Popination Incantation (at the Light Rail station)

a series of unhinged personal essays disguised as pub reviews. Today: Incantation Coffee and Taphouse.

Incantation Part Deux

Hey Jenn, you’re probably saying: Didn’t you already do a Popination piece on Incantation Brewery? Yep, I sure did, and I liked it very much. Didn’t I wax rhapsodic about loving Metal themed pubs and that I might have found a paradise there on the corner of an Aurora strip mall? I’m pretty sure I did, and as much as I’d like to return there and enjoy its odd beers with the poetic darkly themed names, that’s not how Popinations roll. But they’ve opened a new smaller branch of Incantation Brewery in Denver. This one is a robust coffeehouse as well as a taphouse for select Incantation flavors, all of which still bear Gothy or Metal or Horror-mythos names. So of course I had to Popinate there and see what the spinoff was like.

Beer, coffee, & Metal? Don’t mind if I do…

DiME Denver

Remember that liminal time just before lockdown, when the pandemic was only just starting to be called that, and the stay-in-place orders weren’t yet imminent? My Spring semester of 2020 began mid-January, and my live classes were twofold in the [UNIVERSITY NAME REDACTED] theatre department: Stage Movement, and a live version of Staging Cultures, a sort of global theatre history class I’d taught many times online. This class, though, was being offered at a strange place called DiME Denver; a little branch of the university that was focused on professional music education and training. Sort of like a musical conservatory related to but separated off from the whole. This area was a little ways away from the downtown-adjacent Auraria campus, over on Alameda, in a very crunchy area near the light rail station. DiME lived in a little, squareish, lime green building made of painted cinder blocks, it seemed, and shut with many steel-analog and more technical security alike, since there was so much state of the art musical and production equipment stored inside.

But this semester, for the first time, they wanted to add a theatre class to the curriculum of gen-ed arts courses required of all the musical students, and so I got assigned to be the first theatre prof from that department to teach at DiME. And I loved it. I had a big classroom with a piano smack dab in the middle, and a stage with band equipment ready to go. The piano would end up being manned by one of my students each day of class before we began (and sometimes he accompanied class). Often the stage would be taken by students after class was over, especially if we got all our work done early. The students were artsy and engaging and engaged, playing music all the time, and even though they were very busy and so it was hard to get them to do their homework, it was still a pleasant experience talking with them about all this cool global theatre history stuff. And since we were live, I could play movement games with them to help their brains refocus. Tableaux Vivants were one of my favorites of these to play with, regardless of topic. Because doing tableaux are relevant to all arts topics. No, really.

Spring Break hit the week of March 14th(ish) that year of 2020, and we all know what happened that week. Suffice to say, we all went off to Spring Break and the powers that be instructed us to not return after break to our classrooms, but to continue the last few weeks of our courses online. We were locked down, and DiME Denver would run out of money and get cut off unceremoniously from [UNIVERSITY NAME REDACTED] not long after schools opened back up. It was a sudden and harsh demise, and the students were heartbroken and forlorn, having to finish their music degrees at the university proper, or transfer somewhere else. I was saddened, too—even though my time there was short, I felt deeply connected to the institution, its vibe and its premise, and especially its students.

Vitruvian M[e]n of DiME Denver: I’d always do tableaux with all my live classes.

But DiME Denver is not a pub!

I’d been told, during my orientation and first days of work at DiME, not to walk the one block from its green cube to the Alameda light rail station, close as it was, because of the frequency of students getting mugged. So I decided to Uber to Incantation Taphouse today, even though I’d noticed that the light rail seems to have come back somewhat since its shutdown and dereliction during lockdown days. I was curious to see what the train was like now, but didn’t figure the mugging factor was any better today and so it wouldn’t be worth the risk; in fact, violent crime around that area all the way into downtown is worse, I hear. But.

Little did I know from Google maps, the new Incantation is on the corner right there, abutting onto the station itself! No mugging distance at all, not even a block. I was thinking I’d light rail home in that case, but as I sat there, I watched delays and cancellations pop up every five minutes in the light rail app, so. As convenient as it may have been on paper, it just wasn’t going to be. 

Look at that chandelier!

This branch of Incantation abuts right into the entryway plaza of the Alameda light rail station, as I mentioned, and is just as delightfully decorated and black-painted as its brewery counterpart, though it’s got no patio to speak of and is much smaller inside. It still boasts beautiful death themed art, candles and black decor, and skulls abounding, just like its brewery big brother, with the pleasant addition of the scent of sweet coffee drinks and cinnamon. A skinny, lanky-haired and crop-topped metalhead in tight jeans and a chain wallet ‘dude’d me in a warm and friendly manner, and I chose a beer called the Shaman, as the scent of the place was so pleasant I wanted it on my palate as well. Shaman is a blonde ale infused with cinnamon, coffee, and vanilla, and is one of the most delicious beers I’ve ever tasted–not too sweet but very flavorful and crisp for a Fall day. I found myself wistfully wishing this place had been here when I was going to DiME twice a week. 

This is a stout, name of which I’ve forgotten, not the Shaman. But it’s pretty, right?

Being here was nice and comfy but again, it’s not in an area where I need it or can frequent it (as are so many of these Popinations I pick out of a Denver map). And I find myself steeped in nostalgia again: back at Tivoli, I would have loved to have that place on campus when I taught there so many days a week in the early years of my adjuncting, and now here, again, when I was at DiME, Incantation would have been so nice. Seeing those two young people of indeterminate gender, reading their books and studying comfortably in the corner on the couches under the sludge metal music, made me long for a thing that wasn’t and couldn’t have been. Kenopsia strikes again, or is that Hiraeth? It’s more Hiraeth, I think, as even though Incantation Coffee was pretty slow that afternoon, it was in fact active and alive.

At any rate, It is a lovely place to wait for a delayed train. Or an Uber. The world I used to dwell in has improved since I’ve left it. Sort of an opposite to a ‘Scouring of the Shire.’ It’s actually a good thing, nice to see, if bittersweet—that the world I’ve left behind is going just great, thank you very much. That’s as it should be. The kids (and the Incantations) are all right.