Popination Association
a series of unhinged personal essays disguised as pub reviews. Today: Vine Street Pub & Brewery.
Mountain SunÂ
Vine Street is one of 3 versions of this pub that are still open (the flagship pub, Mountain Sun, makes four total), and it was the very last one of them to reopen after the plague—it took them a while to gather the proper staff and etc. from what I hear. And I noticed (mainly by the scent as I walked in) that it’s now the place where the beer for all four gets brewed. So I can imagine that could have been part of its delay in opening, too.Â
A beautiful day in the Mountain Sun neighborhood
It was a beautiful day for a post-church pint, and as I was deposited near Vine Street’s extensive patio just a few minutes before it was to open at noon, I took a walk of only a block down to my erstwhile writing haunt of St Mark’s. I didn't remember or realize how close by this branch of my beloved Boulder pub is to that eminent coffee shop, where I composed many a blog post before lockdown.
As I mentioned before, Vine St. is now the brewery for all Mountain Sun pubs. It used to be brewed at the flagship pub itself alone, but now I can’t imagine that working in such a small space. But yeah, I do remember clearly the growlers of FYIPA I’d take home on a Sunday back when all liquor stores were closed on Sundays. It was my loophole out of what I felt was an antiquated and puritanical law. Including the lack of beer & wine on offer in grocery or convenience stores, both of which have changed since the pandemic—yes, it took a plague to get Colorado to join the 21st century. Then again, we did have legal weed very early on. Coloradans are known for being skiers and stoners, it seems.Â
I do still always get the FYIPA when I go to any of the Mountain Sun family of pubs, and always the fries. I don’t know what their technique is, but the skins-on dark fried potatoes are literally the best tasting fries in the universe. It’s just true. I don’t make the rules. It was true today in new-to-me Vine Street—I happily burnt my mouth on chicken tenders and enjoyed the famous fries which were done exactly like they do them at Mountain Sun.
Home Sweet Sun
There was something of the familiar magic of Mountain Sun in Vine Street—I felt immediately at home there, even though I’d never been before. It had the same chaotic decor as my fave in downtown Boulder, but more the size and scope of its younger sister, Southern Sun, which is aptly in South Boulder. And though Vine St.’s menu did include the basic favorites of the OG kitchen (like the tempeh reuben, the date night burger, and the aforementioned fries), it also had things like pizza and wings, which you can only find in the Longmont version, Longs Peak Taphouse.Â
I’ll write about Southern Sun and Longs Peak too at some point—Longs Peak has some mixed emotion of memory for me, though, as that’s where I and my ex-husband used to frequent when he was in rehearsals for the Longmont Theatre Company’s production of The Rocky Horror Show. When he first moved in with me in Boulder many years earlier, and inserted himself into the aerial dance company I was in, he also got a job in the copy shop where I’d been working for a long time, and went to Mountain Sun often, as we all did who lived and worked near there. I do still feel like Mountain Sun is mine, but it’s undeniable how much that one man took over everything that had been mine during that too-long relationship. It can be argued that I let him do so, but. I don’t think that’d be quite fair to me, marrying him in my impressionable late 20s, an ugly duckling who he convinced was a swan. So I’ll give myself some grace when it comes to Mountain Sun. And Vine St. feels like a similar third place home, and it’s not only closer to where I live now but it remains unsullied by my ex's dominating clutches.
Of all my favorite haunts, (the downtown) Mountain Sun was one of the last places to open up again after the pandemic, which worried me for a while. Southern Sun actually got back on track first, then Longs Peak got itself up and running, being the third of three big, famous, and popular breweries in that little cow-town: Left Hand is the oldest (which I’ll have to get on down to Popinate to one of these days), then the distinct silo that’s Oskar Blues, where I used to have a pint while waiting for the bus home after teaching at the community college back just before the lockdown. And then Longs Peak. But they all have the Mountain Sun vibe, if not the small size and hippie-granola legacy. I’ll definitely be back.