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

Size: 5.5 x 4 inches

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

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 in bold black, red, blue, green, gold, and white, and each one is its own little poster. The 90 Shilling Colorado Ale glows navy-blue behind a snow-capped mountain at sunrise and a deep-maroon banner. The Easy Street Wheat is sunny gold, with a hot-air balloon and a wooden road sign nailed among the hop vines. The Cutthroat Porter is dramatic black, a leaping, spotted cutthroat trout arcing over a blue diamond wreathed in wheat and hops beneath a red banner. And the Cutthroat Pale Ale answers it in forest green 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, opening its doors just days before another now-famous Fort Collins brewery started up nearby. Two pioneers, one small college town on the Cache la Poudre River, at the very start of something enormous.

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. The cutthroat is a trout native to the cold rivers of the Rocky Mountains, and it's easy to imagine the brewery reaching for it as a badge of its Colorado home — a fish of the same mountain streams that gave the town its water. We'll own that as our own fond guess rather than dress it up as documented fact, but the artwork's love of place is unmistakable.

🕰️ 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.

🖼️ Display ideas

• 🍺 Frame all four together in a single long mat for a home bar, taproom wall, or man-cave centerpiece — the set reads as a matched quartet.
• 🎣 Pull the two Cutthroat trout labels for a fishing-and-brewing corner that ties beer to the Rocky Mountain rivers.
• 🏔️ Group them with other Colorado and Fort Collins memorabilia for a Front Range craft-beer tribute.
• 🎁 Split the set among framed coasters or a shadow box for a beer lover's gift that keeps all four stories.
• 🍻 Hang them in a kitchen, basement bar, or brewery-themed space for instant Y2K-era craft-beer character.

🎁 Who collects these

Breweriana collectors — the folks who chase beer labels, coasters, tap handles, and cans — love complete sets from a single brewery and a single era, and this quartet delivers exactly that. Beyond them, it appeals to craft-beer enthusiasts and Odell fans, Colorado and Fort Collins locals, fly-fishing and trout lovers drawn to the Cutthroat art, and anyone decorating a bar, basement, or brewery-themed room. The complete-set convenience is the whole point: rather than hunting down four separate labels one at a time, this brings the full turn-of-the-millennium Odell lineup together in one lot. For anyone building a beer-label collection, a ready-made matched quartet from a single celebrated brewery is a genuine shortcut to a display-worthy centerpiece.

❓ Frequently asked questions

How many labels come in this set?

Four different Odell Brewing Co. labels: 90 Shilling Colorado Ale, Easy Street Wheat, Cutthroat Porter, and Cutthroat Pale Ale — the complete quartet, together as one lot.

Are these bottles, or just the labels?

Just the paper labels — unused New Old Stock, never applied to bottles, so they lie flat and are ready for framing or a collection.

How do you know they're from around 2000?

The year is printed on them: each carries a © OBC 2000 copyright notice. The federal Government Warning (required since 1989) and the printed dot-com website both fit a 2000-era bottle, confirming the turn-of-the-millennium dating.

Is Odell Brewing still around?

Very much so — it grew into one of the country's larger craft breweries and became employee-owned in 2015. These labels come from its earlier, family-owned era, which is a big part of their appeal.

Why buy the set instead of a single label?

Because the set is the whole story at once. Tracking down four individual Odell labels separately takes time and luck; this lot gathers the complete turn-of-the-millennium lineup in one place, matched and ready to display together.