Popination Reverberation
A series of unhinged personal essays disguised as pub reviews. Today: Rock Bottom.
Rock Bottom Brewery
(in Greenwood Village. Or Englewood. Or Centennial. Or whatever it is. It’s impossible to say. But also the one downtown, in memory)
I left my partner drooling over all the lovely things in Guitar Center and walked across a very hot and wide swath of black parking lot to grab a cold one while I waited for him. I was instantly refreshed by coolth,* the moment I walked through the beer-garden-like patio and through the faceted glass door into the dim interior.
*Fritz Leiber uses this word frequently in his famous Fafhrd & Gray Mouser stories. It looks weird, until you think about how it’s actually more weird that we have the word ‘warmth’ but not ‘coolth.’ Anyway I love it muchly and have adopted it.
The first thing I noticed was a familiar scent— it smells not like a bar but like a brewery, which I knew very well, having not only been a regular at more than one brewery but having actually gotten into home brewing for a while there with my first husband. It’s a yeasty, appetizing smell, a beer remnant scent that’s very different than the stale booze smell of a bar. It smells more like the ingredients of beer than beer, if that makes any sense.
I noticed, as I found a seat at the bar, that it was pretty empty for 4pm on a Friday. I wonder why. A nervous yet courteous, very young seeming bartender served me a cold APA and I tried to settle in and take some notes, when the echoes of a boisterous row of extremely drunk middle aged and older men intruded on my concentration. The whole Cheers-like row were obviously regulars, one of whom was garbling something about how you should never call his mother a bitch, man, or he’ll kick your ass all over the place. Repeatedly. Which, hey, that’s fair.
My ability to be easily chummy with dudes stems from way back, even before my time with the Band of Young Men, back in elementary school where the only kid in my 4th grade class who wanted to play D&D was my friend Ben. These guys at the bar are pretty far gone though; almost incomprehensibly so. Slurring for sure. Later, after my partner had joined me and we snacked and chatted, the bar-end of bellends got up and swayingly hugged and staggered out. I dearly hope none of them were driving. It looked like they were an institution here—the kid sure knew their rhythms & regular orders, that was apparent.
Wood you like a beer?
This branch of Rock Bottom is cavernously large, without being stark, since there’s dark wood everywhere, from the tables to the bar, echoed in the brick (paneling?) on the walls. There’s giant screens showing sports all over the place but weirdly enough they’re not intrusive, and don’t have sound or captions on, so they don’t steal your eyes from you. Maybe it’s because they’re mostly mounted quite high up. There’s lots of tall tables and a good number of regular tables, and a long bar to the right just as you walk in. All this wood makes it feel cozy, even though it’s such a big place. The woodenness also is probably why it smells like it does in here.
Chain chain chain🎶 … chain of brews
Rock Bottom is indeed a real brewery, in that all their beer is made on site, chain though it is. And, chain though it is, it’s a small local one. And since it’s a brewery, they’ve got growlers of anything you want to go. I had a pint of APA that was delicious and then an IPA that was almost as yummy. I don’t remember what they were called, and idiotically enough, I didn’t write the names of these beers down in my notes. Harrumph. But the APA reminded me of that one called Handsome Paul from Well80, which is why I was so fond of that one. And I’m unhappy with this citrusy/hazy trend in IPAs. Give me bitter or give me death! A desire for a bitter death to my taste buds? Sure, that sounds pretty goth…
There’s good food here, too—I remember this fact from having gone to the downtown Rock Bottom a few times in the earlier days of my job at Metro. This was my first visit to the Englewood one, though. I tried the smoked salmon dip appetizer which was supes delish (O god I’m channeling Rachael Ray someone send help)…
I’ve hit Rock Bottom
I used to frequent the downtown Rock Bottom quite a lot, as a pre-game for other events, like the time my then-husband and I would sample a few of their pints and judge them meticulously before attending the Great American Beer Festival to see if they won. I often took, too, a relaxation moment between my adjuncting work at Metro and the long bus home to Boulder. Rock Bottom on the 16th Street mall was an easy stop, especially before fancy Terminal Bar existed, and the Market Street bus station closed. That Rock Bottom was also big, more big-city style big than suburbanly sprawling like the Centennial one. Which, of course, fits. What it used to remind me of is the now-defunct Walnut Brewery in Boulder. That one deserves a Pubs Of Yore post here for sure—that’s the place where my manipulative mother finagled their famous beer bread recipe from them using her patented silver tongue and nat-20 charisma.* But that’s for another time—suffice to say that the array of brews at Rock Bottom reminded me of those at Walnut, though just a tiny bit less robustly flavored. I’ll definitely be returning there next time my partner needs to go to Guitar Center. Which I’m sure will be soon.
I’ll just need to make sure I don’t insult that one guy’s mother.
*my second D&D reference in one Popination piece? I’ll allow it.