Fort Collins, Colorado

We’ve been spending our days visiting with Ashton and Reilly because we know this visit will soon come to an end.  We sure do love seeing them when we can.  Since they’re in school all day we only see them for a few hours each evening on the week nights.

They loved Nana’s spaghetti

The fun part about being here this time of year is that we get to go Trick or Treating with them.

First Reilly had to get her hair colored

Then we went over to their house where Todd had cooked up a batch of  roasted red pepper, tomato and butternut squash soup with shredded chicken in it.  Wow, was it ever good!!

Like the little pumpkin bowls?

Then it was time to head out for some candy

I’d say they did pretty good collecting loot

Wednesday was Rod’s birthday so he told Todd he wanted carne asada for dinner.  Todd got together all the ingredients, marinated the meat all day and made a homemade pie.  Again, a really yummy meal!

Todd and Ashton thought it would be funny to turn the candles upside down.

It was a chocolate silk pie with butterscotch pudding on top

Then Reilly had to have story time before we left

Yesterday Rod and I decided to head out and see what there was to do in the area.  Apparently, Colorado is known for their breweries.  They are everywhere!  We went to the Visitor Center to get an idea of where they were in this area.

The first place we went to doesn’t bottle their own beer and they have a very small brewery downstairs from their restaurant.  We decided to have lunch there before going on to the next one.

Coopersmith Brewery

Their small brewery downstairs

From there we headed to the New Belgium brewery which is a much larger brewery.  I had researched it online and found out you had to make reservations in order to go on the tour.  That was fine with me.  I made our reservations for 2:30 in the afternoon since that would give us plenty of time for lunch beforehand and plenty of time afterwards to get home and make dinner.  You can read about how the brewery started by clicking here.  It really is an interesting story

Airstream trailer that was in the parking lot used to travel the country showing people the philosophy behind New Belgium beers.  They call it the “Beerstream”

Inside the Airstream, this was ALL hand painted and tells the history of the company from the very beginning.

We even got to pour our own beer after careful instruction.  Seth (our tour director) said mine was perfect!

Rod’s looks pretty good too

They take their work seriously here but they have a lot of fun doing it.  All employees can have a few glasses of beer at the end of their shift and if they happen to be doing the tour they get to have beer then as well.  They gave us a beer when we started the tour, then they gave us beer after showing us how to correctly pour one, then they gave us beer when we went to see the bottling plant and then they gave us more beer at the end of the tour not to mention the two tokens they gave us when we walked in the door.  You don’t even have to take the tour to get a couple of free beers.  LOL

Fat Tire is their most well known beer and here it is being bottled.

This is what the bottle looks like

Here is Seth pouring us even more beer!!

Two more beers at the end of the tour and candy!!

All employees at the end of one year’s service get part ownership in the brewery and a bicycle

Looks like a lot of the employees make good use of them

This brewery was so fun to visit and I found a dark beer that I liked that I would have never tried.  Can’t wait to visit the next brewery.  That will have to wait a few days because today JB & Brenda are stopping by on their way down south.  These are our friends that we visited in Canada a few months ago.  The great migration has officially begun.