How Two Dry Towns Became Colorado's Beer Country

If you moved to Northern Colorado in the last twenty years, the beer probably arrived before the history did. Fort Collins has more than twenty craft breweries. Greeley has a downtown distillery named after a vote count. The region gets called the Napa Valley of beer often enough that locals have stopped finding it funny.

What almost nobody tells you is that both of those towns spent most of their existence with alcohol banned outright, and that one of them was founded that way on purpose.

Greeley was built dry, by design

In late 1869, Nathan Meeker, the agricultural editor of the New York Tribune, ran an advertisement looking for settlers. He was not looking for just anyone. He wanted people who were literate, of high moral standards, and committed to the principles of the temperance movement. His editor, Horace Greeley, backed the venture financially, and the town that resulted took his name.

The colony was founded in March 1870 and went by two names: the Union Colony, and the Union Temperance Colony. The second was not decorative. Property deeds in the new town carried clauses forbidding the sale of alcohol, and if a landowner broke that clause, the colony could take the property back.

This was a utopian experiment in the most literal sense. Meeker had absorbed the ideas of the French social theorist Charles Fourier and believed that a community built on temperance, cooperation, education and irrigated agriculture could avoid the problems he saw everywhere else. Whatever you think of the theory, the town worked. It grew fast, farmed successfully, and is still here.

Fort Collins chose it later, and kept it longer

Fort Collins came to the same place by a different road. It was not founded dry. It got there through decades of pressure from temperance societies and anti-saloon organizing, borrowing tactics from movements back east.

In 1896, the Larimer County Board of County Commissioners signed prohibition into law, more than twenty years before the rest of the country did the same. That ordinance turned out to have remarkable staying power. It remained on the books for 73 years, outlasting national Prohibition entirely.

Think about what that means. Alcohol was illegal in Fort Collins before the Titanic sailed. It was still illegal when the moon landing happened. National Prohibition arrived, failed, and was repealed, and the local ordinance did not move.

What people actually did about it

Nobody stopped drinking. They just got creative about geography.

There was a quarry town called Stout in the hills west of Fort Collins, connected to the city by rail lines built for hauling stone. Those same lines made it easy for Fort Collins residents to go somewhere they could legally buy a drink, and the resulting trips home worried officials in both towns. The Bureau of Reclamation bought the property in 1946, finished the dams in 1949, and water filled the valley in January 1951. That was the end of Stout, and parts of the old townsite are still down there.

The name did not quite die with it. A small community grew up along the southern shore in the decades after, and a sign there reads "Stout, Colo. pop 47 1/2." It is not official, nobody can explain the half, and most of Fort Collins uses it anyway.

Closer in, a ring of bars and restaurants grew up just past the city limits, operating on county licenses the city could not touch. Inside the city, the rules softened just enough to permit beer at 3.2 percent alcohol by the mid-1930s, which is why a handful of dance halls and restaurants became the entire social center of drinking in town for a generation.

That is a detail worth sitting with. The beer culture that Fort Collins is now famous for did not begin with craft brewing. It began because weak beer was the only legal option, and everyone drank it together in the same few rooms.

The year it ended

By the 1960s the argument had shifted from morality to money. The bars at the county line were visibly profitable, and none of that revenue stayed in the city. Meanwhile the university kept growing, filling the town with students and returning veterans who had no patience for the ordinance.

Petitions to repeal failed in 1961 and again in 1965, defeated by organized religious opposition. Boulder repealed its own rules in 1967. Fort Collins finally voted in April 1969. The first legal drink of spirits in the city since 1896 was served at five o'clock in the afternoon on August 8, 1969, on the top floor of a downtown bank building.

Greeley ended its own ban the same year. The margin was 477 votes, which a downtown distillery now uses as its name. Ninety-nine years after Meeker advertised for temperate settlers, the town he built voted itself wet by fewer than five hundred ballots.

Then nothing happened for twenty years

Here is the part that surprises people. Repeal did not produce a beer scene. Fort Collins did not get its first brewpub until 1989, two full decades after the ordinance fell.

What happened in between was national. American craft brewing barely existed in 1969. When it did emerge in the late 1980s, Fort Collins turned out to be unusually well suited to it: a university town with an agricultural research history, cheap industrial space, and exceptionally good water coming off the Poudre and out of Horsetooth. The city now has more than twenty craft breweries, and the industry has become part of the region's identity in a way that would have appalled the people who wrote the original ordinance.

Why the history is still visible

You can still see the shape of it if you know where to look. The ring of older establishments sitting just outside the historic city limits. The persistence of 3.2 beer in Colorado law long after other states dropped it. The fact that a distillery would name itself after a vote count, and expect people to get the reference.

Northern Colorado spent a century deciding it did not want a drinking culture, then built one of the country's best in about thirty years. Both halves of that are true, and the second half is more interesting because of the first.