Beer Review: Old Scratch Amber Lager

By / August 8, 2008 /

Red Rocks Rocks by Josh Mishell of Flying Dog Brewery

Red Rocks Amphitheatre. Massive slabs of 250 million year-old sandstone towering over your head on both sides. Amazing acoustics, especially for a 9,000 seat music venue. If you’ve never been there, you’re missing out. Big time. Because Red Rocks is one of the best places to see music in the world. And you Denverites live really fucking close to it. What makes it even more cool to me is that you can get Flying Dog beer there (you can also find other great Colorado beer at Red Rocks, like Fat Tire).

We’ve got Old Scratch Amber Lager there, a beer that’s fermented at medium temperatures, causing it to have both ale and lager characteristics. What you’re getting in this beer is a malty brew that goes down easy. Although it’s a fairly dark-colored beer, it’s light and refreshing. It seems like you guys aren’t much into the beer-nerd specifics, but if you are, read more about it here. Suffice it to say that this is a wonderfully drinkable beer, especially on those hot Summer days we’ve been having. Old Scratch has won a ton of medals, most recently a Silver award at the 2008 World Beer Cup (we also won the same award in 2006, at the last World Beer Cup). But 2 Golds at the Great American Beer Fest (held annually in Denver) aren’t too shabby, either.

I try to go to Red Rocks at least once a year. I went there a few times in the last couple weeks to see The Police and Elvis Costello (fun, but my row 7 tickets were stupidly overpriced) and then again to see yonder Mountain String Band. Both of those shows represent who I am musically. I grew up on a steady diet of my older brothers’ 80s rock (read: the Police, the Cars, Men at Work) – whatever I could get my hands on to play in my Teddy Ruxspin.

Yes, I’m a loser who had a Teddy Ruxspin. So anyway, seeing the Police was pretty cool, it was really loud and they were really old. But I felt I needed to see them in my life. So I made it happen.

But the band I’ve been really into the last handful of years is Colorado’s own Yonder Mountain String Band. Yonder is an acoustic band that some might classify as bluegrass, but they are influenced by a wide variety of bands, from the Misfits to the Minutemen to Ozzy Osbourne to Billy Joel and a whole host of other people you wouldn’t normally think of as influences on a bluegrass band. This band is from the hills of Colorado, and they’re starting to become a really big deal. I’ve seen them a lot and scored a photo pass to the show, which is pretty unreal – I’m still thinking about how amazing it was to score something like that (click photo below to go to my photoset on Flickr).

Seeing a Colorado band in a great Colorado venue calls for one other thing – wonderful Colorado beer. So I kicked back and watched my favorite band in my favorite venue and drank some of my favorite beer, Old Scratch. It was cool to see two bands that have heavily influenced me, one from when I was a kid and one from now, in the span of 10 days.

As the dog days of summer are waning, reach for a cold Old Scratch next time you go to Red Rocks to catch some awesome music. I’m thinking about going to the Nine Inch Nails show, if you see me, I’ll buy you some!