Popination Elevation
a series of unhinged personal essays disguised as pub reviews. Today: Mountain Sun.
I had a bunch of errands to do in Boulder recently and so I decided I’d take the opportunity to visit an old favorite haunt from my Boulder days: one of these places that was a true 3rd Place to me during a certain period of my life, and one that I don’t find my way to very much anymore at all, mainly because of distance. But I still do try my best to pop(inate) there whenever I’m in town. I first wrote about this special place briefly in my very first popinaton collection: so this is another one of those that I feel needs the honor of a full dedicated Popination essay, not just a couple paragraphs among many. So here’s a bit of a remix and a new observing of an old friend:
Mountain Sun
is one of those places that epitomizes Boulder. Want to know what Boulder is about, get a taste of the culture? Just go to Mountain Sun, sit out on the patio, and order an FYIPA (It doesn’t stand for what you think). You’ll get the idea. This pub is also a brewery, though I don’t think the flagship pub in downtown actually brews on premises anymore. I could be wrong—this recent visit, I noticed they advertised that many of their beers were available to go, which I don’t think you’re allowed to do if you’re not brewing on premises. But I digress.
I was going to attempt a detailed physical description of this little pub, but Mountain Sun is just too busy to encapsulate in a few words. I don’t mean busy with customers (though it often is that too), but busy with colorful decor. There’s a mini sky-chair dangling from the ceiling with a Jerry Garcia doll sitting in it, along with a weirdly psychedelic smiling moon, and brightly rainbowed painted sections of the wall in each booth’s cubicle. There are old hippie concert posters framed on the wall, and the menu is usually adorned with chalk art. There’s a cacophony of clashing artwork everywhere here, which was back in the day centered around a huge temporary chalk piece by local artist Bryce Widom, though I haven’t seen his work up there for a while now.
The beer at Mountain Sun is exclusive to the brewery, and you can’t get it in any other taphouse or any liquor store, so it’s unique and amazing. Their food is fantastic, some of it obnoxiously healthy, but they are famous for their fries. Fish & chips day here is a monumental treat. Their hippie style extends to their policies, too, including all servers serving all tables, pooling all tips, and that they only accept cash or checks, no cards. Very weird. Very Boulder.
I used to go here nearly daily when I worked at the copy shop down the street, and almost that often when I was bussing back and forth between my teaching jobs in Denver and my home in Way Far Out East Boulder, as it’s literally a hop skip and jump away from the bus terminal. One of these trips, I was standing waiting for my pint to be poured on a very busy evening, when a guy sitting right below me asked, “Would you like to play dominoes?” This was no creep, but a guy who went to this pub as frequently as I did, who was there for his weekly meeting with his work friend for pints and chats and games. I accepted, and my dominoes games with Harold and his friend Scottish Paul became a regular thing for the next several years. Harold is still a very good friend of mine, even though I don’t get to meet up at Mountain Sun with him nearly as often in recent days. But he’s now math tutor* for my high school aged stepgoblin, and I’m glad that my fellow in pints is still in my world in some way.
*A word of advice: never get into serious dominoes games with men who are mathematicians. These f*ckers would count tiles so effortlessly, even while drinking whole pitchers, that I could absolutely never keep up, let alone win. Not that that was the point of playing, but.
Stout Month
Mountain Sun and its branches (Southern Sun, Under the Sun, and Longs Peak in Longmont) is best known for an annual event that takes place through the month of February, which has in recent years spread from being centered at the Sun to other breweries around Boulder and even into Denver. I remember in past Stout Month Popinations that Tivoli would have a little version of Stout Month themselves, and this year I saw a couple posts about Stout Month all the way from Lady Justice, in Aurora.
Stout Month (especially post pandemic hiatus) consists of a celebration of dark beer, and that’s pretty much it. Through February, both Mountain Sun itself and other guest breweries offer an array of differently flavored and brewed stouts that you can sample all month. This is great for stout lovers, as usually Mountain Sun doesn’t have many, if any, stouts tapped—their most popular beer is the FYIPA (a favorite of mine as well). I used to take notes in my phone, noting down each type of stout I’d enjoy a taster or whole pint of. When I went in to Mountain Sun this past week in the middle of my Boulder errands, I was delighted to find that I actually still had these notes saved in my phone’s cloud—I have stout notes saved from Februaries from 2017 on! (Though I hadn’t any notes between 2020 and this year. I believe they didn’t actually do Stout Month from lockdown till… maybe 2023? No research for these posts.)
This year, I was delighted to see that they’ve made up a Stout Month bingo card, where each pint consumed gets checked off by your server and any bingos achieved enter you into a drawing for prizes. Very much in my vein of keeping track of the stouts enjoyed through the huge numbers of variations. But Stout Month used to culminate in an even bigger contest—the whole month used to lead up to an amazing Movember-adjacent event called the Chop Contest. Here, check out this article from 2015 I wrote for Your Boulder about this whimsical celebration:
From Your Boulder (edited slightly)
You’re enjoying a stout style beer called Oatimus Prime, rich and dark and pleasing to the palate, when the bagpipes begin. The pipers enter in procession, followed by a regal figure carried on a litter. The most distinguishing feature on said figure (you notice, as he is lowered and descends from his royal chair) is his magnificent facial hair: two mutton chops, large and long and groomed to perfection. The entire crowded room raises dark pints, snifters and tulips to him as he strides to the center of the gathering and makes his annual proclamation. Later, he will reign over other mutton-chop wielding gentlemen as they compete for the title of Best Chops.
He is the Chop King, and the ceremony over which he presides is Mountain Sun pub’s Chop Contest, the culminating event which takes place at the end of February, otherwise known to Mountain Sun loyalists as Stout Month.
Eighteen years ago, Tim McMurray and some other male Mountain Sun staffers decided to appear at work one day with chops. For the shock factor, of course. This whimsical addition to Stout Month caught on, and as customers joined the staffers in their hirsute hobby, the Chop Contest was born.
Think this event sounds a bit silly? Perhaps so, but the prizes that go to the winners of the Chop Contest are nothing to sneeze at:
1st Place: 3 organic pork chops, a $200 Mountain Sun gift certificate, 1/6 of a barrel of Mountain Sun beer
2nd Place: 2 organic pork chops, a $100 Mountain Sun gift certificate, a half gallon of Mountain Sun beer
3rd Place: 1 organic pork chop, a $50 Mountain Sun gift certificate, a quart of Mountain Sun beer
Know how much a sixth of a barrel is? A lot. It’s a lot of beer.
Don’t have the necessary secondary sex characteristics to compete with chops? No problem: cut your hair into an epic mullet and win a prize of your own.
One tip from me, a previous attendee of the event: since the votes for Chop Contest prize winners are all from the audience of spectators, the contestants will be campaigning hard to solicit votes (sometimes they even offer bribes in the form of candies or toys or poetry). Arriving to the event early will mean that you’ll be able to get in (getting there even earlier means you can claim a table as your fiefdom), and you’ll have the opportunity to more thoroughly enjoy the characters the contestants portray. The Chop Contest is a very popular event, and the place fills to the gills fast, so be ready to get there early, chill with the myriad stouts on tap, and see who’s got the chops to win this year.
My favorite stouts? Well I always appreciate the Girl Scout Stout, which is a chocolatey coffee-y stout with mint—it’s basically a Thin Mint beer, and it’s fantastic. Their Addiction* Coffee Stout, especially the bourbon barrel aged variety, is a deep sweet strong tiramisulike treat, though that one is so strong, alcohol-wise, that it comes in a small tulip glass, not a pint, and after having one Addiction it’s usually time to stop. Their Nihilist Russian Imperial Stout is also a favorite, though it too is very rich and strong. The Trickster is a good session stout, when you don’t want to consume your beer with a fork—it’s light and drinkable and pleasantly bitter but in a smooth way that goes down easy. But there are so many on offer during the month, and there’s always the possibility that something strange and delightfully unusual will dethrone my favorite at some point. I guess that means I have to get up to Boulder more often. That’s okay—it’s my birthday month and I’m sure my Dad wouldn’t mind meeting me there more often so I can fill up my bingo card.
*They had to change this beer’s name a few years back: I noticed it was called Addition, instead of Addiction, and I asked why. They told me something about that they were getting some flak from someone or other for naming a beer after an alcohol-related problem, which… I dunno, c’mon guys, really? How delicate can you be? Yeesh. But this year I noticed it was back to its original Addiction name. All is right with the world again. Or at least, with Stout Month.
The whole take home your fav brew started during the pandemic and continues.