Colorado’s Mountain Sun pubs set for Stout Month

Taps at all four Mountain Sun pubs — Mountain Sun, Southern Sun and Under the Sun Eatery and Taphouse in Boulder, along with Vine Street Pub and Brewery in Denver — will give in to the dark side throughout February for the brewpub’s annual Stout Month celebration.

Festivities kick off with a 20th anniversary concert of Funky Good Times on Saturday at the Boulder Theater — featuring members of The Funky Meters, The String Cheese Incident, Lettuce, The Motet and Mofro performing as The Pearl Street All-Stars — with proceeds benefiting KGNU independent community radio.

All Mountain Sun locations will feature a rotating selection of house-brewed, local and national stouts throughout February, with special tappings each Tuesday of favorites such as Oatimus Prime Imperial Oatmeal Stout, Stoked Oak Stout, as well as a tapping of Cherry Chocolate Stout on Valentine’s Day.

Special events are planned throughout the month:

• Patrons may purchase a six-beer sampler, preview the next day’s stout release and tour the breweries with Mountain Sun brewers from 5 to 8 p.m. each Monday in February at the Mountain Sun, Southern Sun and Vine Street Pubs.

• The “King of the Chops” extreme sideburns competition, a perennial favorite, is set for Feb. 27 at the Vine Street Pub in Denver and Feb. 28 at the Mountain Sun in Boulder.

• The winning brew from the 2014 Stout Month Homebrew Competition will be tapped Feb. 25.

Glenn Duggin and Brandon Christian won this year’s competition with a memorable, if offbeat, homebrewed beer.

Duggin and Christian, who became friends while attending the University of Southern Mississippi, considered several recipe ideas before landing on their winning entry.

They talked about adding blueberries or chile peppers to the beer, or perhaps making a smoked stout, but those ideas seemed too tame.

And then Christian posed a question via text message on the morning of their planned brew day: “How crazy do you want to go with this?”

The answer came in that most-celebrated of breakfast meats: bacon.

“We’d noticed a surge of bacon beers at this year’s Great American Beer Festival — some of which were good, and others, not so much,” Christian said.

Duggin and Christian devised a recipe for a Bacon Milk Stout, and when they first tried the beer on New Year’s Eve, they were pleasantly surprised by the results. The brew had an overall sweet creaminess thanks to the addition of lactose, and the smoked grain, along with the 2 1/2 pounds of cooked bacon that they’d added during the boil, was just enough to add a hint of smoky bacon flavor without being too meaty — or greasy.

Judges at Mountain Sun’s homebrew competition agreed. Duggin and Christian’s bacon beer, which they dubbed “Vegans be Damned,” took top honors among 35 total entries.

The pair brewed a larger batch with Mountain Sun brewers using Vine Street Pub’s six-barrel pilot system — this time using 105 pounds of cooked bacon — and are looking forward to sharing their beer with the public.

“We’ve both gone on tons of brewery tours, and it was so neat to brew on a much larger system and learn more about the science that goes into it,” said Duggin, a pastor who is in residency to become a hospital chaplain.

“It was cool to see it go from grain to glass,” adds Christian, who is working toward his broker’s license. “I just hope everyone enjoys it and has as much fun drinking it as we had making it.”

Contact Tom Wilmes at boulderbeerguy@gmail.com.