Golden

During lunch on Friday there were a few errands to be run at the bank, gas station and grocery store. This provided the opportunity to try out the Empanada Grill, a Venezuelan eatery in Golden. It’s a tiny place, specializing in empanadas and arepas so the best thing to do was get both. The walls were decorated with black and white photos from around Venezuela and I immediately recognized one of the pictures as being an aerial shot of Gran Roque island, a small island off the coast of Venezuela that Claudia and I had visited aboard Ma’alahi so many years ago (got stuck at waiting for diesel fuel, actually). Later that afternoon we had a visit from another family member when my brother, Mark, was passing through after delivering horse trailers in Loveland and Nebraska. He had a lot of driving left to do before getting back home but he was able to stay long enough for us to enjoy another fine meal at Table Mountain Cantina & Grill.

Boulder

We started the next day with a quick visit to the Golden farmers market in search of cage-free, organic eggs. None were found so we headed to the Boulder farmers market since we had seen them there on the previous Saturday. Since we had most of the day still to go we figured we could get a few more breweries checked off our list. We started with West Flanders Brewing. I had a 10-oz. serving of their Angry Monk, a Trappist-style Belgian ale that was a bit unique among most Belgian-style ales. It was quite good. They were out of their Lion Heart Stout that Karen was hoping to find so she ordered up the Ska Brewing Buster Nut Brown Ale from their guest tap instead. Our next stop was at BRU handbuilt ales where we both had the Obitus American Brown Ale. This beer had a fuller body (good) and higher alcohol (not so good) than normal for a brown ale and we both thought it was very good. Now this might be hard to believe but they had this great pizza oven going behind us and … we didn’t get a pizza! I don’t remember for sure but the reason may have been that we were holding out for more barbeque from that food truck that we knew would be in Golden that evening.
As fate would have it, our next stop was just down the street at Fate Brewing Company. They had a long list of their own beers as well as guest beers on their menu and after a couple of sample tastes we both zeroed in on the Fate Coffee Kolsch, a most unique and delicious beer. The Kölsch style is generally light and crisp without the bitterness and roasty flavors that we enjoy in coffee porters and stouts but the distinct coffee flavor paired quite well and we were both sad when it was too soon gone.

Golden

Well, it was time to get happy again so we drove back to Golden to the Golden City Brewery where we knew we’d find our favorite Colorado food truck, Texorado. Before barbeque, though, we managed to procure two Mad Molly’s Brown Ales. We ordered up a couple of brisket sandwiches and just as I got back to our table with them it started to rain. We grabbed up our beers and sandwiches and ran to the car, parked on the street out front and from its dry comfort we watched the flooding rain and finished our beers and too-much-fat-in-the brisket-for-Karen sandwiches.