11 Mile & Brew Tour 14Feb16

Greg and I hit 11 Mile Canyon of the South Platte on Valentine's Day - yeah, we'd celebrated with our wonderful brides on the day prior. It was pretty nice in the AM, arriving at 9:30am, with sun and 40° or warmer but we still bundled. The AM was super slow and I never caught a thing and returned to the car. Greg persisted and landed four nice 'bows (he'll have to submit the pics for those)Submitted!!!,
from 12:30-1:30pm, around the corner and downstream of the last bridge. Red #22 top secret midge was his most productive weapon. There was clear evidence of the cutthroats and rainbows building spawning beds but we didn't see fish on them yet. We left after lunch and a growler of Greg-O-Pliny (very tasty) when the wind and clouds blew in. We followed the fishing with an IPA brew tour of COS starting at the Smiling Toad and tasting a couple of their four IPAs. The Toad is a salt of the earth, hard to find brewery in the backwater Cheyenne area - it wasn't crowded but there were 15 people. We moved into town and found the Triple S brewery. Here we could not stomach the IPA and the only worthy beer was the Porter. No one was there but the location, site, marketing, furnishings, paintings, and the like were nice - I can not see this place surviving at their burn rate unless they modify their brews. We moved to Brewer's where the best new to us was Elevated IPA from La Cumbre (Albuquerque) - super west coast citrusy; there were a couple folks there. We capped the evening at Storybook where we enjoyed a happening crowd, several dogs and both the Gnomish and Beer Wars. Yeah, the gaudy clad waitress photo-bombed our selfie.