Chris Goodrow is on track to visit every craft alcohol producer in the state

By Jay McKinney

There are beer fanatics and then there is Chris Goodrow. After moving to Colorado in January of 2019, Goodrow visited a local brewery with his wife Anna, picked up a copy of Thirst Colorado Magazine and began thumbing through it. He came across the comprehensive list of Colorado breweries, distilleries, wineries, cideries and meaderies and got a crazy idea. What if we tried to go to all of these places?

“She went ha ha, and of course my liver went ha ha, yeah right, wait are you serious?” Goodrow jokes. He admits that it took some convincing to get his wife on board with the plan but now, just over two years later, his mission is nearly accomplished. As of the last issue of Thirst, Goodrow only has eight places on the list left to go.

“It’s taken us all over Colorado, I mean to places we ordinarily would have never gone,” he says. “We’ve had amazing experiences, just seeing that many different places and the people you meet.”

His record for the most places he has visited in a single day is 22, which he did in the Denver Metro area. On that day Goodrow had to pace himself, consuming multiple 2-ounce pours instead of the typical pints that most breweries sell.

When asked about his favorites, he says Grandma’s House in Denver is one of the most unique breweries he has been to because of its nostalgic décor that makes guests feel as if they are visiting their grandmothers. However, Goodrow loves the breweries that also have great food options, with The Post Chicken & Beer and Avery Brewing Company coming to mind as prime examples.

Goodrow acknowledges that anyone could just go ahead and say they’ve been to all of Colorado’s craft alcoholic producers and that is why he has documented every experience he has had, filling a stack of journals with descriptions of each place, whether he liked them or not, and other details.

With this detailed documentation, he has also come up with his own rating system based on his last name that he uses to rate the places he’s been on his new website TheFoodrows.com. If he hates a place, it’s a “Badrow.” If it’s not so great, then it’s a “Not so Goodrow.” And if it’s good, then it’s a “Goodrow,” followed by the best ratings, a “Very Goodrow” and a “Greatrow.”

Now that he has been to nearly all of the establishments on the Front Range, Goodrow is planning a trip through Southwest Colorado to finish off his mission. He maps out his journey with the places he must visit along with other destinations, such as hiking trails, in order to make the trip worthwhile.

“There’s a lot of time and dedication that goes into something like this where you’re planning everything out and marking it on a map because you don’t want to drive through a town and then realize later that you missed two wineries that you could’ve hit while you were there,” Goodrow says. “We started, of course, in Denver where we could just hit 10 breweries within 15 minutes of each other. It was just easy to knock those out. Then it got more and more difficult to get a bunch of breweries in one day as they got further and further away from us.”

Outside of obsessively visiting Colorado’s craft alcohol producers, Goodrow has a garage that is worthy of museum status. From floor to ceiling, most of the wall space is lined with beer cans that he has collected over the last 40 years since he was 10 years old. There are 4,892 unique cans with some dating back many decades.

As he continues to add to his can collection, Goodrow says he likes to build his own six packs at liquor stores based on cans he does not already have. And he tracks the progress with a detailed spreadsheet that has every can documented with a specific wall and row in his garage. In addition to collecting the cans himself, Goodrow says he receives cans from friends and even his postman who was fascinated by the collection after he delivered the mail one day and the garage was open. In the collection, Goodrow estimates that nearly 20 percent of the cans come from Colorado breweries and he especially seeks out crowlers while travelling to the breweries on the list.

By the end of the summer, Goodrow plans on having visited every craft alcohol producer in Colorado. After that, one of the walls in his garage is a blank canvas that he will surely be working to fill as he continues his can collecting.

- Jay McKinney is a Colorado native who recently graduated from Metro State University of Denver with a bachelor’s degree in communications. He loves spending time outdoors, playing golf and hiking.