Retro Odell Cutthroat Porter Beer Label 🎣 Fort Collins Colorado Brewery Collectible OBC 2000

Odell Cutthroat Porter Beer Label 🎣 Odell Brewing Co., Fort Collins, Colorado · © OBC 2000

Size: 5 1/2" x 4"

A big leaping cutthroat trout bursting out of a blue diamond of mountain water, hops on one side and barley on the other, CUTTHROAT® on a red banner and PORTER underneath - this is the whole wraparound bottle label from Odell Brewing, never used. The side panels carry the government warning, the bar code, a "Bottling Date" box, "Please Refrigerate," "Net 12 Fluid oz.," © OBC 2000, and a little note signed by Doug Odell, Brewmaster. I have a stack, so yours will look just like this one.

🐟 Named for the State Fish

Odell says the name honors the cutthroat trout, Colorado's state fish - the greenback cutthroat got that title in 1994, a year after this porter first poured. And that fish has a story. It was thought wiped out by mining and pollution back in the 1930s, and when University of Colorado researchers went looking in 2012, they found the world's only pure greenbacks in a three-and-a-half-mile stretch of Bear Creek near Colorado Springs - where an innkeeper had stocked them in the 1800s so his guests would have something to catch. By 2022 they were reproducing on their own again in their native waters. The cutthroat gets its own name from the red-orange slashes on the underside of its lower jaw, and the artist didn't miss it - look under this trout's chin and there's the red line.

🍺 A House Beer for a Fishing Man

Cutthroat Porter started out in 1993 as a house beer for the Mountain Tap Tavern in Fort Collins, named by the proprietor - a fisherman, or maybe a pirate, depending on who's telling it. That proprietor was Jim Parker, a beer writer who had opened the Mountain Tap in 1992. Odell brewed the porter at his request and he came up with the name - the cutthroat, the trout Colorado would make its state fish the following year. Parker was a real name in the beer world, too: he directed the American Homebrewers Association, was editor-in-chief of Zymurgy and The New Brewer, and ran the Oregon Brewers Guild as its executive director. Odell first sold it on September 16, 1993, it took a silver medal at the 1996 Colorado State Fair, and it went into bottles in 1997, after the brewery added its first bottling line. CUTTHROAT was registered as Odell's trademark on July 13, 1999 - that's why the ® is on this 2000 label. It even made the book 1001 Beers You Must Try Before You Die. And read Doug's note on the side panel: Odell "gives the hightest priority to the quality and consistency of products which bear our name." Hightest. Even a great brewery needs a proofreader.

🏭 The Grain Elevator Brewery

Doug's road to that grain elevator started at Anchor Brewing in San Francisco. In 1978, while he was going to school at San Francisco State, he got a part-time job there scrubbing out the mash tun and then climbing into the brew kettle to scrub that too - "the lousiest job in the whole place," in his words. After Anchor he moved to Seattle, ran a landscaping business, kept on homebrewing and perfecting his recipes, and met Wynne. On their honeymoon in the UK they saw one small brewery after another doing fine selling flavorful real ale, and they came home set on taking Doug's hobby commercial. Doug's sister Corkie was already living in Fort Collins and sold them on the college town - unlike Seattle, it didn't have a craft brewery of its own yet.

Doug, Wynne and Corkie Odell started Odell Brewing in 1989 in a converted 1915 grain elevator on the edge of downtown Fort Collins - the second packaging craft brewery in Colorado and the first in Fort Collins. Doug's 90 Shilling was one of his first two recipes, worked out over ten years of homebrewing before they opened. They sold their first keg on November 18, 1989, and until 1996 the beer was draft only. Doug brewed it and sold it - that's his signature over "Brewmaster" on the side panel - making his sales calls out of an old mustard-colored Datsun pickup, delivering kegs and bringing the empties back, while Corkie cleaned out the tanks and Wynne paid the bills. Five years in they had outgrown the elevator, so in 1994 they built a whole new brewery a few blocks away, and that's where the bottling line went in. In 2015 they sold most of the company to the people who work there - 51 percent to three senior managers and 19 percent to a new employee stock plan, keeping 10 percent each.

📜 The Stories

Breweriana collectors will tell you that the craft labels of the '90s and early 2000s were often drawn by local artists who actually drank the stuff. And there's a good bit of town history behind that 1915 grain elevator: it went up in a dry town. Fort Collins outlawed liquor in 1896, and apart from 3.2 beer it stayed that way until the city council fully repealed prohibition in October 1969 - so when the Odells sold their first keg, Fort Collins had only been wet for twenty years.

Great framed in a Colorado kitchen, a fly-fishing cabin or a home bar.