Wolf Pickin’ Hops
It’s no secret we love hops around here. We often work closely with hop farmers in the Pacific NW and Colorado, anxiously awaiting new experimental hop varieties that we can bring home to play with. This weekend we’ll release our latest hop crazy Roots Release creation, Wolf Picker.
Named in honor of the hop growing community and the harvesting equipment many use, Wolf Picker is an American Style Pale Ale brewed with two experimental hop varieties. The malt profile produces a light golden straw hue and a clean crisp finish that allows the hopback and dry hopping additions to shine. Wolf Picker features ADHA (American Dwarf Hop Association) #881 and HBC (Hop Breeding Company) #366, which give it an intensely complex hop character and aroma filled with notes of lemon, fresh basil and tropical fruit.
This spring, we will once again partner with several hop growers to showcase several new yet-to-be-named varieties for the annual Craft Brewers Conference. We’ll have up to nine different experimental hop beers on tap throughout the conference week!
Want to see a Wolf Picker in action? Check out this video from our friends at Colorado State University, and swing by the Tap Room on January 11th & 12th as we celebrate the tapping this latest Roots Release brew.
Hop to Sip – The Story of a Beer from Hunter Thompson on Vimeo.
Wolf Picker will be available on draft and in the Winter-Spring Montage Variety Pack beginning January 13th!
Odell Outreach 2013 Review
As 2103 comes to a close, here’s a little recap of our charitable efforts!
Charity of the Month program: Our charitable committee selects 2 great organizations for our charities of the month. Each organization receives a grant and the opportunity to share more about what they do in our Tap Room. We also select another organization that receives our guests’ generous tips. Here’s a recap of this year’s recipients…
January Tips: ELTC Circles
- Hand Up Inc. (Fort Collins)
- Ensight Skills Center Inc. (Fort Collins)
February Tips: Urban Peak Colorado Springs
- Generation United/United Way (Fort Collins)
- Greenhouse Scholars (Boulder)
March Tips: Cattleman’s Land Trust
- Legacy Land Trust (Northern Colorado)
- Arapaho and Roosevelt National Forests Foundation (Fort Collins)
April Tips: S.T.R.I.D.E. Learning Center
May Tips: Growing Project
- Gardens On Spring Creek (Fort Collins)
- Rocky Mountain Farmers’ Union Charitable and Education Foundation (Denver)
June Tips: Project Self-Sufficiency
- Women’s Wilderness Institute (Boulder)
- Hands of the Carpenter (Lakewood)
July Tips: Volunteers of America
- Poudre Wilderness Volunteers (Fort Collins)
- Wildlands Restoration Volunteers (Fort Collins)
August Tips: Juvenile Diabetes
- The Lift of Northern Colorado (Fort Collins)
- Wray Rehabilitation and Activities Center (Wray)
September Tips: Sustainable Living Association
- High Park Restoration Coalition (Fort Collins)
- Earthlinks (Denver)
October Tips: Colorado Water Trust
- Save the Poudre (Fort Collins)
- NFRIA-WSERC (Gunnison)
November Tips: Food Bank for Larimer County (turkey dinners!)
- Sproutin Up (Fort Collins)
- Feeding Colorado (Denver)
December Tips: Project Self-Sufficiency (holiday gifts)
- BASE Camp (Fort Collins)
- Family Attachment Center (Colorado Springs)
As you can see, they were diverse and we worked hard to represent all three of our giving parameters, Human Services (specifically at-risk youth and the elderly), Education and Sustainability.
Our tip jar program is highly successful due to the amazing generosity of our guests. We are able to allocate $2,400 on average at the end of each month to the designated charity on the jar.
Volunteer…
Odell Outreach has been a great practice for us in engaging our co-workers and fans in some of the community work that we do outside the brewery. In the spring we take part in and invite our fans to join us for, National Volunteer Month. We have had great success partnering with the United Way and their partner agencies to make sure that our efforts will not be in vain. We had a group go out to a local historical landmark, the old water works for yard work and general “sprucing up.” We had a second group go out to the new facility for the Center for Family Outreach and paint the indoors to make it more inviting. It was a great day and the kids even made us lunch!
We also help engage with Make A Difference Day in the fall. This year we partnered with La Familia (The Family Center) to make their fall harvest celebration a success. We had another group head over to the Northern Colorado Aids Project helping them make their facility more inviting and less clinical.
This year our co-worker Team Build was done in tandem with one of the biggest projects we have taken part in this year, The House That Beer Built. HTBB is a project that we put together with our local Habitat for Humanity chapter and engaged our industry colleagues to join us in helping to rebuild a home for a family that was victim to the High Park Fire. 8 of our local breweries came together to raise the $100,000 that it takes to build a Habitat house and to fill the sweat-equity hours. We were able to get the family into their home this week (before the holidays!!) and celebrate their dedication. We are still about $13,000 shy of our $100,000 goal and are looking forward to an event at the Moot House this coming January to raise the balance. This incredible collaboration speaks to our wonderful, inclusive industry and our collective dedication to our community!
Events…
Throughout the year we donate thousands of gallons of beer and loads of merchandise to help ensure the success of fundraising events for hundreds of non-profits in our distribution area. Fort Collins Read Aloud served our beer after The Dead Celeb race right before Halloween, Trees Water People served our beer at their annual Stove Party, and we were the featured beer for Turning Point’s Zombie Crawl again this year just to name a few. We look forward to being the beer sponsor for the Book Trust’s Books On Tape event in the Agave Room on January 23rd, 2014.
We also host events here at the brewery for local non-profits. Some are fundraisers, some are staff and volunteer appreciation nights and some are educational, like our monthly NCRES meetings, the 3rd Tuesday of each month. We just held a fundraiser for Save the Poudre and the FoCo Café was here last week to generate and celebrate donations to their cause on Colorado Gives Day. We celebrated Winter Bike to Work day with free pints for riders, a raffle for the Bike Library and live music.
New in 2013…
This year we tried a couple new programs that generated great results! The first was a collaborative effort created by one of our hop providers in the Willamette Valley. They provided us product, hops and malt, and we turned into a delicious brew and donated the profits (to the tune of $5,000!) to Ales for ALS!
We were also approached by a research associate from CSU who works with the Colorado Natural Heritage Program on campus. He presented to us a beautiful little butterfly named the “Hops Blue” or “Celastrina,” that happens to make its habitat on wild hops that grow in riparian areas unique to Colorado. We crafted a delicious Saison to compliment this fun story and committed $1 from each bottle sold. We were able to raise $12,000 for the Colorado Natural Heritage Program and celebrated with them 2 weeks ago on Giving Tuesday!
Happy holidays to all, cheers to 2014 and all that we can accomplish together!
– Karla
PS: If you are interested in learning more about Odell Outreach or would like to volunteer with us, please visit our philanthropy page or join our Facebook group.
Karla is originally from Pittsburgh, PA. She graduated from CSU 10 years ago and made Fort Collins her home. She has been given the extraordinary opportunity to work at making it a better place through her employment as Community Outreach Coordinator at Odell Brewing Company.
Same great beer; new name!
Red Ale becomes Runoff Red IPA
This January, our beloved seasonal hoppy red ale will return with an updated name and label. The recipe will stay the same, but we wanted to give the beer its own unique identity and story, similar to our other seasonal offerings…thus, Runoff was born. The name is a nod to the late winter and early spring snow in Colorado which becomes the springtime runoff that’s so important to our local ecology and our beer making. The label art also depicts this shoulder season and the transition from winter to spring with a snowy peak and plain melting into to a crisp Colorado stream and a beautiful aplenglow color that mirrors the color of the beer. We also updated the style of the beer to more accurately describe its hoppy character. Brewed with hearty malts and dry-hopped with copious amounts of American hops, Runoff Red IPA has a complex malt backbone with a floral fruity nose and a kick of grapefruit and pine hop flavor. It’s almost as surprising as the season itself!
