For over a decade, the Colorado Brewers Guild has annually offered Guild members and patrons a platform to share a quintessential part of craft brewing: collaboration. Colorado brewers look forward to the Guild’s annual Collaboration Beer festival as a special venue to showcase their innovation and talents with beers from experimental to nonsensical, brewed specifically for CollabFest.

This year’s event, held at the Westminster Westin on April 19, was no exception, offering community, camaraderie, creativity, and over 180 breweries and 130 unique beers. Each original beer was collaboratively brewed by two or more breweries, inspired by a forgotten style, an inside joke, an ingredient showcase, or another connection made through friends brewing with friends.

Each beer expressed a story and an opportunity to advance Colorado’s state-of-the-art beer scene. Two of those stories exemplify local brewers’ mastery of vision, tradition, and ability to continually drive innovation in the industry.

The first grew from ponderings by fellow Weld County brewers from Tight Knit in Evans and Wiley Roots in Greeley. The brewers considered English barleywine, American wheatwine, and Munichwien (a German-inspired barleywine made with Munich malt), and asked if a light barley malt could be pushed successfully to a similar result. These high-gravity beer styles are more often made with medium to dark malts, producing a rich, malty sweetness, and express toffee, caramel, and bread notes.

The brewers chose to leverage a classic European light malt: Pilsner, known to be round, direct, and sweetly malty. Compared to the pale ale malts used in the exemplar styles that result in copper color and toasty, biscuity notes, Pilsner malt— the quintessential German lager base malt —is produced from 2-row spring barley, lending a pale-straw color to wort and mild, malty-sweet flavor with gentle notes of honey in final beer.

The Weld brewers pushed their malt to the far end of its potential, yielding a finished beer in the range of 11.5 ABV, yet as lithe on the palate as a typical Pilsner. It poured deeply golden with a sweet bouquet, floral profile from Spalt and Lórien hops, and a traditional soft graininess without being cloying or heavy. With nowhere to hide off-flavors, the Pilsnerwein collaboration was a bold experiment that resulted in a refined expression of how good grain always leads the craft beer experience.

Continuing in the spirit of asking “why not push it?”, Cereceria Colorado and Howdy Beer brewed a CollabFest beer that reached back while leaping forward. The breweries are part of the recently formed Wilding Brands, along with Stem Ciders, Denver Beer, Great Divide, Funkwerks, Formation, and Easy Living Hop Water. Their pooled talents and supply networks represent a true Colorado collaboration and deftly cover the craft beverage manufacturer spectrum.

Cereceria and Howdy created a hybrid Smoked Helles, likely a beer not unusual in 1635 but uncommon outside of Germany today. Prior to the mid-17th Century, “smoked” beer (Rauchbier) was not a “style,” it was just how one made beer since malt at the time was often dried over open fires, imbuing it with an unavoidably smoky character. Following the invention of the smokeless kiln by Sir Nicholas Halse in 1635 and other advances of the Industrial Revolution, beer with smoky malt all but disappeared outside the Franconia region of Bavaria, where breweries in the town of Bamberg still employ 400-year old Rauchbier traditions.

From colonial times until the late 1980’s, smoked malt beers were uncommon in the United States other than at homebrew competitions. Around 2014 though, domestic brewers began releasing more commercial smoked craft beers as they pursued new ways to reintroduce old world styles. The trick with smoked beer is to balance smoked malt with neutral-kilned grain to avoid overpowering smokiness. The Wilding Brands Helles was built on a grist of 70% beechwood-smoked malt, Pilsner malt, and malted corn from Mexico. The finished straw-yellow beer exuded light noble hops aromas and finished with a curt dryness, piqued with a mild smokiness reminiscent of bacon. A one-of-a-kind brew inspired by a forgotten art.

There is nothing formal to prevent craft brewers from releasing inspirational collaborations like these throughout the year.

Federal recipe and label approval regulations can nevertheless add complexity to commercially releasing these beers. Fortunately though, local craft beer fans can thank the Colorado Brewers Guild for making that process a little easier at least once a year at CollabFest.

Start making plans now to catch special releases like these in 2026; it’s the one festival not to miss.

Cyril Vidergar can be reached with ideas and comments at beerscoop@gmail.com.