DRAFT Magazine

On Friday, a thief broke into Laramie Wyoming’s Altitude Chophouse and Brewery, opened the taps, and dumped $21,000 worth of beer all over the establishment. But the story has a happy-ish ending. In an email to DRAFTMag.com, brewmaster Nathan Venner explains what happened:

Early Friday morning a dude broke into Altitude and opened up all our taps. He didn’t steal anything; he didn’t even pour himself a beer. We lost over $21,000 dollars worth of beer, most of it went all over the floor of the dinning room. I had a few lucky breaks: I decided not to tap a new batch of Pale and just risk it running out late Thursday, and I decided not to hook up a new nitrogen tank even though it was under 150 lbs. So when the nitrogen ran out the CO2 tank couldn’t keep up and all the pressure in the tanks dropped to 7-8 psi, which made the taps slow to a trickle. Last night we packed the house and served 8 of our brews, albeit from very low tanks. All of my specialty brews were emptied, including a Braggot with 300 lbs of honey, the Cayenne Cocoa Bock, and the Grizzly Whisperer IPA. I always thought that churches and breweries were exempt from vandalism around here. What kind of person dumps that much craft beer down the drain? It was like watching old prohibition videos when the untouchables were destroying stills.

It gets better when we tried to find the dude. We just had some really nice cameras installed with great night vision. So we had several shots of him wandering around in the dark. The owners thought to check the cameras at their sports bar down the street to see if he had been in there drinking. He was not only at Lovejoy’s earlier that day, but he applied for a job! Now he’s the dude in prison for dumping out about 50 kegs worth of craft brew.

We should have some photos available very soon of possibly one of the dumbest criminals.