The folks at Mountain Sun have been perfecting the pub chain’s concept since 1993, incorporating plenty of hippie Boulder style along the way.
Vine Street Pub and its sibling companies in Boulder, Southern Sun and the original Mountain Sun, specialize in hand-crafted beer, local food and relaxing atmospheres.
Vine Street shares the same atmosphere as the other two pubs. The sunny corner bar is decked out with the same styles that made their Boulder establishments so cozy: Carpeted floors, hop vines painted on the air vents overhead, prized original concert posters, tapestries and artwork bought directly from craft workers in Asia and Africa, oak furniture and plenty of good vibes. The pubs are even filled with the same species of plants in all three locations to keep the feel of the different locations familiar.
Beautiful chalk art featured at Vine Street is the work of members of the talented staff. The uber friendly employees work every position at Vine Street – one day cooking, next day managing, next day serving tables – to instill a sense of ownership over the restaurant and to ensure that a guest never runs into an employee that can’t help them with whatever they need.
Summertime is a great time to party at Vine Street. Guests can people watch from the pub’s front patio, or play Corn Hole, a bean bag toss game that’s harder than it looks, on the west patio.
Vine Street Pub serves affordable pub fare with plenty of creative vegetarian options as well as locally sourced and organic products. Prices range from $3.95 for a half sandwich to $9.95 for gigantic, fully loaded chicken nachos. The pubs’ award-winning burgers are made with beef produced by a rancher just outside Boulder who grinds and patties the meat especially for the Mountain Sun company.
The beer at Vine Street really puts the pub on the map. Most of the pub’s beers are produced at Mountain Sun and Southern Sun for now. The brewery in the Vine Street location is under way, and the pub should be producing its own brews by early 2012. Until then, the pub features an abundance of top shelf Belgian and Belgian-style beers in addition to a dozen or so Mountain Sun taps and another eight or nine guest taps nightly.
Mountain Sun and Southern Sun produce many fantastic styles of beer. The selection varies day to day based on what’s hot in the beer world, moods of the staff and seasonal favorites.
Some local favorites are pretty much always on the tap. For those who are into lighter flavors, sip a Blackberry Wheat, a dark purply-pink American-style wheat beer made with 125 pounds of blackberry puree per 10-barrel batch. Quinn’s Golden Ale is the brewery’s most approachable beer, with lower alcohol content and smooth, mellow Liberty hops. Annapurna Amber, a mellow, malty American-style Amber made with nine malts, is also easy drinking.
Thicker, stronger, hoppier, darker, heavier – people differentiate between easy drinking beers and more hardcore brews in their own ways, but here are some of the most popular big boys.
Colorado Kind Ale, sweet yet hoppy, this unique combination of toasty caramel malt and classic Cascade hops is also known as “a pint of the dank.” This brew is described as somewhere between an American-Style pale ale and an American-style amber ale. XXX Pale Ale, dubbed “the crippler,” offers pleasantly sweet yet quite bitter and hoppy flavors with a crippling alcohol volume of 7.6 percent. FYIPA is the best seller at Vine Street. The owners credit this beer’s distinguished hop profile and huge popularity to maintaining the reputation of the pub as a hophead brewery. The Old School Irish Stout is dark with mild roasted flavors, but drinkable and approachable. It’s the same style as Guinness Irish Stout, classic Irish-style dry stout.
Vine Street Pub celebrated two years of fresh local food and fantastic strong suds April 20. The anniversary marked the debut of the brewery’s newest creation Blonde Bombshell, a Belgian blonde ale with malt sweetness and a fruity spicy nose.
During happy hour, beers cost $3 for pints and 8-ounce glasses of imperial beers, or beers over 8 percent alcohol per volume. During regular hours, the cost is $4.20.
If You Go
Vine Street Pub
1700 Vine St.
Denver, Colorado 80206
mountainsunpub.com
303-388-2337
Open nightly from 4 p.m. to 1 a.m.