KEVIN GREER: Ready?
RYAN SKEELS: Think
we're good to go.
♪ MUSIC ♪
RYAN: I'm Ryan Skeels,
I am co-founder, brewer,
bartender, janitor, etcetera here at Baere Brewing.
So, we are in the
Baere Brewing taproom
here in Denver, Colorado.
We are about 10 to 12 blocks from the South Platte River.
Since Baere started
we have always had a focus
on the local Denver community,
and we happened to meet Andrew
who has the program with bringing the greenback back.
♪ MUSIC ♪
So, the process for
this beer starts with
our base beer called
Baere-liner Weisse,
it's a German-style sour beer,
light, sour, pretty refreshing.
Bring the Greenback
utilizes spruce tips
in that beer for flavor.
What we do is actually we combine them with smaller amount
of beer and let them
sit for a week or two.
♪ MUSIC ♪
ANDREW TODD: For the
Rare Fish Rare Beer project,
that also came out of just
me wanting to give back
to the resource, in native fish.
And so we decided, let's
craft beer and the native fish-
I feel like they're
the same brain cell
that make people fish
snobs and beer snobs.
LAUGHTER
ANDREW: Why not? Why not
teach craft beer lovers
to love native fish
and vice-versa?
So, Bring the Greenback in particular has really generated
some interest, because of
being the state fish and all.
Well, what I like about it,
I mean, it's very deliberate
that the beers had
to be made by breweries
in the same watershed as the fish that they're celebrating.
Where are we thinking
about going?
KEVIN: Well . . .
RYAN: They're in the
South Platte watershed.
KEVIN: Right.
ANDREW TODD: We could
do Zimmerman Lake,
that's a place where they reestablished the greenback.
♪ MUSIC ♪
RYAN: So this lake is
surrounded by spruce trees,
which are currently
producing their spruce tips
and so gathering
them here was a perfect
combination of the
fish and the beer.
ANDREW: I'm Andrew Todd,
I am a native to Colorado.
For me a watershed is
very aquatic-specific,
being that I am an
aquatic biologist.
And the health of the watershed is, it's in totality.
If you've got a potion of it that's impacted by something,
it affects the health
of everything downstream.
It's all related.
RYAN: We're at the headwaters
of the Poudre River,
and this is a place
called Zimmerman Lake.
ANDREW: This is one of
the places that they've
reintroduced the
greenback cutthroat trout.
KEVIN: Oh my god,
there's a fish. See him?
RYAN: It's one of the core
conservation populations
for the greenback cutthroat trout at this point.
♪ MUSIC ♪
KEVIN: I'm Kevin Greer,
I'm co-owner
of Baere brewing
company in Denver.
I kind of do a lot
of everything there.
Prior to opening
the brewery,
I was a water
and wastewater engineer,
and I currently serve on the Water Quality Control Commission
for the state of Colorado
and I brew beer
with lots of water.
RYAN: Ooh yeah! Party!
ANDREW: Coming out hot.
KEVIN: Happy New year.
RYAN: The whole goal of the
rare beer, rare fish project
is to bring attention
to native species
which are cutthroat trout
and the one that's native
to the South Platte watershed.
We make a lot
of sour beers.
We worked with Andrew
to create a beer
that we thought had some
connection to the watershed
and to the
greenback cutthroat.
Spruce is relatively
common around here
and spruce tips are a really
nice ingredient, you know,
gives a lot of citrus and
piney character to beer.
When we pair that sour
beer with the spruce tips
and they give that, both
citrus and piney character
it's a very unique,
interesting, light,
easy-drinking sour beer.
RYAN SKEELS:
Alright, cheers.
Cheers to spruce tips
and the greenback.
KEVIN & ANDREW: Cheers to them.
♪ MUSIC ♪
