Retro 2000 Odell Brewing Co. 🍺 90 Shilling Colorado Ale Label NOS Fort Collins

Remember Odell 90 Shilling Ale's First Labels? 🍺 Odell Brewing Co. 90 Shilling Colorado Ale Label, Fort Collins, 2000

Size: 5 1/2" x 4" ~ Never used.

This is a beauty for anybody who loves Colorado beer. Snowy mountain peaks rise against a blue and gold sky, green hop vines climb up both sides, and a big maroon ribbon across the middle reads 90 SHILLING® in gold, with COLORADO ALE underneath and ODELL BREWING CO., FORT COLLINS, COLORADO below on navy. It's the whole wraparound label, never put on a bottle, and the copyright line reads © OBC 2000.

The side panels are all there too: the government warning, "Brewed & Bottled By Odell Brewing Company, Fort Collins, Colorado," the bar code, "Bottling Date," "Please Refrigerate," "Net 12 Fluid oz." and "Please Recycle." And on the right, the brewery tells the story itself: "Richer than most amber ales, 90 Shilling is smooth & deeply satisfying, with a crisp, clean Colorado taste. The name comes from the old Scottish method of naming a brewery's beers, based on original gravity and resulting tax rating. Odell Brewing Co. is a family-owned brewery that gives the highest priority to the quality and consistency of products which bear our name. We hope you enjoy them." It's signed by Doug Odell, Brewmaster. The back is blank.

🍻 Why "90 Shilling"

The name really does go back to Scotland. In the late 1800s Scottish beers were named for their invoice price in shillings per hogshead, a 54-gallon cask. Stronger, better beers paid more duty and so cost more, which is why a "90 shilling" was a big, rich ale. Light beers ran around 42 to 48 shillings, and Younger's brewery made heavy beers anywhere from 80 all the way up to 160 shillings.

🏔️ Odell Brewing, Fort Collins

Doug Odell spent ten years working out recipes in his kitchen in Los Angeles before he, Wynne and Corkie Odell opened Odell Brewing in 1989, in a converted 1915 grain elevator on the edge of downtown Fort Collins. It was the second packaging craft brewery to open in Colorado and the first in Fort Collins, and its first two recipes were 90 Shilling and Easy Street Wheat. In the early days Doug delivered the kegs himself, picked up the empties and made sales calls out of an old mustard-colored Datsun pickup.

They built an 8,000-square-foot brewery in 1994, added a bottling line for six-packs in 1996, and kept growing from there. In 2015 the Odells made the brewery employee-owned to keep it independent, selling 51 percent to three senior managers and 19 percent to a stock plan shared by all the workers. By 2019 the Brewers Association ranked it the 23rd largest craft brewer in the country, and it all started with 90 Shilling.

Fort Collins has a story of its own. It's the seat of Larimer County, about 60 miles north of Denver, and it sits at 4,982 feet, right where the plains run into the foothills of the Rockies. It sits on the Cache la Poudre River along Colorado's Front Range, in the valley where the Northern Arapaho were centered, and it started as an Army post. There was a Camp Collins upriver near present-day Laporte, guarding the Overland mail route, until a flood wiped it out in June 1864, and the new fort was set up several miles downstream and named for Colonel William O. Collins, the commandant at Fort Laramie. The Colorado Agricultural College, today's Colorado State University, was founded there in 1870 and held its first classes in 1879.

It's a great piece for a home bar, a Colorado cabin or a craft beer collection.