Blue Moon Brewing has a bit of an image problem. Which is to say, its image is too good.
The nation’s top-selling “craft” beer brand is widely known, and because of that, drinkers also associate it with its flagship beer, Blue Moon Belgian White, a cloudy, lower-ABV beer with sweeter notes of citrus fruit and coriander – and usually served with a slice of orange.
But at the Molson Coors-owned brand’s restaurant and taproom in the River North Art District in Denver, Blue Moon’s brewers make a lot of beers besides, well, just Blue Moon.
“We have 23 other beers on tap,” said Blue Moon brewmaster John Legnard, adding that the taproom produces around 100 different beers each year, from IPAs, barleywines and stouts to German-style ales and lagers. “We need to promote Blue Moon beyond just the Belgian white.”
With that in mind, Blue Moon RiNo – the location, rather than the brand – will can and sell four of its beers for the first time in a special 12-pack throughout Colorado. All four beers — two lagers and two ales — will carry the brand name New Voyage as a symbol of the brewery branching out.
They are Fresh New Voyage, a 4.7 percent ABV lager with “hints of grassiness and citrus”; Crisp New Voyage, a 5.2 percent ABV pilsner; Bright New Voyage, a 5.5 percent ABV pale ale with blood orange; and Hazy New Voyage, a 7 percent ABV hazy IPA that is heavy on the citrus.
“We are trying to spread what we do here further out,” Legnard said. The 12-pack is “Blue Moon for whoever can’t come to RiNo.” The beers should hit liquor-store shelves this month.
The original Blue Moon Belgian White was first brewed in 1995 as Bellyslide Wit at the Sandlot, the small Coors-owned brewery inside Coors Field. But by the end of that year, Coors had changed the name and begun marketing Blue Moon around the country. Over the next few decades, Coors would make dozens of other Blue Moon and “Moon” variations.
But in 2016, the company opened its RiNo flagship, at 3750 Chestnut Place, to serve as a site where people could visit and put a name to a face – or, rather, to a beer. (Neither Denver location actually brews the Blue Moon you see in stores, though, as that is made elsewhere.)
In 2020, Blue Moon Brewing stunned the beer world when it won a gold medal at the Great American Beer Festival for a style that was pioneered by small craft breweries: hazy pale ale. That beer, Moon Haze, can now be found in the New Voyage Explorer 12-pack as Hazy New Voyage.
They’ll be available at least through the end of 2023, but if the cans sell well, Legnard said he “wouldn’t be surprised if we continue to expand it … . We’ll see how it does, and then make a plan.”
