beer, beer, beer, and tea?

Remember when I said we did everything under the sun? Well that included drinking beer, and a lot of it. I realized that Colorado was the beer capitol but I underestimated the sheer amounts of independent, cool, breweries. We started off the day at Boulder brewery and shared the sampler 13 beers (yes, 13!) at 11:00 AM. At least it was technically noon my time, but still it was super early. They weren't full size beers but it equalled 2 1/2 beers a person but still...we all took our Ole Miss training seriously and quickly realized this day was a marathon not a sprint. So what to do at noon with a hardcore buzz? Scroll down...

Celestial Seasonings, of course! We stroll into the famous tea factory like we own it and arrive right in time for a tour. Sadly, we heard people behind us being turned away that had actually really wanted to go on this extremely informative tea tour.

Unfortunately the strict no cameras policy severely dampened my dreams of capturing the magic of tea making and most importantly surviving the mint room, but I was able to catch these gems.

Is there anything better than a man in a beard cap?

Next we went on to Avery brewery and had lunch. True beer snobs Whitney and Travis ordered very dark and scary beers while Rebecca and I got some kind of champagne beer which was fabulous.

After Avery brewery we drove to Golden, Colorado and took a second tour of the day at Coors. We enjoyed this tour but really didn't give it our full attention like the Celestial Seasoning tour. In fact, Rebecca informed the Coors staff that we were more "visual learners" and did not need to listen to the entire tour. Translation: we just want to get to the end so we can sample our free beers.
Although we made it to the end of the tour, the Waters have gone totally native and were insulted by the lame quality of Coors beer. We left after only 1 beer with our noses righteously up in the air. Lastly, because we hadn't reached our 1,000 calorie mark in beer, we went to Golden City Brewery.

This was much more Colorado style, which included yummy beer, dogs, transvestites, hippies, and most important, fabulous friends.

For Natalie's News this has been, Natalie-Corinne.