Beers and Bikes: Tour de Fat 2011

Part of moving to Colorado requires one saying goodbye to her love of Michelob Ultra and hello to a better beer drinking future. I chose to adopt New Belgium as my favorite CO brewery after tasting Mothership Wit for the first time on our camping trip back in June. If you know me, you know that I have the tendency to become very, very loyal to brands (i.e. their dream consumer). For example, 1995 - 2005 I wore all Volcom, all the time - which has now been replaced with all H&M, all the time. Toms on my feet. I've got six pairs (three with holes now in the upper left toe which makes me feel like a hobo and causes me to question said loyalty but I digress...). And since moving to CO and discovering another requirement - that of the Nalgene bottle - I now own three and have a forth picked out as soon as they launch their translucent line next week.

As part of adopting New Belgium as my brand for beer, I made sure I was not going to miss their annual bike parade party for the people aka: Tour de Fat.

Tour de Fat is an annual tour put on by New Belgium that travels across 13 cities with the mission of connecting people with bikes, beer and community. And that they did here in Denver on Saturday. With the best of New Belgium beers priced at 1 per token and tokens only costing a 5 spot a piece, it's no wonder $50,000 was raised to benefit Bike Denver. We also were incredibly Denver in the fact that we were at 93% sustainable thanks to New Belgium's Composting Offices and, well, us being Denver.

Josh, Linz and I had to get creative with our bike lock-up when we arrived to City Park where the event was taking place. See here. That's three bikes on one U-lock.

Kristen and Jake (recently back from their summer in Alaska....YAY!) joined us, as well and overall it was an afternoon full of people watching, costume commenting, games, beer and biking. They had Rideable ARTifcats where you could ride these crazy bikes with shoes as wheels or wheels of wheels. The boys played Toss the Tire and this girl even got herself a tour tee-shirt which she hasn't done since Britney back in 2000.

We had so much fun we had no choice but to recover by picking up Popeye's Chicken on the way back to my place - making it the first, and possibly not the last, time I ever had fried chicken in my basket. 

We've already all made the pact to get up nice and early for Tour de Fat 2012 and I'm pretty sure Josh is going to start sewing our costumes together next week.

 I mean - honestly, what is better than an afternoon filled with the above? Love live the tour!