In Boulder, the guys and gals who work at Mountain Sun and Southern Sun pubs are groovy. In the restaurant group’s latest establishment, Vine Street Pub in Denver, they are hip.
Instead of Birkenstocks, dreadlocks and tie-dyes, they’ve got skinny jeans and ironic, too-tight T-shirts. And rather than a strip mall (Southern Sun) or the sanitized Pearl Street Mall (Mountain Sun), the Vine Street Pub has the corner of Vine Street and 17th Avenue, a lively patch of Denver, one of the city’s flowering little bohemias. This all works splendidly for Vine Street Pub.
Here’s one thing, among many, that it’s got: street theater. I recently sat outside with my two daughters, Stella, 9, and Ruby, 5. We grabbed a table near the black, wrought-iron fence surrounding the patio. Hipsters with their metal-studded belts and their Amy Winehouse ‘dos, their skateboards and their brakeless messenger bikes filed by.
A big mutt hanging out on the sidewalk named … Stella … rose to her hind legs, shoved her mug over the fence, and lolled her tongue. The other Stella laughed. The owner pulled doggie treats out of her shiny little purse and patted the dog’s head.
While the “jam band” devotees weren’t imported from Boulder as part of the Vine Street Pub package, when the pub owners opened shop in Denver, they did bring their reverence for good beer.
The food at all three of the pubs is fine, the standard selection of burgers and nachos and so on (including outstanding homemade fries), with some excellent vegetarian options (the meatless Reuben, for instance, is very good). But it’s the beer that always drew me to the Boulder joints. And now to Vine Street.
These people are beer geeks. And bless them for it. They brew beer that is so hoppy it almost tastes like saffron. They make an ale called “Kind” that smells like marijuana (don’t worry, it’s just an aroma thing). They use nitrogen, instead of carbon dioxide, to propel some of their beers through taps, which makes for a particularly heady, creamy pint.
For years I’d said that part of Denver needed a good brewpub. Now that it’s here, let’s all raise a glass.
– Douglas Brown
