Tour de Left Hand

Marc and I made our annual pilgrimmage up to Left Hand Brewing for their Hops & Handrails beer festival a few weeks ago.  Made a few tweaks to the route which I think made for better riding, but of course the one thing that didn't change was the fact that a lot of beer was consumed.

Kicked off things at Fossil Brewing with a Mammoth IPA.

And then it was over to Red Leg Brewing.

Then the standard Red Leg to Pikes Peak via the Santa Fe trail.

We decided to take the journey west this year, heading to Palmer Lake and jumping on CO 105 to take us north.  No trip to Palmer Lake is complete without grabbing a brew at O'Malley's.

Then it was a long ride up to Sedalia.  We battled the wind and earned a stop at Bud's Bar.

One last brewery stop for the day.  Really love Living The Dream and their Arrogant Hipster Lager.

Then it was off to the hotel.  Which doubled as a dinosaur exhibit.  Pretty cool.  And it was right across the street from the Rusty Bucket, a local Steelers bar.  Met up with Kircher and Garcia here and drank a shit ton of Iron City.

Kircher continued with us on Saturday morning.  After some wandering around trying to get across the I-70 barrier, we made good time to the first brewery of the day, Four Noses.  We were deep inside GZ country at this point and tried to get him to come out and play, but he used some lame excuse about family to bail.

Then it was off to Louisville.  Awesome stop at what was probably my favorite brewery of the weekend (playing Phish certainly helped), 12 Degrees.

Breweries were falling into our lap at this point.  We didn't even know we'd be passing Liquid Mechanics.

At some point we actually did get to Left Hand.

We were pretty late getting to the actual festival, but we had a blast on the ride up there and made the most of the time we had at the beerfest.  Even saw my old arch-nemesis.

Neither of us do much of anything anymore, so whenever we get together all we talk about is how good we used to be.

One more brewery on the way to the hotel after the festival.  300 Suns Brewing.  My 119th Colorado brewery.

There was even more debauchery after that, but my mind gets kind of fuzzy.  I know I ended up at Oskar Blues at some point.  And on Sunday we went back to Left Hand and then to the Tasty Weasel before catching a ride back to the Springs.

Awesome weekend of drinking beers and riding bikes.  70 miles the first day, 50 miles the second day.  Thinking of adding a ride up to the annual IPA fest at Avery this year, this kind of trip is way too much fun not to take advantage of that opportunity.