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

A Genuine Piece of Colorado Craft Beer History, Still Unaffixed After All These Years 🎣

This is a genuine Vintage Odell Brewing Company Cutthroat Porter beer label, copyright dated 2000, produced for the brewery's 12-fluid-ounce bottled porter at their Fort Collins, Colorado facility. Odell Brewing was founded in 1989 by Doug, Wynne, and Corkie Odell in a converted 1915 grain elevator — the second packaging craft brewery to open in Colorado and the first in Fort Collins. Cutthroat Porter itself was introduced in 1993 and first made available in bottles beginning in 1997, making this copyright 2000 label a document from the beer's early bottling years. This is a New Old Stock (NOS) example, never affixed to a bottle, measuring approximately 5.5 x 4 inches.

There is a particular feeling that comes over a Colorado craft beer enthusiast when they hold something like this — paper printed during the era when the state's independent brewing scene was still finding its legs, still figuring out what it was going to be, still producing labels by hand in quantities that seemed large at the time but look modest in hindsight. This label is that feeling, made physical. 🍺

The art at its center is confident and unhurried: a cutthroat trout leaping in full arc across a diamond-shaped panel of mountain-blue water, its spotted flanks rendered in warm olive and gold tones, a spray of hop bines and a full wheat stalk framing either side. The color palette is deep — black ground, bold red banner, blue water, golden grain — the kind of illustration that was clearly drawn by someone who understood both craft beer and the rivers of northern Colorado. It does not look like a beer label designed by committee. It looks like it was drawn by someone who had fished those waters. 🌊

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The Grain Elevator on the Edge of Town 🏔️

The story of Odell Brewing begins not with a gleaming purpose-built brewhouse but with a building that had already lived a full life before Doug Odell ever walked through its doors. The 1915 grain elevator on the outskirts of downtown Fort Collins was a working piece of agricultural Colorado — the kind of structure that defines the flat-horizon silhouette of the Front Range. When Doug and Wynne Odell converted it into a brewery in 1989, they were not just opening a business. They were doing what the best craftspeople do: finding something with bones good enough to carry a new purpose.

Doug's path to that elevator is its own piece of American brewing lore. His passion for craft beer had its ignition point in the 1970s at San Francisco's Anchor Brewing Company, a place that is itself a chapter in the founding mythology of American craft beer. After Anchor, Doug moved to Seattle, kept homebrewing, and met Wynne. The turning point came during their honeymoon in the United Kingdom, where they encountered small regional breweries producing real ale — unpasteurized, cask-conditioned, rooted in local identity — and doing it with the kind of quiet confidence that comes from knowing exactly what you are. They came home from that trip with a plan. 🇬🇧

Colorado in 1989 was not yet the craft beer landscape it would become. The Odells were early — early enough that the second-packaging-brewery designation was not a marketing claim but a simple fact about what existed in the state at the time. Fort Collins, now spoken of in beer circles as one of the great brewing cities per capita in the country, was then a college town with ambitions that had not yet fully materialized. Odell Brewing helped give it an identity that still holds. 🌾

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The Fish on the Label — and the Story Behind the Name 🐟

Cutthroat Porter arrived in 1993, and the name carries more meaning than it might first appear. The cutthroat trout — Oncorhynchus clarkii — is Colorado's state fish, a native species that shares its coloring and its character with the high mountain rivers it inhabits. Odell's documented explanation for the name honors that heritage directly: the dark, richly colored fish was a natural ambassador for a dark, richly colored porter. There is a satisfying logic to it, the kind that only works when the naming committee is actually made up of people who live in the place. 🎣

Among Colorado beer collectors, a piece of lore circulates — not confirmed by Odell's own records, but persistent enough to be worth noting as the story it is — that Cutthroat Porter was originally brewed in 1993 as a house beer for a Fort Collins tavern whose proprietor was either a dedicated fly fisherman or a man with a pirate's disposition toward naming things. The official record tells a cleaner story, and the state fish connection is the documented one. But the tavern tale gets passed around at beer club tables because it is the kind of origin story craft beer lore tends to accumulate, especially around a beer with a name that evokes both nature and danger in equal measure. Framed as the lore it is, it adds flavor. 🍻

What is not lore is this: in 1996, Cutthroat Porter won the Silver Medal at the Colorado State Fair. That is a piece of documented competitive brewing history from the era when this label was being printed.

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What a Copyright 2000 Label Tells a Collector 📅

The label carries a visible copyright notice — OBC 2000 — which places its design firmly at the turn of the millennium, three years after Cutthroat Porter first made it into bottles in 1997. For the breweriana collector who tracks Odell's label evolution, this is a meaningful data point. Odell's early bottling years produced labels in relatively modest quantities compared to the industrial runs of national brands, and an unaffixed NOS example from the brewery's first decade of bottling carries the particular appeal of paper that survived intact through what is now a quarter-century of handling, storage, and the general entropy that finds paper ephemera.

The label is New Old Stock. It has never been wetted, never been pressed to glass, never gone through the cycle of refrigeration and condensation that turns most paper beer labels into a peel-and-destroy proposition. It arrived in this condition and has remained in this condition — a crisp, clean, fully printed label from the early Odell bottling era, measuring approximately 5.5 x 4 inches. 📐

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The Family Brewery That Became a Co-Worker-Owned Brewery 🤝

Part of what makes Odell Brewing a beloved name in Colorado's craft beer community — as opposed to merely a successful one — is the arc of its ownership story. For the first quarter-century of its existence, the Odell family held the vast majority of the company, with Doug, Wynne, and Corkie Odell owning 98 percent prior to 2015. In 2015, the family sold the majority of the company to its co-workers in a combined management buyout and Employee Stock Ownership Plan. Doug and Wynne and Corkie began their planned exit from day-to-day operations in January 2020.

This is not a brewery that was absorbed by a regional conglomerate. It is not a brewery that sold to a national brand and watched its identity dissolve. Odell Brewing remains fully independent, co-worker owned, operating out of Fort Collins. A label from the copyright 2000 era — from the years when the Odell family was still in the building every day, still signing off on every recipe and every design — is a document from the brewery's founding chapter, from the time before ESOP and transition plans and the vocabulary of institutional ownership entered the story. It is a piece of paper from when the brewery was still entirely the Odells'. 🏠

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The Art of the Label Itself 🖼️

Beer label illustration from this era has its own aesthetic that collectors recognize immediately: the diamond-panel composition, the naturalistic wildlife illustration rendered in a style that sits between vintage sporting print and craft brewery romanticism, the layered red-and-black color scheme. This label executes that aesthetic confidently. The cutthroat trout dominates the frame, leaping from the blue water panel in a posture that suggests both vigor and grace, its spots and fin detail clear and warm. The hop bines on the left and the wheat stalk on the right are not decorative afterthoughts — they are compositionally balanced and botanically recognizable, the kind of ingredient illustration that tells you this brewery was thinking about what went into the beer when they were thinking about the art. 🌿

The red ribbon banner carrying the name sweeps across the fish's midsection in a way that feels like a Victorian sporting trophy plaque. ODELL BREWING CO. runs in clean white lettering across the bottom. The entire composition works at the scale of a 12-ounce bottle label, which is not a given — a lot of craft beer art of this period suffered when it was reduced to label size. This one holds. 🏆

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Who This Label Belongs With 🎁

The Colorado native or Front Range transplant who spent any time in Fort Collins during the late 1990s or early 2000s will feel this one land somewhere specific. 🏔️ The craft beer historian who tracks the independent brewery movement in Colorado and recognizes what the pre-ESOP, family-owned chapter of Odell actually looked like. 🍺 The fly fisherman or trout enthusiast who knows what a cutthroat looks like in the water and appreciates seeing one rendered with that kind of care. 🎣 The breweriana collector who understands that paper from this era — NOS, unaffixed, copyright-dated — is exactly the kind of material that disappears fastest, because most of it got wet. The vintage label and packaging collector who can spot genuinely well-executed regional printing when they see it. 🖼️ The person who has been to Odell's taproom, who has ordered the porter, who wants something from the brewery's early chapter that is not a pint glass or a poster.

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Fort Collins and the Brewing City That Was Still Becoming Itself 🌆

There is a version of Fort Collins in 2000 that is hard to fully picture now. The city that would eventually be called one of America's best beer towns was then a place with a handful of craft breweries, a state university, and a downtown that was still figuring out what it wanted to look like when it grew up. Odell Brewing was part of that figuring-out. The converted 1915 grain elevator was not just a building — it was an argument that old Colorado infrastructure could be made new again, that the history in the walls was worth keeping.

Old-timers who remember the brewery in its early years speak of Doug Odell as someone who was genuinely present — not a figurehead, not a name on the door, but an actual brewmaster who cared about what went into the tank. His signature appears on this very label above the word Brewmaster, a fact that connects the paper directly to the man who built the place. That kind of personal accountability is woven into the document itself. ✍️

The grain elevator building, predating Prohibition by nearly a decade, carries its own layer of local history that Colorado beer enthusiasts enjoy connecting to the craft brewing revival narrative, though no documented link to Prohibition-era brewing at that specific site has been confirmed. What is documented is that the building stood for over seventy years before it became a brewery, and that the Odells chose it deliberately — a choice that said something about how they thought about permanence and about the value of things built to last. 🏗️

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❓ Questions Collectors Ask

What exactly is this item, and what was it made for?

This is a genuine paper bottle label produced by Odell Brewing Company of Fort Collins, Colorado for their Cutthroat Porter, a 12-fluid-ounce bottled porter. The label carries a copyright date of 2000, placing it in the brewery's early bottling era — Cutthroat Porter was first bottled in 1997. It is a New Old Stock (NOS) label, meaning it was never applied to a bottle and survives in unaffixed condition, measuring approximately 5.5 x 4 inches.

How do I confirm the era of this label?

The copyright notice on the label reads OBC 2000, which confirms the design was registered in the year 2000. This is fully consistent with Odell Brewing's documented history: the brewery opened in 1989, Cutthroat Porter was introduced in 1993, and bottling began in 1997. The label's design, printing style, and regulatory text — including the standard Government Warning language required on U.S. alcohol products from the late 1980s onward — are all consistent with a year-2000 production date.

Is this label authentic, or could it be a reproduction?

Authentic vintage beer labels from this era were printed on paper stock with offset lithography designed for adhesion to glass bottles. The NOS condition of this label — unaffixed, never wetted, carrying the characteristic feel of period printing stock — is consistent with genuine brewery-origin paper rather than a digitally reproduced facsimile. The UPC barcode, the Odell Brewing Company address (Fort Collins, Colorado), and the Doug Odell brewmaster signature printed on the label are all consistent with authentic documented production from this brewery in this era.

Why do collectors want Odell Brewing labels from this specific period?

Odell Brewing was a fully family-owned independent brewery during the year-2000 era, with Doug, Wynne, and Corkie Odell holding 98 percent of the company. The brewery transitioned to a co-worker ESOP structure in 2015, and the founding family exited day-to-day operations in 2020. Labels from the pre-ESOP, family-owned chapter — especially NOS examples that were never applied to bottles — represent a documented moment in Colorado craft brewing history that cannot be recreated. The Cutthroat Porter was also a Silver Medal winner at the 1996 Colorado State Fair, adding competitive provenance to the beer's story.

What is the significance of the cutthroat trout on this label?

The cutthroat trout is Colorado's state fish, and Odell Brewing's documented explanation for naming the porter after it is a direct tribute to that heritage. The fish's naturally dark coloring was seen as a fitting visual ambassador for a dark-roasted porter. For display, acid-free matting behind UV-filtering glass preserves both color fidelity and paper integrity over the long term. The label's horizontal format and bold color palette make it well-suited for framing alongside other Colorado craft brewing ephemera or fishing and sporting art of the same era.

Was Doug Odell actually involved in producing labels like this one?

Yes. Doug Odell is documented as the brewmaster of Odell Brewing Company from its founding in 1989 through his planned exit from day-to-day operations beginning in January 2020. His printed signature appears directly on this label above the word Brewmaster, consistent with the brewery's practice during the family-ownership era of making the brewmaster's personal accountability visible on the product itself. Odell Brewing was founded after Doug's formative years at San Francisco's Anchor Brewing Company in the 1970s and a subsequent period of homebrewing in Seattle that led him and Wynne to open the Fort Collins brewery after a UK honeymoon trip during which they were inspired by English real ale producers.