New Belgium Brewing, Fort Collins, CO

The ride north from the Denver area to the city of Fort Collins, Colorado, where the New Belgium Brewery is located, is only a little over an hour away and passes some beautiful scenery.  My husband and I wanted to take the free brewery tour of New Belgium Brewery, Colorado's biggest craft brewery since we moved here. Colorado is known for its variety of beer producers and is home to five of the top 50 craft breweries in the United States.

(All photos, and photo collages, in this post, will enlarge for easier viewing if clicked on)

New Belgium Brewery opened in 1991 after its founder, Jeff Lebesch, decided to take his homebrewing passion commercially.  If you enlarge the photo collage above by clicking on it, you can see the brewery's logo is a bicycle, and a bicycle is permanently parked outside.  The brewery's legend is that one of the co-founders was influenced by a bicycle trip he made through Belgium and Europe, tasting craft beers along the way.  When he returned home he developed and brewed his own amber ale, and named it "Fat Tire" in honor of that trip. Fat Tire Beer is now their flagship brand and the most popular beer

Bicycles are used as decorations throughout the brewery!

Most of the brewery employees bike to work in the brewery, which is located close to the bike path along the Cache La Poudre River. All employees have a stake in the ownership of the brewery, which they earn after one year's employment, along with a limited-edition Fat Tire Cruiser bicycle. After five years of employment, the company sends the employee on a trip for one week to Belgium!

The New Belgium Brewery utilizes sustainability and recycling in its operations. You can watch a new program video about many of these methods at this Youtube link.  They use solar and wind power to provide electricity in their plant, plus methane gas created as a byproduct of their on-site water treatment plant.

The brewery also uses an energy-efficient kettle for the brewing process, that heats twice as quickly, and provides significant savings in natural gas consumption,

I enjoyed photographing the colorful mosaics floor around the demonstration kettle on the tour.

The brewery has been named one of the "Best Places to Work" by many publications and organizations, as it promotes employee satisfaction and wellness. How could they lose with profit sharing, free bicycles, trips to Belgium, paid sabbaticals, and fun slides provided for the employees to use to travel from one floor to the next?  My husband had to try one out!

At the end of the free tour of the brewery, we were treated to samples of the different New Belgium Brewery beers in their tasting room. In addition to Fat Tire, they make Ranger IPA, Sunshine Wheat, Blue Paddle, Shift, and a litany of other beers--seasonal and artisanal blends. My husband and I really enjoyed the tour and would not hesitate to go again on another visit to Fort Collins.

New Belgium Brewery is located at 500 Linden St, in Fort Collins, Colorado, Tuesday - Sunday, 11AM to 6PM. Their free tours are very popular, so it is best if you book ahead of time

New Belgium Brewery is expanding and is opening a new brewery on the east coast, in Ashville, North Carolina sometime in 2015, so that they may have a market beyond their present 38 out of 50 states.

Have you tried any of the New Belgium Brewery beers? Do you have a favorite?

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