Retro 2000s Odell Brewing Co Beer Label Set 🍺 90 Shilling Easy Street Wheat Cutthroat Porter Pale Ale Fort Collins Colorado

🍺 What if you could hold the whole early story of a Colorado craft brewery in one set of four labels? 🎣

Size: 5 1/2" x 4"

Here is a genuine time capsule from the dawn of the American craft-beer boom: a complete set of four Odell Brewing Co. beer labels from Fort Collins, Colorado, each carrying a printed © OBC 2000 copyright and the flowing facsimile signature of founder-brewmaster Doug Odell. The four are the 90 Shilling Colorado Ale, the Easy Street Wheat, the Cutthroat Porter, and the Cutthroat Pale Ale — four different beers, four different pieces of artwork, gathered here as one lot. This is the whole quartet together, the complete-set convenience that a single label can never give you, and every one is New Old Stock: unused, never applied to a bottle, straight from the turn-of-the-millennium print run.

They are richly printed offset lithographs, and each one is its own little poster. The 90 Shilling Colorado Ale puts a snow-capped mountain at sunrise behind its banner. The Easy Street Wheat has a hot-air balloon and a wooden road sign nailed among the hop vines. The Cutthroat Porter has a leaping, spotted cutthroat trout arcing over a diamond wreathed in wheat and hops, and the Cutthroat Pale Ale answers it with the same magnificent trout. Set the four side by side and you have a small gallery of one brewery's turn-of-the-century identity, and preserving that whole story, intact, is exactly why we love putting a set like this in front of you.

🏔️ Odell Brewing: a family, a grain elevator, and the birth of Fort Collins beer

To hold these labels is to hold the early chapter of one of Colorado's most beloved breweries. Odell Brewing Company was founded in 1989 by three members of the Odell family — Doug Odell, his wife Wynne, and his sister Corkie — in a converted 1915 grain elevator on the edge of downtown Fort Collins. It was the second packaging craft brewery in the entire state of Colorado, and the very first in Fort Collins, in a college town on the Cache la Poudre River that didn't have a single other craft brewery yet - which, by the brewery's own telling, is exactly what sold them on it.

Doug's road there is the stuff of craft-beer legend. By the brewery's own telling, his passion began in the 1970s with a first job at San Francisco's Anchor Brewing — scrubbing out the mash tun, the humblest job in the house. He carried that spark to Seattle, kept homebrewing, met Wynne, and on a honeymoon through the United Kingdom the two fell in love with the little breweries turning out flavorful real ale in village after village. They wanted to bring that home. Corkie, already living in Fort Collins, sold them on the cozy college town, and the three joined forces. Their first commercial beers were an Odell's Golden Ale and the flagship 90 Shilling — the very beer whose label anchors this set.

🍻 Four labels, four beers, four stories

What makes this set such a satisfying thing to own is that each label tells its own honest little tale, printed right there on the paper:

• 🏔️ 90 Shilling Colorado Ale — the flagship. The label explains the curious name: it comes from an old Scottish method of naming a brewery's beers by their original gravity and the resulting tax rating. It's described as richer than most amber ales, smooth and deeply satisfying, with a crisp, clean Colorado taste.
• 🎈 Easy Street Wheat — the sunny one. Its name, the label says, comes from the brewers “taking it easy” by not filtering the beer; the natural proteins and yeast left behind give it a pleasant smoothness and a slight citrus character. There's even a little Pour / Swirl / Pour-Yeast diagram to teach you how to serve an unfiltered wheat.
• 🎣 Cutthroat Porter — the showstopper. A robust, smooth, creamy dark ale in the classic London porter tradition, whose dark-roasted malts give it both its color and its hints of chocolate and coffee. Its leaping cutthroat trout is one of the most striking pieces of art the brewery ever put on a bottle.
• 🐟 Cutthroat Pale Ale — the trout's other half. Well-balanced and hoppy, brewed in the classic British style and finished with Fuggles and First Gold hops for a distinctive fruity taste.

The two Cutthroat labels share that gorgeous leaping trout, rendered in mottled olive-green with a scatter of dark spots and a blush of coral along the belly, arcing up out of a blue diamond of water. Odell says the name honors the cutthroat trout, Colorado's state fish. The porter actually started in 1993 as a house beer for a local tavern, named by the proprietor - a fisherman, or maybe a pirate, depending on who's telling it - then took silver at the 1996 Colorado State Fair and went into bottles in 1997. CUTTHROAT was registered as Odell's trademark on July 13, 1999, which is why a little ® sits on the banner of a 2000 label. And read Doug's note on the porter label closely: it promises the "hightest priority" to quality. The 90 Shilling and Pale Ale panels spell it right - the typo is the porter's alone.

The fish itself has a story. The greenback cutthroat became Colorado's state fish in 1994 after it was thought wiped out by mining and pollution back in the 1930s - and in 2012 University of Colorado researchers found the world's only pure greenbacks in three and a half miles of Bear Creek near Colorado Springs, where an innkeeper had stocked them in the 1800s for his guests to catch.

🕰️ Dating the set — the year is printed right on it

There's no guesswork here, which is a rare pleasure. Each label carries a printed © OBC 2000 copyright notice, so the set dates plainly to right around the year 2000 — the turn-of-the-millennium era of Odell's bottled lineup. Two other printed details back that up. Each label bears the full federal Government Warning, the Surgeon General statement that has been legally required on American alcoholic beverages since late 1989, so its presence is exactly what you'd expect on a 2000-era bottle. And each carries a printed email address and a dot-com web address — a small, charming marker of the early-internet age, when a brewery proudly printing its dot-com on the label still felt new. Together those details place this set firmly at the Y2K turn of the millennium, in the family-owned era well before the founders sold the company to its own employees in 2015.

🌄 Why these labels matter today

Odell didn't fade — it grew into one of the giants of American craft beer, ranked among the largest craft breweries in the country, and in 2015 the founding family sold the majority of the company to its co-workers in a combined management buyout and employee-stock-ownership plan, turning employees into owners. Its beers earned real acclaim: three different Odell brews — the 5 Barrel Pale Ale, the Cutthroat Porter, and the Odell IPA — have been named in the reference book 1001 Beers You Must Try Before You Die. That's what gives a set of turn-of-the-millennium labels like this its weight. These are the graphics from the family-owned, grain-elevator years, before the expansions and the employee ownership — the look of the brewery when it was still finding the identity that would carry it to national fame.

Frame all four together in one long mat and you've got the whole turn-of-the-millennium Odell lineup on one wall - perfect for a home bar, a Colorado kitchen or a fly-fishing den.