Fort Collins Courier: Spring 2017 by Wolverine Farm Publishing Co. & Bookstore

“We bring you Fort Collins.” Volume 4, Issue 1

wolverine

farm

publishing

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collins , colorado

SPRING 2017

FREE

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spring 2017

publications manager

Evan Brengle cover art

Mary Addison Hackett back cover art

Tyler Smith Owings contributors

Charlotte Conway Jessica Owings Crouch Anna Fagre Desirée Fiske Rachel Fountain Danny Hesser Taylor Heussner jordanairy Brianna Kratz Brigid McCreery Joe Norman Tyler Smith Owings Alexandre Payette Maureen Phenix Sierra Tamkun Blair Wittig Sam Wood publisher/designer

Todd Simmons board of directors

Heather Manier Bryan Simpson Kathleen Willard © Joe Norman

WE BRING YOU FORT COLLINS The Fort Collins Courier brings information, tools, and expertise

together to help our community members live engaged and more self-reliant lives. We want to explore the paths locals take, and inspire visitors with our city’s unique charm. Our areas of interest stem from our decade-long relationship with Fort Collins—in each issue we’ll feature content about bicycling, agriculture and the local food movement, as well as reporting about environmental issues and profiles of local makers and the return to craft. We distribute 5,000 copies of each issue to over 35 locations throughout Fort Collins.

a Fort Collins Courier Vol. 4, Issue 1, April 2017 Published by Wolverine Farm Publishing PO BOX 814 Fort Collins, Colorado 80522

Wolverine Farm Publishing is a 501(c)3 non-profit organization based in Fort Collins, CO. We publish books, this community newspaper, and collaborate with other non-profits, businesses, and people toward a more mindful engagement with the world. Opinions expressed herein are not necessarily the opinions of Wolverine Farm Publishing, and are offered up freely to better discern the state of our local culture. Please send in your letters to the editor, story ideas, local photographs, good bicycle rides, and donations to the address listed below. Donations accepted online or by mail. Thank you very much. est.

2003 A 501( c )3 n o n - p ro f i t o rg a n i z at i o n

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an n o i t c u d o Intr to

t r A t s e t o r P

Introduction by Jessica Owings Crouch : Art by Joe Norman (this page) Nestled among these pages are works of art and protest by several friends of Wolverine Farm. These artists, like many Americans, felt the anger and division of our country over the past few months. In their work that anger fanned the flames of creativity, and the result is printed here, for your open hearts and eyes. Many thanks to Mary Addison Hackett, Joe Norman, Tyler Smith Owings, and Sierra Tamkun for their ferocity and generosity.Â

COVER STORY

AGRICULTURE

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Agriculture

The Troubadour Malt House © Chris Schooley

Bringing

Connection

Back to Craft How Troubadour Maltings is Redefining the Local Beer Scene Article by Maureen Phenix

ccording to Urban Dictionary, Fort Collins is “The most wonderful town in Colorado where the beer flows like wine.” With over 20 craft breweries (and counting), one thing is clear: we really like our beer here. Folks all along the supply chain are contributing to the renaissance of craft brews, and local malt house Troubadour Maltings is on the forefront of innovation in this field. On behalf of the Fort Collins Courier, I had the chance to sit down with co-founder Chris Schooley to find out more about how Troubadour Maltings is reimagining the way craft beer is produced. Fort Collins Courier: What exactly do you do here at Troubadour Maltings? Chris Schooley: We are a malt house that works with cereal grain seed breeders as well as growers throughout Colorado to provide locally grown and processed malts to brewers. We are a conduit between growers and brewers, and help to provide more options on both sides of the equation. What is the importance of malt to brewing? Malt is commonly referred to as the soul of beer. Malt is what provides the sugars for the yeast to eat in order to produce the alcohol. Malt contributes flavor, color, mouthfeel, head retention, and a direct connection from each beer you drink to the cereal fields (generally barley or wheat) surrounding us here in Northern Colorado. How did Troubadour Maltings come about? We are surrounded by barley fields here, but after doing some research I realized that

in North America there are basically five giant commercial barley suppliers, and hardly anyone in Colorado was growing barley for craft beer. My business partner, Steve Clark, was doing similar research around the same time and we saw the opportunity to present something really new and special to the market. This April we’ll be at two years of production. How is Troubadour Maltings shaking up the traditional supply chain model? Craft brewers are trying to create something really unique, and the best way to do that is to start with really unique raw materials. Being able to diversify the raw material supply chain has to do with knowing everyone along that supply chain. Transparency is important; not just so you know where things came from, but so you can innovate. It’s not just beneficial for brewers, it’s also great for growers to know exactly where their product is going. When there’s a conversation all the way through the supply chain, that’s where good things happen. Some of the breweries that we work with may be using grain that was grown and malted within about a three-mile radius of their doorstep. It’s really cool.

What impact does that have on a final product? Not only do brewers know exactly where their grains are coming from, but we’re also introducing a different product—we’re not trying to replicate what’s already out there. That’s why we give our malts unique names, because they really are going to perform differently than the malts you’re used to. A huge part of it is freshness. People put the brew date on their bottles now, but how old were their raw materials? Freshness has an impact on flavor, and when there is access to fresher raw materials, new flavors can be introduced. What are the names of some your malts and how would you describe their unique flavors? We’ve purposely given our malts interesting and evocative names so that when people drink the beer and notice something special about it, it can be attributed to something captivating rather than something generic. Pěvec is the Czech word for songbird, and is a pilsner styled malt. That style of malt is all about highlighting the unique attributes of the barley variety itself and its terroir. The name was inspired by the golden breasted meadowlarks we see when we’re out visiting our fields. Our light caramel style malt, Chorus, really sings in a beer, and fills out the mouthfeel as well as adding a light honey ´ and fresh biscuit flavor. The floral and stone fruit flavors from our Ballad Munich style malt certainly have a romance all their own. What kinds of breweries do you work with? Who is your “typical customer”?

2016 crop LCS Genie 2-row malting barley at Troubadour grower Greg Walker’s field © Chris Schooley

We’ve worked with about 30 breweries up to this point, the majority of which are in

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Steve Clark (l) and Chris Schooley (r)

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agriculture

Colorado. The scale of operations varies; we’ve worked with local breweries such as Horse and Dragon, and Zwai Brewing, but we also provide five percent of the grain bill for Beerito from Oscar Blues. Whether our malts are ten percent of the grain bill or one hundred percent, it’s going to do something special and influence the flavor in really unique new ways.

What does the future hold for Troubadour Maltings? A big part of what we’re trying to do in the next year is open up the retail portion of our business to become more accessible to homebrewers. And we want to continue to educate folks. People just don’t think that much about the malting process, so we try to have an open-door policy here where people can come in and learn why what we’re doing is important. Ultimately, it’s the consumer that influences the direction of the market, and if consumers start to express interest in knowing where their malts come from, breweries will respond to that.

The Troubadour icon was designed by local designer Bonnie and Caprice © Chris Schooley

LITERATURE

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Literature A Multidisciplinary Approach to Climate Change: An i nte rvie w w ith

John Calderazzo Interview by Danny Hesser

ohn Calderazzo is a retired professor of English at Colorado State University, and current co-director of Changing Climates @ CSU, a multidisciplinary dialogue of ongoing conversations and information about climate change. He has contributed to High Country News, Audubon, and Orion, among other journals. I had the opportunity to ask John about interacting with scientists, writers, and other stakeholders regarding climate change. Fort Collins Courier: How long have you been pursuing the issue of climate change, and what is your motivation? John Calderazzo: I realize how long now I’ve been writing about these matters—how long I’ve been thinking about them. If you would have asked me a year ago about the place of human culture and how it intertwines with the natural world, I might have said I’d been doing it for ten years. But the more I think about it the more I realize it’s been more like 25 to 30 years. It strikes me that you really can’t talk about human activities without thinking about how almost everything we do comes from and goes back to the natural world. Virtually everything we have here, what we are—you know, the “dust to dust” in one of our oldest and most important books pretty well encapsulates that—is temporary. As a Buddhist might say, the brokenness is already inside the cup. Someday we’re going to break it. Maybe that’s true for us as well? Yes, that’s that dust-to-dust thing. It seems to me that in the world we’re dealing with large forces—corporations, governments. Some people operate inside those forces knowing that this kind of thing is true. Others want to deny that, assuming that natural resources are sort of endless. I even think about United States history. We had huge amounts of land we were able to use for our herds, for farming—all these things came at such low cost that on a spreadsheet it would basically come to zero. Even the mineral rights to obtain oil and coal originally, were relatively low. Special laws have been passed to allow miners to do their thing, and we have a legacy of that here in the West. When we talk about capitalism as our major way of going forward, we tend not to think that so much of this came up front for practically free. We realize now that there are much greater costs for all those things, including environmental mitigation. In a way we’re picking up the cost of things that happened a long time ago, and we frankly didn’t think about those things as a culture. This is likely true of uranium, coal, tar sands oil, gas from shale fracking? Yes. There’s an extremely good book by a relatively new writer, Erik Reese’s Lost Mountain. He looks at the destruction of one single mountain, and uses that as a lens to look

at the larger issue of mountain-top coal mining in Kentucky. He approached the project just wanting to do some nature writing, explore nature with poetry, and then encountered this, which emerged as an awakening story. When you’re a writer, you’re not writing in isolation. You’re really one person pushing a conversation among other writers, speakers, movie makers, and activists. Wendell Berry and Aldo Leopold have been pioneers in developing a land ethic, so likely anyone writing about environmental issues has read these people. It’s a conversation that doesn’t just issue out of nowhere. It’s also a conversation across time. What is important about the movement today? How do we best convey a sense of immediacy? Now that we know a lot of things in general about environmental issues, those of us who are capable of doing so need to magnify our efforts. If your best response is to plant an organic garden—why not teach others how to plant an organic garden? Or gather up people in your neighborhood and plan a larger, community garden. If you’re good at public speaking, try to reach out with a little discomfort to some who might be on the fence, marshalling the best facts that you can. Communication theory has shown that we need to explain why something is important, and one good way is to stake out shared values. For example, there’s an organization called POW (Preserve Our Winters). They’re complete freaks, whose passion is great snow. How do you get to them about climate change? Not by explaining the science, or by explaining that they should be good environmentalists. Get to them through the powder. If this thing is going to shorten your season, it’s going to threaten the very thing you love. Scott Denning, a climatologist at CSU, is magnifying his efforts. He’s probably given 500 talks in the last 5 years. One of the things I’ve chosen to do is to train scientists on how to talk to the public. That teaching aspect of my life may be more important than the writing. It’s a huge shift, and a really fun one, too. Others, like Katharine Hayhoe—she’s an evangelical Christian, and an atmospheric scientist—asks what the bible tells us about being stewards of the earth, as opposed to domination. She’ll take the stewardship angle and show you scripture. You meet people where their deepest values are. Hayhoe can talk to other scientists about climate change, using not a word of the bible, but just about her research, and then take the same thing and talk to people at a local church—she speaks in many languages. More info can be found at the following links: http://changingclimates.colostate.edu/ http://science.sciencemag.org/content/306/5702/1686.full http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/16/science/naomi-oreskes-a-lightning-rod-in-a-changingclimate.html?_r=0

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literature 7

ALWAYS SERVING TO-GO COFFEE. JUST NOT IN TO-GO CUPS. At Wolverine Farm’s Letterpress & Publick House, you’ll always find delicious coffee to drink, but you won’t find to-go cups. There simply isn’t room for them in our busy lives. Feel free to bring in your favorite cup or travel mug if you can’t stay. Thanks.

LITERATURE

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Coyote America, by Dan Flores

Being a Beast: Adventures Across the Species Divide, by Charles Foster

Roots to the Earth, by Wendell Berry with Wood Engravings by Wesley Bates

Review by Brianna Kratz Review by jordanairy

Review by Sam Wood

I was initially stoked by the sound-bite synopsis of a “manimal’s” rewilding memoir, in which author Charles Foster endeavors to remember his primal roots through pseudo-shamanic journeys. However, despite further intrigue by the author’s choice of animals to represent the earth’s elements, I soon found my focused fire waterlogged while perusing his musings, with their mediocre meanings at best and mad-scientist mutterings at worst. While the text offers educating, entertaining, and at times edifying moments, it seems to fail as a cohesive, engaging whole, perhaps due to “the disaster of written language, which makes things something other than they are [and] smothers it with layers of nuance so thick that the thing itself suffocates.” “This is an incomplete writer, and an incomplete book,” admits Foster. “You should ask for 25 percent off the price of this book,” he says. And yet for kindred soul students of Nature who seek an authentic account of the wilderness; for spirit-animal lovers who have totems in badgers, otters, foxes, deer, and swifts; for legions of bibliophiles who exhibit an affinity for intellectually infused prose peppered with salty, British humour, I’ll only recommend borrowing Being a Beast. (If you do decide to buy, consider donating the book, or perhaps the 25% you saved, back to your local nonprofit, indie bookstore.) I wonder whether the time spent reading this book might be better served feasting on Wikipedia articles, or better yet: a) shutting off the screen, b) stepping outdoors, and c) exploring your beast.

“Yodeling coyote music is inseparable from the silvery wash of planets and the high moons of the winter night skies of this part of the world.” - Dan Flores, Coyote America

To be a person who works the land is to become intimate with one’s own mortality, and each brief poem in this collection is populated by a character fully aware of their impact on their own condition. In the poems, we see crops quick-wilting and giving way to generations of farmers on the same land. Each new crop becomes a record of the past yield and spells what is to come. These are deeply superstitious poems in which nature takes the place of a deity, all-dictating. The reward may be rich, but the poems are rife with consequence.

Coyote America tells the history of humanity’s relationship with coyotes. Starting with ancient cultures which revered the coyote as a god, a trickster, or even the creator of the earth, and moving through the colonization of the United States to the present, Dan Flores provides a smart and in-depth look at human/coyote relations. It is clear that Flores is passionate about his topic and knows a great deal. His respect for the tenacity of coyotes to survive harsh conditions (often created by humans) comes through in his writing. He states in the introduction, “...the coyote’s unique history and similarities to us do appear to make it, by this point in United States history, a damned fine candidate as a national totem,” and as the reader continues through the book, they find themselves inclined to agree. Much of the story told in Coyote America centers on government sanctioned hunting and poisoning of coyotes intended to eradicate the animals with Flores providing vivid descriptions of the effects of some of the more vicious poisons. There are small moments of humor such as Mark Twain’s unflattering description of coyotes, but ultimately this book is not a light read. For the politically and environmentally conscious, Coyote America is important for providing perspective on an often unseen and voiceless citizen of our country.

It is a relief then, that Roots to the Earth is not, at its center, a book of Wendell Berry poems. Each of these pieces has inspired a print by woodblock artist, Wesley Bates, and each offers something like reverse ekphrasis. These prints take the mortality-grappling driving the poems and condense it to a distinct, human moment. A particularly striking example exists between the poem “The Current” and its accompanying piece. About the farmer’s hand, Berry writes, “it has given up its birdlife in the air. / It has reached into the dark like a root / and begun to wake, quick and mortal, in timelessness.” The actions in the poem begin to transcend the moment. In response, the print depicts a quiet scene with two figures. The smaller figure, a child, reaches into tall grass at the edge of a field. In the forefront, a bit of plowed earth breaks away from the print, casting its own small shadow. Originally published in 1995 and only available in limited runs, Counterpoint recently reissued the book for larger circulation, adding a short story previously not included, as well as additional illustrations.

Indeed, repeat daily for “beast” results. “There seems to be an ancient and earnest need to unite the human and animal worlds,” Foster writes. So we breathe.

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LITERATURE

spring 2017

The Blue Hour, by Laura Pritchett

The Luckiest Scar on Earth, Ana Maria Spagna

The Vegetarian, by Han Kang

Review by Charlotte Conway

Review by Alexandre Payette

Review by Danny Hesser

The Blue Hour takes us on a journey inside of the heart of a small Colorado town after the tragic death of the local veterinarian. The ripple effect caused by the unexpected death touches every soul in the town, from the newly widowed mother of two he left behind, to every animal he healed and every human he encountered. Each chapter is told from a unique perspective, adding dimensions to the emotional interdependencies Pritchett develops through the course of the book. Offering a particularly poignant view of the modern American backwoods, Laura Pritchett explores the intricate web of relationships composing the town. The world seems to be closing in around the secluded community as they realize the inescapable realities of mental health and emotional turmoil.

Though the main character of The Luckiest Scar on Earth is a 14-year-old high school student, you will find no vampires, werewolves, or other fantastical beings here. Instead, with this young adult novel, Ana Maria Spagna deftly navigates a series of topics that are all too real: divorce, abandonment, reconciliation, love, and loyalty.

Towards the end of Han Kang’s The Vegetarian there’s a hallucination of trees. The vision belongs to YeongHye, and it propels us towards an understanding of how nature serves as one’s refuge and place of emergence, how an ultimate form of reciprocity might be to imagine oneself as a tree, solitary among “the undulating forests that blanket the continents like a heartless sea.” This vision of salvation, and the beautiful language which traces Yeong-Hye’s fidelity to it, actually belong to Kang, whose depiction of a modern metamorphosis will leave you exhausted, and yet, wanting more. Eating meat becomes a paradigm for anything that the world wants us to believe, despite an intuition that rises, tidally, against those notions.

Rather than shy away from the complications of our unpredictable, untidy human condition, Pritchett embraces our quirks and crafts a story that revolves around them. Wild and irrational, yet miraculously tranquil and introspective, the characters’ interior complexion reflects the winter landscape. Frigid temperatures, inevitable blizzards, an apathetic and lingering grizzly, a rare bird, and Blue Mountain with its familiar meadow are as much a part of the story as the characters, effecting emotions and mirroring the town spirit. Characters welcome their urges, boldly diving into a pool of sex and love, searching for self-awareness and deeper relationships. From moments of stillness and quiet introspection to irrational bouts of pure unfettered emotion, Pritchett confronts the most raw, uncouth, and wild aspects of our being.

Charlotte, the narrator of Luckiest Scar, is among the best snowboarders in Colorado and she experiences the Rockies like a parishioner does a church service. The loss of her mother’s job results in a move to the Pacific Northwest where Charlotte is reunited with her father, Larry. They bond by snowboarding, but an attempt to develop the area and cover it with condos threatens to separate them once again. It seems to be no coincidence that Charlotte’s specialty is the slalom as it feels at times that Spagna herself is racing in one. Spagna covers a multitude of topics and moves between them, as Charlotte does from gate to gate, with a breathtaking speed, while exercising a control that prevents her from ever going too wide.

Yeong-Hye’s serenity speaks volumes, her resolute nature as slow and timeless as a tree, and her inner language grows more poignant and poetic. There is a lack of suitable words, and hence, intimacy, among those caught in her gravity to describe the internal landscape of the wife/sister/lover before them. Her uncanny ability to suffer makes her faith more resolute. Kang does not make it easy to discern whether such faith is lunacy, as seen by those who are resigned, in their own way, to lead a pre-scripted, normative life. Does genius, do mad visions, accompany only those willing to sacrifice all pretense to such normalcy? In an age of awareness of the fragility of nature, this seems like a reminder of our origins in nature, and thus our fragility as well. Our fates may be intricately tied to our imaginative nature, to developing an ethic that will be perceived by many to be insane.

Always accepting book donations, especially fiction, nature, poetry, DIY, Craft, classics, and anything radical or revolutionary

970-472-4284 : wolverinefarm.org

BICYCLING

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Bicycling

BIKE CULTURE AND SOCIAL JUSTICE: An Interview with Chris Johnson of Bike Fort Collins

Article by Brigid McCreery

s the executive director of Bike Fort Collins, Chris Johnson seeks to tackle the tough issues of transportation, which extend far beyond merely shuffling people to and fro. In this interview, Johnson details how transportation intersects social equity, lifestyle, and environment. Fort Collins Courier: Where are you from and how did you end up as Executive Director of Bike Fort Collins? Chris Johnson: I’m from Las Vegas, and the southwest is really auto-centric, structurally and culturally, and that’s a big part of their identity. Then I moved to Chicago after school, with my truck, and every night I was spending an hour looking for parking, moving my car, and getting tickets, and it was expensive. Then I started meeting people who were adults who were successful professionals who had never learned how to drive. And I was like, “what do you mean you don’t know how to drive?” and I thought it was the coolest thing. I had all these notions that only losers walk or only losers ride the bus, which were this artifact of my upbringing. So, I sold my car and it was super scary at first. At first it was buses and taxis and stuff, and then on a whim I got a bike a couple years after I got there. I also got really interested in social justice when I was in Chicago, and how your racial or gender or class identity affects your lived experience and how you’re perceived. I never had an outlet for it, and then about a year ago I was asked to interview for and to run Bike Fort Collins. I was really interested in the intersection between social justice, equity through diversity and inclusion issues, and transportation. How we move and get around in the States is so fundamental to our experience and our lives. Health care, education, healthy food, recreation, and civic engagement are all dependent on the culture and where you live relative to it. You can be in a city that thinks of itself as really bike friendly, but that bike-friendliness looks really different, say, if you’re a

college professor that lives on Remington and rides your bike into CSU, versus someone who lives in Poudre Valley Mobile Home Park and works in a hotel on Mulberry.

In a lot of cities, from one side of the street to another the class composition changes pretty quickly, but in Fort Collins they do a pretty good job of concealing social inequity. The segregation is real, and I think as we grow, affordability is going to become a bigger problem. It’s going to be harder for the working class or the working poor to live here, and they’re going to be pushed further out of town. People will have to drive more, and it’s really important that if we’re interested in issues of safe streets, we change in a way that isn’t at the expense of vulnerable populations. I want to really be careful in asking “what are we doing to include people in decision making?” We really want one voice. How is BFC addressing these issues?

We are funded in 2017 to work on a couple different big projects. One with Larimer County where we’re working on health equity and built environment, gathering data. Some of it is figuring out the questions to ask. How do we know what these inequities look like? How do we know what the effect of built environment is on life expectancy?

We are leading a grant to work with Kaiser Permanente in Poudre Valley Mobile Home Park to help the mobile home park develop an active living plan. The goal of that project is to look at the behavioral and cultural challenges. First of all, what is the picture? How much are people riding? How little? How much are they walking or using cars? Why don’t people ride more? Why do they drive? We know that in low-income communities, transportation, which © Chris Johnson is largely automobile transportation, can take up 40% of household income, and that can be debilitating. So, what can Fort Collins and Larimer County do to make it easier to go car-light and car-free?

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BICYCLING

There’s a lot of answers, and Sunday bus service is something we’re working really hard on. It may happen—the city committed to fund half of the pilot so now they’re looking for partners to fund the other half. Public transit is a big part of it. Safe sidewalks is a big part of it. Bike-friendly businesses is a big part of it. How is Fort Collins’ population growth affecting these equity issues? The way things are now you could put a bike lane on every street in Fort Collins, but if most of the work force can’t afford to live here—and we’re not talking extreme poverty here, we’re talking teachers and nurses and the middle class—it’s pushing people away. If everybody’s in the exurbs of Fort Collins, they’re not going to ride their bikes in from that far away. People should be within two or three miles from transportation that will connect them with work. The more we sprawl out the more we develop in a way that we make it easy and affordable to buy a half acre lot in Wellington that requires that they drive for half an hour each way. Traffic fatalities are also up in a really dramatic way over the last couple of years. The National Safety Council took a look at that and said they think that the biggest proximal causes of that are people driving more, because of artificially cheap gas and lack of affordable housing near job centers. More people drive, more people get hurt. You can do things to mitigate that—you can have seat belt laws and you can encourage folks, but, really, driving is the most dangerous thing people do in a day. And I’m not being anti-car in saying that, but that’s the risk and we’ve normalized that risk a lot. People are really afraid of crime and urbanization, but by not living in an urban setting you’re a lot more likely to die violently because of traffic. So, we’re interested in changing the way that Fort Collins and the leadership and the citizenship think about land use and transit-oriented development.

© Chris Johnson We’re going to grow, and we’re going to have to care about housing capacity. We want to have a serious conversation about urbanism as land stewardship. Building up is going to do a lot more to protect our natural spaces and our land than spreading out.

V ‘

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WOLVERINE FARM BOOKSTORE

Calli ng all Make rs

Wolverine Farm Letterpress & Publick House Mon - THu: 8am - 9pm / Fri & Sat: 8am - 10pm / Sun: 1pm - 8pm

A letterpress print shop and event space in Fort Collinsâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; River District, specializing in community engagement opportunities. Our space is available to rent for events, literary workshops and readings, films, music and other cultural offerings. We have local coffee and espresso, wine, beer, snacks, and local goods available for purchase. All proceeds go to Wolverine Farm Publishing, a local 501(c)3 literary/arts nonprofit.

Please visit www.wolverinefarm.org or call 970-682-2590 for more information

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EDUCATION RESTORATION CELEBRATION E n j oy

beer from New belgium brewing Co. and food from local eateries

Dance

to live music from Lineage Music Project, dave Miller blues band, and Patti Fiasco

Connect

with local groups that work to improve and maintain the health of the river

Learn

about conserving the Poudre River and its resources through kidsâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; activities

Volunteer

to help with river cleanup and restoration projects in the coming year

June 3, 12â&#x20AC;&#x201C;7pm

Poudre river oxbow (Near New Belgium Brewery)

www.PoudreRiverFest.org

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MAKE

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Make

Freedonia Volksmarches to the Fort Article by Danny Hesser

“W

e take the fun out of beer, because beer is a serious matter. It is sacred,” says Ralf Kracke-Berndorff, founder of the upcoming Freedonia Brewery.

The odyssey of Freedonia Brewery began in 1890 with the Brauerei Hirschen in Kenzingen, Germany, land of the Reinheitsgebot, the Purity Law for Beer, of 1516. Still operable this half-century later, this golden rule dictates that lagers shall have three ingredients only—water, barley malt, and hops. Yeast became the 4th element with the advent of pasteurization. Freedonia emerged as a way to pursue craft lagers, to reflect an original process of brewing in copper kettles, decoction mashing—siphoning off and boiling part of the mash, then returning it to gradually elevate the temperature—and taking on the yoke of the Reinheitsgebot. “Decoction brewing is slow. You might say we’re creating slow beer,” Kracke-Berndorff says, referring to the Slow Food movement originating in Italy. With Freedonia, Kracke-Berndorff will experiment with open tank fermentation prior to lagering, then serve straight from the lager tank. The lagering tanks themselves are double walled to withstand the higher pressure generated via triple decoction. There will be no forced carbonation, per the Purity Law, utilizing only that CO2 produced by the fermenting yeast. There is a fidelity to simple, tried and true processes here that is comforting, and it is evident from speaking with Kracke-Berndorff that, more than just “a serious matter,” this adherence to old-school methods has pedagogical implications for any and all who enter this hall, or who simply want to craft delicious beer, including particularly students studying within the new fermentation program at CSU. Kracke-Berndorff appreciates the reception received from Zwei Brewery, the Liquid Poet’s Society, Hops and Berries, Equinox, and a bevy of others, and for the advice and encouragement he’s received towards this effort. In a town

where new microbreweries frequently appear in an increasingly crowded environment, with Freedonia, Kracke-Berndorff hopes to fill a niche that many of us didn’t even know existed Freedonia is an enterprise reaching for an experience distilled from the past and challenging our collective notion that more variety is better. “We hope to offer a light and dark lager as our house beers. Sometimes you have to break from the tradition of too many choices,” says Kracke-Berndorff. He plans to sacrifice quantity for quality. Focusing specifically on this style, Freedonia will add a flagship of well-crafted lagers to the overall milieu of great beers in Fort Collins. Perhaps the spirit of this nascent brewery is best illustrated by the muse they found in Brett Tschacher. Kracke-Berndorff happened upon him in a meadow on the Pine Ridge Reservation, South Dakota, where Tschacher had built his own home, and helped cobble together a biodiesel fuel plant to help sustain that community. Kracke-Berndorff took inspiration from Tschacher’s knack for translating old and new technologies and melding the two to create something indelibly new and practical. One of the challenges for Freedonia, for example, is to reconfigure the electronics for the German brewing machinery to run on our electrical grid. There is something comforting and exciting to see a place as a fleshed-out philosophy, even if it’s only in its emergence. In their location inside an old church at 208 Remington, incipient in the bar, the drinking floor, the arches discovered beneath walls, and the passages which are being excavated in the new place—much as the vintage 1911 kettle and lauter tun were excavated from the old brewery—is the excitement before you tell someone a secret. Down in what was once the crypt, surveying the parts of the brewhouse yet to be given new life, there are ghosts, perhaps, of this building’s past. It’s appropriate that there is faith inherent in the newcomers, distilled from experience. Freedonia Brewing hopes to open in late spring, ushering in well-crafted, old-world lagers to our beer-loving community.

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spring 2017

MAKE

Photographs from the extraction of the 1911 kettle and lauter tun from the Brauerei Hirschen brewery in Germany. Used courtesy of Ralf Kracke-Berndorff.

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COMMUNITY

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spring 2017

Community The other piece we do is celebrate that creative sector, such as letting people know who the professionals are. Our downtown community is really thriving so it’s about sharing with people in our community and outside the value of that industry, and making sure it stays healthy and visible. We also want to make sure we are connecting our artists to do better business to contribute to our economic prosperity. A lot of the time, people forget they have those creatives. If you need a video shot, logos or artwork created— there are a lot of folks in town who can do that. Musicians can come get hired for events. We have amazing partners in the community. Sometimes people in the industry don’t realize their impact or value. What hopes do you have for the Creative District in terms of working with the community? We have a lot of hopes. Me personally, I want to do two things. I want to connect our creative community to itself and to a larger community. I really want to see it thrive and succeed. We have so many talented artists and business owners that think outside of the box and I think it’s what makes Fort Collins so successful and key to our way of life. The Creative District cites that it’ll serve as a hub for creative economic activity. What are some of the current projects in the works? Graphic provided by Peggy Lyle

The Fort Collins Creative District: An Interview with Peggy Lyle Interview by Taylor Heussner

f you’ve been to downtown Fort Collins, you know the art and music scene is flourishing. The Music District opened up earlier this summer, venues have been growing, and First Fridays continue to attract visitors. The Fort Collins Courier was able to chat with the coordinator of the Creative District, Peggy Lyle, about the future of this district, its role in the creative community, and its participation in the recent Fort Collins Startup Week. Lyle stated that in 2014, nearly “500 million dollars in sales was generated in Fort Collins by the creative industry.” Often businesses can forget that creatives help keep different industries alive and flowing. The Creative District was born to help bridge the disconnect between businesses and the individuals involved in the creative sector. Fort Collins Courier: What are the goals for the Creative District, long-term, and for this year? Peggy Lyle: We have a broad vision and our mission comes down to advocating and celebrating for our downtown creative sector. It’s a business sector within the creative industry [that allows us] to advocate for space for artists to use in the downtown district.

We took part in Startup week, and helped infuse creativity throughout the event—it was an event designed for business owners, entrepreneurs, and start-ups. Startup week is four-years-old. [A] traditional start-up week is geared towards hi-tech startups, folks who are launching more in the tech industry. Last year, it was put on by Galvanize and this year, another board I serve on, Creative Places, has taken over organizing Startup week. We brought in people to talk about funding, angel investors, from entry level business acumen to how to go public. We worked with partners including Larimer County Small Business Development Center. I think it was a great opportunity as Creative Places and all our programming partners came together to re-envision and we saw a need to be serving businesses across the spectrum. And we are focused on creative industry, so we wanted to make sure creativity was infused throughout. How can the Creative District support artists where in the past this might not have been so? Some of these programs are new as our certification comes on. We were in a two-year candidacy program and now we can launch into doing more. [This is] a program where we can help people connect to local creatives: everything from a writer to a musician to write a jingle for your business to a dance company to work at your parents 50th anniversary. How has the Creative District partnered with the community thus far? We were able to build a website and participate in programs including Startup week. We have been able to share the good news of our certification since July. The Music District has started up and a collaboration has begun. I think we are just hitting our stride. [It’d be great] to find even more resources and partners, but we are fledgling and celebrating. We were only one of six districts to become certified.

Studio Tour 2017

Article by Jessica Owings Crouch with thanks to Jeanne Shoaff

ver 50 local artists are gearing up for the Lincoln Center’s Fort Collins Studio Tour that will commence during the last weekend of April. The Studio Tour is a free, self-guided tour open to anyone curious about Fort Collins’ local artists and their processes. It is also an excellent opportunity to buy directly from the artists, putting financial support of local culture right in the palms of the artists’ hands. 2017 marks the sixth year for the Lincoln Center’s Studio Tour; it was resurrected in 2011 from an organized tour the Fort Collins Museum of Art previously facilitated. Participating artists are required to pay a participation fee, but are encouraged to seek studio sponsors to offset the cost and are also eligible for $3,000 in prizes during the Studio Tour exhibition—where an example work of art by each artist on the tour is presented—which is on display from March 31st through April 30th at the Lincoln Center Gallery. Sales over the weekend have ranged from $26,000 to more than $37,000 over the past few years, and for some artists it is a major source of their annual income.

The Lincoln Center generates a beautiful brochure with listings for each artist including maps to their locations throughout Fort Collins, Bellvue, and Laporte. Brochures can be found throughout town after the beginning of April. Look for them at the Lincoln Center, the Gardens on Spring Creek, Northside Aztlan, the Community Creative Center, Fort Collins Senior Center, the Armstrong Hotel, Jerry’s Artarama, Wolverine Farm Letterpress & Publick House, and many other locations throughout the city. Pick one up and plan your “tour” today!

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COMMUNITY

spring 2017

Drop the Apathy and Get Active:

How to Survive the Next Four Years Article by Desirée Fiske

017 is here. Breathe. Escapism will be especially appealing in the near future, but let’s not bury our heads in the sand just yet. Rather, confront frustration with traditional and non-traditional democratic action.

In terms of traditional action, the promised, partisan policy reversals and obvious conflicts of interest of the incoming administration enable legal challenge while established organizations provide foundations for action but also find themselves reworking agendas. Then, there’s also non-traditional action which demands innovation, bravery, radical thought, and unabashed reaction. Each storyline may have a role for you. Traditional Activism at State and Local Levels Federal political action is already garnering state and local reaction. Governor Hickenlooper has stated that the repeal of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) will drive generation of a similar, state health care program. This of course necessitates resident buy-in and near-consensus as well as the actual writing of such a law. Stay informed and show your support as this develops. Beyond the repeal of the ACA, other anticipated federal policy reversals appear to have also already been addressed by the city of Fort Collins’ agenda. The recently approved Legislative Policy Agenda for 2017 includes affordable housing, equity and inclusion, and sustainability. The agenda clarifies the city’s intentions over the next year and is a tool for broader communication to state legislature and to other municipalities looking to build alliances. According to Councilmember Ray Martinez there are nearly thirty Agenda boards and commissions Fort Collins’ residents can join. Now is the time to get involved. Further, this year the city will offer quarterly multicultural retreats which Councilmember Bob Overbeck suggests will facilitate processes of healing, sharing, and trust-building in our diverse community. Councilmembers are nonpartisan and available by appointment in addition to open forums. You can visit the city’s website for more information. Shifting Agendas in Organizations: Reacting to Transition Non-profit and also issue-based activist organizations are also already responding to impending policy reversals. For instance, the League of Women Voters of Larimer County are rearranging their agenda. The recent election has the League prioritizing civic education, government transparency, open records, and higher ethical standards according to their spokesperson, Sarah Pitts. It also appears that the 45th president’s agenda conflicts strongly with the ACA and sustainable energy affinities of the League nationally and locally, so we may see responses there as well. Another issue-based group to keep an eye on has been formed to focus on availability of information. It is no secret that the Internet Archive has moved a copy of its servers out of the United States to Canada to preserve digital open access to information. Locally, an interdisciplinary group of CSU faculty and students, is generating research and policy fact repositories. Facilitation for such data preservation is being coordinated in concert with local and state—rather than federal—officials. Furthermore, the School of Global Environmental Sustainability is circulating a CSU Faculty Statement on Climate Change to declare its continuing commitment to its responsibility as educators of climate change. As of January 23rd, 123 faculty members from 33 departments and institutes had signed the statement. NoCo Eclectic is yet one more issue-based group responding to the new political climate. Imminent setbacks to LGBTQ civil rights has some organizations “scrambling” to use all tactics available. NoCo Eclectic, part of NoCo Equality, is a transgender, gender non-conforming, and intersex support group. Laura MacWaters of NoCo Eclectic says the organization has been working to educate people on their rights and assist in legal identification documents. At the moment, Eclectic uses social media for outreach but also to inspire positivity. “Positive news has been in short supply lately, but we have no need to scare people with exaggerations or worst case predictions,” MacWaters says,

while also acknowledging that Eclectic will need continued support through the coming years. Thoughts on Non-Traditional Activism Traditional forms of democratic activism are well known—marching, occupying, and boycotting. They are symbolic and serve a purpose under particular circumstances, but are not always the most suitable approach. Demonstrations can be squashed quickly and efficiently, swept under the rug as if a playbook is ready for these circumstances (often there is). However, activism is not limited to the stories from our history book pages. No one can deny that internet organizing was instrumental in the Arab Spring nor that 140 characters can activate previously inert political blocs. Despite these online capabilities, they create very different forums and atmospheres than public meetings. Public gathering spaces are essential in fostering creativity and thought into political action. Public houses have historically been friendly gathering places for people looking to discuss politics. Find a group, or start your own to discuss and respond to issues that are important to you. Arts and critical writing are also powerful tools in political activism. To visualize, hear, touch, and reflect on politics outside the boundaries of “politics-proper” allows timeless rediscovery, reapplication, and even replication in a different era. Consider making a statement or sharing your perspective via whatever creative outlet inspires you. Another way to strategically react is to provide safety networks and safe spaces for those who may feel marginalized and vulnerable. After the election, Americans took a note from post-Brexit Britain’s wearing of safety pins in public to identify as safety allies for refugees. The safety pin movement in the United States became a method to communicate similar values to communities who have been attacked during the election, including refugees, undocumented individuals, and the LGBTQ population. You too can show your support for vulnerable individuals or groups through both symbolic and practical actions. Finally, hold politicians accountable to journalism and journalism accountable to the public. The Freedom of the Press may be one of the greatest assets and/or agitators over the next four years. We must be diligent watchdogs. At the End of the Day… …the election exacerbated divisions amongst people in this country. For American democracy to function again—pass civil rights laws, respond to science, address class struggles—we need to reassess the fractures. Economic concerns were amongst the most hotly debated policy topics (I emphasize policy) of the election, the wind beneath Trump’s wings, and the fuel for Bernie Sanders’ campaign. Unity in campaign finance reform and reducing the role of money in politics should be easy to find. Ensuing discussion about taxation, bank and Wall Street reforms, and other like issues, becomes muddled, but these should be starters rather than non-starters in politics. Without special interest filters in front of representatives, would we see a clearer picture? None of the above will happen if United States residents are not informed and actively engaged. Traditional avenues for democratic activism can keep governmental institutions accountable and responsive, but issue organizations and non-profits need member and donor support. Join, volunteer, donate, or contact an organization that represents your interests. Or, seek out the most marginalized communities and organize in their favor. Finally, protest, think outside the box, and satisfy your creative and political needs. The next four years may not be ideal, so buckle up, be informed, and act. If you sit back and watch the show, apathy will sprout from your ears. Own your reality, banish the apathy, engage politically, and blast us out of the current chaotic kakistocracy.

NATURE

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spring 2017

Nature Natural Pest Management for a Wild and Healthy Garden Article by Rachel Fountain

hen confronting a pest problem, home gardeners are not at a loss for options. Chemical sprays, pheromone traps, manual removal by hosing off or squishing, as well as passive controls like vinegar traps are all methods that can be effective depending on the homeowner’s specific circumstances. Natural pest management, or biological pest control, is yet another option homeowners have. This method aims to control pests by using another organism: the pest’s natural predator. For environmentally-conscious gardeners, this is often an attractive option. To practice biological pest control effectively, there are many subtleties that home gardeners need to be aware of. Often, it’s not as simple as buying a box of ladybugs for your roses. A good first step to effective natural pest management is to do away with unrealistic expectations. For any form of pest control, including chemical, total eradication of the pest is practically impossible. The end goal is to make pests manageable. “You can’t prevent insects from getting places; you just have to deal with them once they’re there,” said Amber Williams, an entomologist and educator with a focus in pest control. Natural pest management requires a thorough knowledge of the life in your yard and the different forms it takes. One of the most common mistakes home gardeners make is simply misidentifying the pest or the predator.

If there is only one type of flower in a garden, the bees will move on to find other flowers with peak rewards. “By having other things in your garden, you’re going to keep the bees in your garden pollinating,” Camper said. A diverse garden filled with bees and butterflies is a powerful defense against pests as well as a pretty sight, but gardeners should be careful. Occasionally, making the garden neat and pretty is exactly what encourages pests. “The more manicured a yard is, the more vulnerable it becomes,” Williams said. “Clear up the dead things, but maybe not of all the dead things.” Natural predators, like all organisms, need shelter to survive. Over-clearing a yard can make it difficult to keep natural predators in an area. “If you’re constantly pulling out weeds, you’re pulling out habitats for the predator,” Camper said. “By providing areas where they can shelter, you’re going to encourage them to stay in the yard itself.” By allowing for weeds and other spaces for predators to live, homeowners relinquish some control to nature. Stepping back and letting the wild forces in the garden govern themselves is key to effective natural pest management.

Spiders, ladybugs, and dragonflies are all helpful creatures that homeowners should encourage in their yards, but can be difficult to identify in their early stages. “The key for homeowners is to decide on what is a pest, and what isn’t a pest,” said Matt Camper, a faculty instructor in the department of Bioagricultural Sciences and Pest Management at Colorado State University. “There are plenty of insects in the garden that you may think are pests but may be something that is helping you.” Homeowners will often unknowingly kill ladybug larvae simply because they misidentified the larvae as malicious. “They look creepy, so a lot of people get rid of them,” Camper said. In addition to being aware of what insects look like at their different life stages, homeowners also need to be aware of how their behavior changes throughout their lifetime and through different seasons. Ladybugs are a good example of this as well. “Ladybugs are tricky because adult ladybugs fly away, but the immatures eat tons of aphids,” said Williams. When ladybugs are packaged they are often in hibernation. When they are released, their immediate reaction is to get back to their hibernation spot and they fly away instead of staying to eat aphids. If homeowners are unsure of what they’re finding in their backyard or have questions about a natural predator’s behavior, taking pictures and consulting a professional is a reliable course of action. Another essential component of natural pest management is creating a space where plants, predators and pollinators can truly thrive. To accomplish this, homeowners must understand the importance of biodiversity in the garden.

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“Having diversity is key. Really having a wild yard,” Williams said. Plants produce and receive different nutrients, so it is beneficial to plant a variety of species around each other so that they can share materials. Plants also have built-in defensive mechanisms, like the sticky sap in geraniums. Healthier plants have better defenses, and diversity makes for healthier plants.

Hugh castor, Lic. Acupuncturist

A diverse array of native species also keeps plants healthy by encouraging pollinators like bees, butterflies, and hummingbirds. “By keeping a wild garden, then you’re going to have a really healthy flow of pollinators,” Camper said.

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Pollinators choose which flower to visit based on what will give them the best reward. Honeybees are flower-constant, meaning they will only visit one type of flower at a time (the flower that has the best reward) before returning to the hive to deposit their pollen.

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RECREATION

spring 2017

Recreation

A Peak at the Upcoming

Poudre Whitewater Park Article by Blair Wittig

atural areas are a major attraction of living in Fort Collins. Many college students and adventurous travelers alike flock to the Poudre river for tubing, fishing, paddle boarding, and kayaking. Despite this fact, the river requires great improvement. There is poor navigation through the river, few safe entryways, and sparse recreational areas on the banks. Many locals dream of a park that could help them access better equipment, and play and socialize in a clean and safe area. That dream may now become a reality with the Poudre Whitewater Park. Jeff Burley and Tim O’Hara first thought of the idea 30 years ago when surveying the Poudre’s flow rates for a restoration project. O’Hara thought a great way to bring the outdoors to old town for tourists and locals alike was to make the Poudre more accessible. The town council at the time, however, wasn’t on board. “For whatever reason, they didn’t want it to happen,” O’Hara admitted. Finally, in 2016, the council approved their idea. Funding was short at first, but in the last few months Burley and O’Hara managed to raise enough to exceed their budget. To make this concept a reality, they had to compile some research. Burley and O’Hara coordinated with University Connections, a team based out of Colorado State University, and the Poudre River Downtown Project to see if it was safe and economically viable to create a whitewater rafting section of the river. In 2010, a survey was conducted on Poudre River water flow in comparison to annual recreational activity in two currently operating whitewater parks in Lyons and Golden. Studies concluded that the days at or above flow rate matched the current flow status needed for popular water sports to maintain a steady pace year-round. The survey concluded that over 500,00 people a year use the downtown section of the Poudre for recreational use year-round. Peak average was recorded to hit at prime recreational time, May thru July. The results were conducive to frequent rafting and tubing use of the Poudre in its peak time, the summer months. This study lead to the approval of the park. The park would compare to Black Bear Hole in Lyons and Clear Creek Whitewater Park in Golden. Black Bear is known more for surfing and spinning, but also encourages kayaking and tubers, with white water rafting capabilities. The land recreational area has climbing walls, a zip line, and a walking trail. Clear Creek has layered pools and drops for different levels of water sports experience. Both parks have their own highlights, which were inspirational to Burley and O’Hara, but instead, the two plan to focus on water recreation and environmental education. They will add campsites for those who choose not to raft or tube. The city and organizers are expecting the Poudre Whitewater Park to bring great changes to the town’s tourist activities, which are mainly centered in the mountains for hiking and climbing, or around Old Town for our many festivals and breweries. A

whitewater park would expand the horizons of tourism, and get people more active and hopefully interested in nature and conservation issues. O’Hara chose the area for that reason; compared to Lions Park in Laporte and Lee Martinez Park in Fort Collins, this area had the most impact on fish and wildlife. Improvements to the river would help reestablish wildlife distribution, and aquatic and riparian zone habitats. The overall restoration project would reclaim land and water from Lemay and Shields through downtown Fort Collins to Mulberry. It would allow fish to travel through the Burlington Northern Trestle beyond I-25 and wildlife to be able to explore and embrace their natural habitats. Renovation would also include redirecting use of the Coy Ditch for wildlife sustainability, instead of its past use of hydrating the Link-N-Greens golf course. Construction with Wilhite Design is set to begin in the spring of this year just north of Old Town near Gustav Swanson Natural Area. Plans will continue with a focus on infrastructure, implementing underwater and riverside landscaping by September, and finishing details by the spring of next year. With the Poudre Whitewater Park, we can promote healthy lifestyles and ecology education while keeping Fort Collins the ideal place to stay. More info can be found at the following link: http://poudrewhitewaterpark.com/

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FOOD & DRINK

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spring 2017

Food & Drink

CopperMuse Craft Distillery; Ingredients with Inspiration Article & Photographs by Anna Fagre

s I write this piece, I am sipping on a “Sparrow’s Song,” a drink hand-crafted by the “queens of liquid arts” themselves, featuring cardamom vodka, vermouth, lemon, simple syrup, rosewater, and Peychauds bitters. To say the drink is unusual and titillates my taste buds in the best way possible is an understatement. The flavors combined in CopperMuse drinks are nothing short of palatable artwork—from rosemary, clove, and bacon vodka infusions to beet, sage, and allspice rum infusions, there is truly something for everyone. I had the opportunity to sit down with Jason Hevelone, president and chief distiller at CopperMuse, and learn about his transition from the world of engineering into the realm of craft spirits. Jason and his friends brewed beer during college, long before the world of craft beer and microbrews took Fort Collins by storm. He and his wife met during college studying engineering and upon graduation, Jason took a position with a local semiconductor company where he worked for 15 years. Then he seized an opportunity at a start-up hi-tech solar company which ignited in him a love for entrepreneurship. Upon trying a gin and tonic from a Colorado craft spirits producer, Jason knew the direction he wanted to take for his own business and he began experimenting with craft spirits. CopperMuse is nestled directly next door to Pateros Creek Brewing, offering a unique partnership full of advantages for both establishments. While CopperMuse was getting started, Jason knew a forklift would be necessary to move the barrels between shelving units. Pateros Creek was also in need of a forklift, so Jason and the owner of Pateros Creek split the cost and both utilize the equipment. CopperMuse and the other distilleries in town also combine orders, saving costs for everyone through order batching. One of the most difficult supplies for distilleries to acquire are white oak barrels. Due to the nature of sustainable oak farming, the waiting list for barrel shipments is a long one. By teaming up on barrel orders, Fort Collins distilleries don’t need to add their name to the bottom of the waiting list when in need of barrels. Many local businesses and farms are also responsible for providing the ingredients that go into the liqueurs and spirit infusions. For instance, the honey liqueur is infused with honey from Beth’s Bees, an apiary in Berthoud. Lavender comes from the Old Town Spice Shop, and during the summer cucumbers and jalapenos are sourced locally from the Pueblo area. From black vodka to the infusionist series and hand-crafted liqueurs, Jason and his team have pegged a unique niche in the distilling community. If one were to try the exotic-looking black vodka with their eyes closed, it would be impossible to distinguish

it from a clear vodka. CopperMuse is the only craft distillery in the country that provides a jet black vodka, lending itself to uniquely dark and sultry craft cocktails. Kristie Dehn and Lauren Mihalko, the queens of liquid arts (which they prefer to be referred to as over the term mixologists), are directly responsible for the innovation behind most of the infused spirits and liqueurs. While writing this, Kristie approached me and opened a large jar of hand-peeled hazelnuts soaking in vodka which will soon become a hazelnut liqueur. The girls will use this liqueur to handcraft drinks with other infusions and natural juices for the upcoming menu. However, their spirits are not the only pride and joy of CopperMuse. Tapas ranging from bacon-wrapped scallops to stuffed criminis and mushroom flatbread, in addition to sandwiches and salads, pair well with many of the drinks offered at CopperMuse. Most dishes feature local foods, including Hazel Dell Mushrooms, Welsh Rabbit Cheese, Nita Crisp crackers, and Nuance chocolate. As the entire distilling and bottling process takes place under the roof of CopperMuse in old town, it was important for Jason while designing the building to most efficiently utilize space in a sustainable manner. A cooling tower on the roof employs highly energy-efficient evaporative instead of refrigerated cooling to supply cooling water to all distilling operations and air conditioning for the distillery space during the summer months. Similarly, a dual set tankless hot water heating system provides efficient heat for the brewing/distilling operations as well as warmth for the distillery space during winter months. Jason even collects the by-products during the distilling process and re-uses them for the next batch, or turns them into cleaners and solvents. He has even been known to use some to fuel his car. There is much in store for the crew at CopperMuse in 2017 and beyond. For those of us that have been waiting for CopperMuse whiskey, the time is nigh. As all true “straight” whiskeys must age in the barrel for a minimum of two years, the batch before us has been soaking in the flavors of white oak since early 2015. You can also keep your eyes peeled for monthly bartending classes, where the CopperMuse queens of liquid arts teach guests how to make a drink of their choice and, at the end of the day, guests take home a bottle of whichever spirit they used to create their concoction. Last but not least, to foster a sense of community and culture surrounding the distilling process, local distillers are planning the first Fort Collins Distillery Fair. This event will create a forum for individuals passionate about craft distilling to gather, taste, and sample local drinks, and learn more about each local distiller’s innovative techniques and sustainable practices employed in the process of creating craft spirits.

JUST IN TIME FOR SUMMER

GET OUT AND ENJOY.

HISTORY

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spring 2017

History

Native Peoples and Archaeology in Our Backyard: An Interview with Dr. Jason Labelle Interview by Charlotte Conway

ittle known to most Northern Coloradans, but significant and famous in the anthropology world, a very important prehistoric archaeology site lies just outside Fort Collins. The Lindenmeier Folsom site is connected to the Folsom people, an ancient people well known for Folsom points, more commonly known as spear points or arrowheads. Ancient jewelry, points, and other artifacts have been found at the site. Lindenmeier lies within the Soapstone Prairie Natural Area, which is open to the public. Dr. Jason LaBelle, Professor of Anthropology at Colorado State University, has an intimate knowledge of the Lindenmeier Folsom site. With research focusing on Great Plains and Rocky Mountains native peoples, Dr. LaBelle studies sites all over the Fort Collins and surrounding areas where people lived up to 13,000 years ago. Lindenmeier is just one of many sites Dr. LaBelle surveys in the area, giving a voice to an ancient and rich history. Fort Collins Courier: What led you to pursue anthropology and archaeology? Jason LaBelle: I grew up all around the plains and so I have always been interested in this environment and history. But then knowing about the native peoples that I learned about when I was a kid and wanting to know more. Where did they come from? How

long have they been here? And wait a minute; you can find things these ancient peoples left here? My interest then went from history to prehistory: learning about these ancient peoples through understanding where they used to live and really honoring native peoples. The big thing is that I wanted to help tell their story, and so when I was a little kid I was moved to do just that. Do you work with any tribes from the Fort Collins area? Local tribes were historically displaced from Northern Colorado to reservations in the 1970s. But it is important to know that the tribes still have a connection to Colorado and specifically the Front Range. I have consulted with different tribes in regards to the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA). That is another role I serve at CSU. We’ve met to discuss the human remains that have been discovered by archaeologists over the last 80 years. Under federal law, the tribes can make claims to those remains. Just this last summer we, along with a partnership of many tribes and other agencies, reburied all but one individual CSU was holding. That was a lot of consultation and meeting with tribal partners to select sites and make sure the remains were respectfully treated. The tribes we worked with were relieved to see this process come full circle. A lot of those remains were uncovered, for example, when

someone was plowing their field and they stumbled upon human remains. They didn’t want to disturb them and didn’t know what to do, so they would bring them to CSU and we would store them. We accumulated a small collection of remains and we worked with the tribes to, as we say, put them back on the trail, to bring them home and rebury them. Which indigenous tribes historically lived in this area? Historically, here in Northern Colorado, the Cheyenne, the Arapahoe, and the Utes are our three main tribes. There is a long list of others as well. The Northern Arapahoe actually wanted to make the Poudre River their reservation. So, when Camp Collins was first constructed, they were camping just on the other side of the river. At that time they were considered friendly. Chief Friday wanted to live peacefully with those moving into his home valley. Do you believe Fort Collins is unique in the degree to which we have lost connections to native peoples? No, that’s kind of the history of the United States. Here, native peoples lived in Eastern Colorado, in the mountains, until the late 1860s. That was a time of great conflict. That was when we had a lot of violent engagement between the newly settled and the native peoples who had lived there for millennia. By the end

of the 1870s, all the Utes, Cheyenne, and Arapahoe were removed from the state and put on reservations, some in Colorado, but mostly out of the state. And that coincides with the settlement of Fort Collins. Really, the discovery of gold in 1859 in Idaho Springs and then Cripple Creek precipitated the spiraling down of that relation with native peoples. There are some very heinous things that happened. By 1870, it was settled that the tribes were going to be removed. It’s really a sad history. What sorts of archaeology sites are in town? We are working on a site on the southeast side of town called Fossil Creek. That site is about 1,300 years old. There are fire pits, beads, jewelry, tools, and animal bones. It is an encampment from early Native Americans. There are mammoth bones that have been found in the city limits in multiple locations. Mammoth teeth have been found in gravel pits down on Mulberry near the river. There is an ancient history here that I am trying to help people understand and appreciate because many people don’t know. I call it the hidden history. But it’s in plain sight; that’s the irony of it. Many just don’t know how to see it. Can you tell me about some of the work down at the Lindenmeier Folsom Site? The city acquired the property in the early 2000s. I did work surveying

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HISTORY

spring 2017

Dr. Jason Labelle leading a field school tour of Lindenmeier stratigraphy

Soapstone and Red Mountain, the two open spaces, in 2006 and 2007. We found and recorded a whole bunch of new sites. We have over 300 archaeological sites on those two properties alone. As part of that work, we helped work with the city to help them understand Lindenmeier and where the Folsom archaeology still exists. There are places where artifacts are still present. We have done a lot of work with the city mapping the site to see where the artifacts are and helping them preserve the site to make sure artifact collectors aren’t walking away with those things so they can be preserved for the Museum of Discovery. That way they belong to the people of Fort Collins.

is spectacular. On a clear day you can easily see Pikes Peak, 150 miles away. So you have an incredible view shed of all the mountains, as well as down below, so if there were any animals, especially in the wintertime, you would see them. It is also a place that people could easily find because it’s below this spectacular hill and it is at the intersection of the foothills and the high plains. I could describe it to someone who knows this environs and they would know exactly where to go. In the ancient past, imagine

horn sheep and the elk, and a short walk you could be in the plains with the bison. You could have every kind of resource you would need. The argument I make is: where does everybody live in Colorado? From Fort Collins to Pueblo, everyone wants to live within a mile or two of the hogbacks, and most of our big cities are found there. That is exactly where the Lindenmeier site is. It has always been a great place to live. People figured that out 13,000 years ago and stuck to it.

What makes the Lindenmeier Folsom Site special, and what about the site is unique? It is the largest Folsom site that’s known to science. And I mean that in two different ways; it has the greatest number of Folsom points and artifacts. But the spatial extent, the geology of the dirt that contains those artifacts, extends over half a mile. That is a huge surface on which the Folsom people lived. The second salient piece to it is that it contains some of the earliest jewelry in all of North America. So there are beads there, small bone and soapstone disks, and eyed needles for making really watertight clothing. The fact that you have needles suggests that it’s a camp where people were staying for long periods. And most likely, in the wintertime, is a good guess when it was occupied, because that’s when you are making clothing. They had hides that they acquired from fall hunts, and they’d make new bags, new jackets, and all sorts of clothing. So those are salient facts. For me personally what makes it a spectacular place, something that is harder to quantify, is that is has an incredible view shed. When you are there, you are on an elevated kind of plateau or terrace, and your view shed to the South

there were people thinly spread over what is now Colorado, and if they were trying to meet up with their kin, on a seasonal basis, we think Lindenmeier was a place where they came together. That is one of our interpretations. The location is a big part of the story because Folsom points are found within the area stretching from Alberta, Canada, all the way to Chihuahua, Mexico and from Utah to Kansas. So in the middle of all this Folsom range is the biggest Folsom site of them all. Ecologically, it is important because it is not in the mountains, and it’s not in the plains, but it is a short distance to either of those places. For the people living off the land, hunters and gatherers, that’s the perfect place to be. A short walk and you could be in the mountains with the big

Are there ways the Fort Collins community can become more involved? Yeah. The biggest one, and I’m actually the former state president of this, is the Colorado Archaeological Society. This is a group of amateurs and professionals with an interest in archaeology. There are chapters around the state and there is a Fort Collins chapter. They have monthly meetings where they give talks, they give tours around the area, and you can even participate in digs. Also, the community can advocate for the Fort Collins Museum of Discovery, which has a wonderful interpretation of the Native American history of the area going back to Ice Age times. They have done a spectacular job. And Colorado State University, we are going on our

50th anniversary of our field school. So we have spent many years learning and excavating, primarily in Larimer County. We are a tremendous resource for local archaeological history. What are some things you wish people were more aware of regarding the native peoples? There are a couple of different things. First, an appreciation for how long people have lived here and honestly, with that, there should be an appreciation for the plight of Native Americans since the 1870s. The history of the Unites States is tarnished by this poor treatment of native peoples and, really, the raw deal native peoples received. We should pull together to help them as best we can. I want people to also know that this archaeological story is fragmentary. It’s like a puzzle and every little piece adds up to a greater story. Sharing the information of things that people find is really important. If people find artifacts, we want to know about it because it might be significant and they don’t even know it. For 100 years people have been picking up artifacts, and so when I go out to a site I guarantee somebody has been there before and already picked up things. So, I have a smaller understanding of what was potentially there at one point in the past. I often work with the public so that we can pull together as much of the story as we can. The other thing I want people to know is that local history and places matter. You don’t have to go to Egypt or to Mexico to experience ancient cultures. They are different here, but nevertheless they are fascinating. These stories should be told as a part of our community. Fort Collins didn’t start with the founding of Camp Collins; it started much, much earlier than that.