Wynkoop Brewing Company

Wynkoop Brewing Company at 1634 18th Street in Denver's Lower Downtown (LoDo) neighborhood holds the distinction of being Denver's original craft brewery, founded in 1988 by a group that included John Hickenlooper, who would later serve as Mayor of Denver and then Governor of Colorado. The founding of Wynkoop at the heart of LoDo's then-dilapidated warehouse district is widely credited with catalyzing the neighborhood's transformation into the vibrant mixed-use district it is today — making the brewery as significant in Denver's urban history as in its culinary one.

The beer program produces all of its beers on-site in the century-old Mercantile building that houses the brewery, maintaining a lineup that typically spans 15 to 20 house beers across styles. The Colorado craft beer flight ($12) is the structured introduction to the current lineup, offering four beers across the range of what is currently pouring. Rocky Mountain oysters ($16) have been the menu's most famous item since the brewery's early years — the Colorado euphemism for pan-fried bull testicles, here served as a pub appetizer that functions simultaneously as a regional delicacy and a tourist initiation rite. Beer-braised brisket ($20) uses the brewery's own production as a braising liquid, creating a pub entrée that integrates the food and beverage programs in the most direct way possible.

The space spans multiple floors of the historic Mercantile building, with the main bar and dining room on the ground floor, the brewing equipment visible through windows, and a billiards hall on the upper levels that has been part of the Wynkoop experience since the 1990s. The atmosphere is reliably animated — a large downtown brewpub that has served the LoDo community through multiple eras of the neighborhood's evolution.