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"I first tried Branden Miller's Beet Saison at a wedding I catered a few months ago. The wedding was a relentlessly locavore affair, held at a small farm, the reception in a converted barn, the tables decorated with curled strands of burlap.
And the Beet Saison, a red-ale beer that Miller produced at hisBlack Shirt Brewing Co.in North Denver, glowed garnet and was served, appropriately enough, in mason jars.
Infused with roasted beets from a local farm, it had sweet root notes in the nose and the full range of beet flavors: earthiness, sugar, even the tannic aftertaste you get from the leaves. Drinking it on a day with just a hint of fall was a like a brief flirtation with a beautiful girl at a wedding. I was smitten.
Miller's brewery,which he operates with his brother and his sister-in-law, is on the outer edges of the loft and warehouse district north of Coors Field. The space used to be the Johnson and Lord Furniture Store — the old sign is semi-visible above the entrance — as well as a disco and, before that, a brothel.
The door handles are made of plumber's pipe. The table uprights in the tasting room are fashioned from boxcar flooring. And a turntable sits on a corner of the bar, with the LP cover ofRage Against The Machine's "The Battle of Los Angeles"leaning against it — music for enlightened rebels.
Black Shirt Brewery is what is known as a craft brewery (the term microbrewery was discarded, by industry-wide consent, in 2002) but Miller, who is welterweight-slender with long curly hair and a thick beard, isn't your traditional craftsman.
Traditional craftsmen are gruff, contrary and suspicious of glibness. Owing their origin tothe guild system started in the Middle Ages,they value secrecy, anonymity and reverence for tradition.
Miller is smoothly articulate and speaks in digestible sound bites. His brewery has already been the subject of a program on the Discovery channel, and is profiled in the forthcoming documentary, "Crafting a Nation."
"For a new craft brewery to stand out, it has to tell a story and convey its authenticity," said Marty Jones, who describes himself as an "educator and evangelist" and does marketing
Black Shirt Brewing Company, which creates craft beers, was started by brothers Chad Miller, left, and Branden Miller, right, and Chad's wife Carissa Miller. (Cyrus McCrimmon, The Denver Post)
The story Miller tells begins with the name. BSB references the shirts Miller and his brother liked to wear growing up. The color scheme — black and white logo, red beer — is inspired by Miller's favorite bands— the White Stripes,the Strokes.Even the way he thinks about beer, he says, can be traced to music. The brewery produces a standard product line: a basic red ale, a red saison, a pale red, an imperial red rye IPA. Think of those as studio cuts.
And then it produces smaller, experimental batches — one-off's that are closer to live cuts or B sides. Like most craft breweries, Black Shirt has two sets of tanks, visible from the tasting room: ceiling-high brewing, fermentation and conditioning tanks and a smaller 10-gallon set used for test batches.
Miller, a product of the YouTube age, doesn't believe in hoarding technical info. When a forklift operator who was supposed to lift one of his fermentation tanks into place no-showed, Miller went on YouTube and taught himself how to operate the vehicle.
"We aim to be the most transparent brewery ever," he says. That means copiously detailed social-media updates about brewing techniques (Miller tweets @brandenjmiller). "We want people to be able to totally geek out on the beer."
One day I bring Wynkoop's Jones into the brewery for a tasting.
Jones, an amateur musician, admires the turntable and raises his eyebrows at the menu board fashioned to look like a Marshall amp. Miller sets out his four standard beers, served in locally designed glassware with a tilted opening that drives the aromatics into the nose.
Jones holds the beers up to the light and sticks his nose into the glass. Why, I ask him, is the first taste of beer always the best?
"Well, the first flash flavor can be the most exciting," he admits, "but there is the alcohol factor to keep you drinking."
Jones has a number of polite and respectful things to say about the beers. He admires the "lacing" left on the sides of a glass, the foamy residue of a well-made brew.
We talk about the American approach to craft beer: Miller has no interest in what he calls the "predictable" German style of beer making, in which every nuance of the beverage is tradition-bound and highly calculated.
"We Americans take a time-tested formula, bastardize it, turn it up to 11, ignore all the rules, then claim it as our own — which, in a way, it is," Jones says.
Miller brings out a fifth beer. It is, of course, the Beet Saison.
Jones sits back in his chair. "Wow," he says. "the color's gorgeous. The head — look at it, it's like pudding." He sniffs it.
"The nose alone is worth the price of admission." He sips it. "This is the beauty of breweries like this. I don't know if anyone has ever made a beer like this, and I don't care."
Miller, who has been lurking in the back during the tasting, comes out. He and Jones engage in easy and mutually respectful shop talk.
To open the brewery, Miller has taken out a second mortgage and a variety of loans, maxed out his credit cards, even sold his car. Why, I think, does he take all the risk? He has spoken of giving frequent Twitter updates about what he's listening to while making beer. "It's like your favorite band. You want to know everything they did to come up with that tune," he says.
It occurs to me that Branden takes the risk he does not just because he loves beer, but because he thinks of himself as an artist. This, perhaps, is the mindset of the new craftsman. The traditional craftsman was content to create a product.
The new craftsman appropriates the artist's prerogative: to create not just a product, but a world around it."
John Broening is a chef at Spuntino, Olivea and Duo in Denver. johnbroening@msn.com
Black shirt brewing co.
3719 Walnut St. Open by appointment and most Saturdays; check Facebook page for updates. Regular hours two days a week are coming in January. 303-993-2799; blackshirtbrewingco.com
Read more:One beer's story: Denver brewery approach is inspired, rebellious - The Denver Posthttp://www.denverpost.com/athome/ci_22148809/one-beers-story-denver-brewery-approach-is-inspired#ixzz2EfaVZ3dv
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