Popination Reiteration

a series of unhinged personal essays disguised as pub reviews. Today: Avery Brewing.

Avery Brewing

…ahhh, Avery. This is a place that’s in a weirdly remote area of not-quite-Boulder and as such, I haven’t made my way down here in quite a while. Though, as we’ll see below, in the past, it was a very important place in my world in the 20-teens. And, as I was coming up to Boulder for a visit The other day, and my parents understand my need for fresh Popinations subjects, we came up to Avery.

It’s funny—I wasn’t sure what to expect, having not been here for so long, and I also wasn’t sure how I wanted to write about it. I figured I’d arrive a little early, and compose some observations myself at the bar before socializing. But here’s the funny thing—I knew I had written about Avery before, but what I didn’t know is that I already had a thesis for this Popination, that I’d pinpointed around 7 (!) years ago.

I mean, for anyone who likes a beer on a patio, this place is heaven. As I’ve said before, I don’t tend to like that experience as much, but those were the best seats available for my parents when they came to meet me, so we did actually go outside to enjoy ourselves. It was shady enough that I actually didn’t wilt and die, you’ll be happy to know.

Inside it was exactly the same as how I remember, from when my partner and I were first seeing each other, sipping on impossible cask-aged coffee porters, and learning more about each other than we ever did in high school. Or stopping by for ‘splashes’ and dessert with a friend on her way to driving me home after a show. I was still living with my soon-to-be-ex-husband, which was in nearby Heatherwood in Gunbarrel, and it wasn't far. 

Today’s visit, in 2024, was a trip though. Outside, the extensive lawns dotted with picnic tables under awnings were the same, and even as early as 1pm, starting to be filled up with Boulderites done with their hikings or bikings and needing a craft pint. Or, it’s time for a beer with lunch (and Avery’s Louisiana-ish nosh is delicious). I drank something called Helios Rosé: a beer that was made like a rosé wine. Or made like a beer but it’s a wine mostly. Or. I don’t remember exactly what the scientific deal was,* but it tasted like all the good parts of a pale ale and all the good parts of a quality rosé wine in one, with none of the disadvantages of either. Their growler machine was broken, or I’d have brought some home.

*No research other than first hand observations allowed for Popinations, remember?

So there I was, sitting at the bar waiting for my parents to show up, remembering that first time I sat there and wrote about myself as a fictional subject. Then much later, the reiteration of that narrative seat and what would become the Parallel Bars blog (I describe its origins here). And now here I was again, after many years, chatting not with ‘Seamus’, but Simeon.

Who’s Simeon? He’s the bartender who served me, and (small world!) is a student at CU for music. How funny, that he was there for studies very similar to my partner’s journey at that school, not just years but decades ago. To be sitting there at that bar that was just the same, so long later, at a place that hadn’t changed at all though my life (and myself withal) has changed so much. Way to feel old. I guess not old, necessarily, but. Evolved? Different? Definitely different.

Avery Haven

Back in my days living out in that strange wild prairie, my partner would drive all the way out to meet me there in the remote oasis that was Avery, and we’d sip on syrupy Tweak stouts, or I would have pints of their crisp and bitter flagship IPA.

Avery fell out of favor once I moved downtown, even before I ended up all the way in Centennial. But especially while I lived up there in Gunbarrel with my soon-to-be-ex, Avery was a haven of sorts (especially before closer places like Finkel & Garf brewery and that one Mexican cantina opened up). It was close enough to my ex’s condo I could get there  easily without a car, but far enough away that I felt a safe enough distance away from my him, and could meet friends and others in a place with some room of my own.

And how amazing was it to amble on back to Parallel Bars and see what I had written, and what my partner had responded with, back in 2017, about Avery but more about the area surrounding it, both geographically and emotionally. Remember, we both had pen names: mine was Peony, his was Seamus. Check out these clips from both our pens, back in 2017 right when I was moving to a place of my own for the first time, and we began navigating what being together would mean, and the many enormous obstacles we’d have to conquer before us could happen. Here’s a couple clips from those:

*

From Peony (‘Plus Ça Change’):

There’s a little gravelly path encircling a pond just past the parking lot of this giant, cavernous brewery whose IPA I like nearly as much as the FYIPA at the other place. This bar is just as bustling and busy and loud as the other, too, at all times. I wonder what it is about loud busy places that appeals to me so much? Maybe it’s my intensely introspective, quiet ways when I’m home that makes me need the sorbet. Even more now, as I’m about to live alone. I spent the night in my own place, alone, last night for the first time, and busy street outside notwithstanding, it was so so still, and quiet.

Seamus says I have a way of gathering stillness around me. Maybe it’s that.

Anyway, about this pond. When Seamus and I were just teetering on the dangerous edge of the precipice that is our love, we took a tipsy walk down the first stretch of said gravelly path. It was late spring, and there was a cacophony of frogs singing an oddly harmonious hallelujah chorus over in the pond. It was that night that we experienced a strange union, then when we had only just re-met, suddenly we were pledged to each other, the frogs as our celebrant and witness. I can’t explain this any clearer than that, reader, and yes, it was that weird and that magical and that true. The wreckage of our lives in the wake of that union is testament to its truth.

*

From Seamus (‘What the Frogs Know’):

Oh, I know that pond.

It’s a sprawling area north of town that is, or at least used to be called, Gunbarrel. I don’t know why. In the 60s somebody went out there and built a sprawling housing division and some apartments, anchored around a small shopping center. Which was strange, because it was really in the middle of nowhere. Over time some apartments and a handful of office buildings sprung up and it became sort of a bedroom community close to, but separate from, the more expensive Boulder. Being cheap and sort of lowbrow, it should go without saying that it’s one of the places I lived as a kid. More than once.

It was also a wetland – basically a swamp – and at one time an ecologically important one. Had anything like environmental impact assessments existed back when they built it the powers would have blocked it cold, but as it was they drained and filled in most of the waterways. Still, all around the place were these very old ponds, creeks and marshes, ringed by ancient cottonwoods. Old, old, and with a strange atmosphere. As a kid I was afraid of the water out there. There always seemed to be a heaviness in the air, sort of a humid weight, watchful stillness, and a subsonic buzz. And strange occurrences too: one time my friend and I were walking near that pond, and he stepped on a pile of leaves. A huge nail, driven through a board and hidden, business end up, underneath the foliage (deliberately?) went right through his foot and came out the top. Blood came up around it through the top of his shoe and I thought, ridiculously, of an oil strike from those old movies. Another time I spotted a long, straight branch laying on the bank with its tip in the water and picked it up, surprised to find a live fish on a length of line tied to its end. Then for a while in the 80s someone was killing dogs. Whoever it was made the news for leaving chopped-up dog bodies in plastic bags around the area. 

So we messed around down there but even we, wild kids though we were, didn’t like it too much. You’d be playing, and a pause would come over everyone, and an eerie silence that didn’t feel right. It was like, if you were going to run into a serial killer – and we were starting to figure out that there were such things – it seemed like that would be the place.

Now there’s very little of the water left. The ponds are mostly filled in, and Peony’s frog pond is ringed by development and has a pleasant footpath around it. It has an air of mystery to it still, but I can’t sense anything malevolent about it. But what Peony said? That happened. And I’m not much of a mystic. Maybe there was some ancient curse and somebody paved over it and built a brewery. Maybe the angry spirits had a beer and just gave up, like eventually we all do. But if there’s magic, and I’m not saying there is (because I’m pretty sure there’s not), a little bit of it still hangs around that place.

Plus Ça Change

Avery is the same but everything else is not. Maybe that old school wetland swamp magic is keeping it preserved, maybe it’s just that Boulder knows its beers and knows what it likes and if it ain’t broke, etc. I feel like my old title is pretty apropos, even more so now than it had been in 2017. The more things change, but also the more they stay the same.

Oh, and! They had the Tweak, just like of old, and though I didn’t drink any during my recent visit (out or in), I brought a couple bottles of it home. It was rough drinking, for me. I wonder how I was able to do more than one in a night, back then. I was in a very different state of emotion/desperation back then (Popination Desperation?) but still. It surprised me, the roughness. It’s delicious, though: strong and coffee-y and almost maple syrupy.  My Dad was curious and got himself one too–I wonder how it treated him.

But my partner and I shared one Tweak between the two of us when I finally got all the way home, and remembered the frogs. And the long, strange trip it’s been, to become us. We’ve sipped on many sweet things and many bitter things in that interim, and here we are. The more things do all that, indeed. And the more we do.