Several New Belgium Brewing brands have now appeared at Harris Teeter in Pentagon Row, among them Fat Tire Amber Ale and Hoptoberfest...priced $2.99-$3.99 per 22oz bottle.
I just picked up four bottles of Fat Tire (22-oz, the only size presently being sold here; six-packs are due in late September) at Total Beverage in Springfield for $2.79 each. They're special "2011 Virginia Commemorative" bottles. I haven't had Fat Tire since a trip to Laramie, Wyoming, in 2007 (we stopped at the New Belgium brewery in Fort Collins on the way up from Denver), so it'll be interesting to see whether I still like it. My taste has evolved to hoppier stuff in recent years. I believe New Belgium are also offering an IPA (Ranger IPA, I think) and I may try that next.
My father tells a story about how when we lived in Copperas Cove, Texas, in the early 1970s (I was born there) it was very hard to get Coors beer anywhere and he managed to get some for a barbecue they were going to have. But he stored it in the garage for a month and he couldn't understand why nobody was drinking it when they finally had the barbecue—"This is COORS BEER!" Coors was apparently a Very Big Deal then. Then he tasted it and found it had skunked in the garage in the Texas heat. Fat Tire makes me think of that story because it seems like Fat Tire was one of those beers that was a Big Deal to a lot of beer-drinkers on the East Coast, probably because we couldn't get it here. I was thinking that Fat Tire has been sort of a younger generation's Coors in the sense that it's only slowly become more widely available.
