entry — proof that Denver's now-massive craft beer identity has real roots in a single LoDo building that predates most of the neighborhood's current development.
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