Vintage 1990s Funky Monkey Ale Beer Label 🐒 Broadway Brewing Denver Zoo Zoobrew Colorado Craft Beer Collectible

Do You Remember When Colorado Craft Beer Still Felt Like a Secret? 🐒 A Vintage 1990s Funky Monkey Ale Label, The Denver Zoo's Zoobrew, Broadway Brewing, Denver

Size: 4 1/2" x 3 3/4"

The whole label is one long joke told well. A cotton-top tamarin stares out of a red-ringed oval with its big white crest swept back like it just stuck a fork in a socket, FUNKY arches over it, MONKEY curves under it, a red ALE banner cuts across, and the dark olive field around it is covered in yellow bananas. Up in the corner the roundel reads THE DENVER ZOO'S Zoobrew, the little green panel says It's a jungle out there and nothing tastes better after a long day of swingin' than FUNKY MONKEY ALE, the foot reads 1 Pint 6 Fluid oz.(650 ml) - a 22-ounce bomber - and up the right edge: Brewed and bottled by Broadway Brewing L.L.C., Denver, Colorado, exclusively for the Denver Zoological Foundation. These were never on a bottle.

🍺 Who brewed it

Broadway Brewing opened in Denver in 1994 as a production brewery, a joint venture between two of the names that built Colorado craft beer. One was the Wynkoop Brewing Company, the downtown brewpub John Hickenlooper and five partners opened on October 18, 1988 at Wynkoop and 18th - they sold 25-cent beers that first day - before Hickenlooper went on to be mayor of Denver, governor of Colorado and a U.S. senator. The other was Aspen's Flying Dog, George Stranahan's brewery. Wynkoop filed the BROADWAY BREWING COMPANY trademark on September 22, 1994, so this label can't be any earlier than that.

🦁 Zoobrew

Zoobrew was the Denver Zoo's own beer line, not a one-off: Broadway also brewed ZEEBREW for the same Denver Zoological Foundation in the same 22-ounce bottle, so you had an animal beer family under one zoo label. The zoo itself goes back to 1896 and, the way Denver tells it, to one orphaned black bear cub named Billy Bryan - after William Jennings Bryan - that landed in City Park and needed a home. The details change depending on who's telling it, but everybody agrees the bear came first. In 1918 the zoo opened Bear Mountain, the first naturalistic habitat in an American zoo.

🐒 The cotton-top tamarin

Good pick for a funky monkey. The cotton-top tamarin, Saguinus oedipus, is a squirrel-sized primate from the forests of northwestern Colombia with that wild white crest, and it's one of the most endangered primates in the world - the kind of animal zoos breed and protect. Putting it on a beer brewed for the zoo's own foundation was a nice touch.

🐒 About these

Every one I have is an unused label, 4 1/2 by 3 3/4 inches. Frame one for a Colorado bar, a brewery wall or a zoo lover, or slip it in with other Denver craft-beer labels from the '90s. The supply is finite - nobody's printing these Zoobrew labels again, and once these last unused ones are gone, they'll be very difficult to acquire.