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Flavors to savor: home of Fat Tire ale, Colorado's New Belgium Brewing mixes old world methods and cutting-edge production. Its great beer inspired our hearty recipes.

Article Excerpt
A TOUR OF New Belgium Brewing in Fort Collins, Colorado, begins at a display of beer ingredients: hops, barley, wheat. All the usual suspects. But then there's kaffir-lime leaves and orange peel. And the barley and orange peel are laid out in the shape of a peace sign.

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That's your first clue that this place differs from the state's big corporate brewers (Coors and Anheuser-Busch, which has a local brewery). "There's always been a perception of us as having an easygoing, hippie vibe," says Bryan Simpson, New Belgium's media relations director. "But there's also a lot of emphasis on excellence." It's paying off: While investing heavily in cutting-edge green technology, New Belgium has become one of the fastest-growing craft brewers in the United States, and its beers--modeled after the complex, free-spirited ales of Belgium--have won multiple awards.

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Upstairs in the brew room sit four giant conical steel tanks that look like the nose cones of spaceships. Through windows on each, you can see the journey of beer--the barley as it's mixed with water, filtered to make sweet liquid called wort, and boiled with hops for flavor. Then it's piped below to the cellar, where the yeast goes to work on the sugars, converting them to alcohol. Once it's beer, it's piped into the chugging, steam-hissing bottling room next door.

The entire operation, you learn as you sip your way from toasty Fat Tire to rich, mahogany-hued Abbey in the tasting room, is...

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