In the early days of Oskar Blues, Katechis sometimes wondered what he had gotten himself into. Katechis named the restaurant Oskar Blues after two friends he’d met on a bike tour, Oskar and Old Blue. He and Christi maxed out four credit cards to start a southern-style restaurant in Lyons, north of Boulder, where they had just bought a house. “I’d always had a dream of opening a restaurant and brewing on the weekends,” he said. But when Katechis started his own business in 1997, a brewery wasn’t part of the picture. The two struck up a friendship that helped kindle Katechis’ desire to do more brewing. Katechis, a home brewer in his college days, followed his nose one day to find the source, a guy named Gordon Knight, whose High Country Brewery was on the cutting edge of the now wildly popular big-hopped beers. at Madden Mountaineering, making high-tech custom backpacks, then riding his bike to his bartending gig at Old Chicago on Pearl Street, which started at 4 p.m.ĭuring his commute on the bike path, he’d occasionally smell the familiar aroma of brewing beer. In fact, Katechis got two jobs in Boulder, working 7 a.m. “Once we realized that the thousand bucks that we started with ran out in Boulder, we said, ‘You know what? We’d better get some jobs,’” Katechis said. They loaded up the van and set out, but they only made it as far as Boulder, where they stopped to visit friends. When they both graduated from Auburn University 20 years ago, the couple made the fateful decision to move to Wise River, Mont., after seeing an article in Outside magazine about the outdoors lifestyle and mountain biking scene there. Katechis was born and raised in Alabama, where he met his high school sweetheart, now wife, Christi. It was a fluke that brought him to Colorado in the first place, but once here, his restless creativity and energy made it all but assured that he would do something special. The way Katechis’ success has played out in Lyons is equal parts accident and inevitability. The waitstaff serves pulled pork and red beans to customers they’ve come to know by name, the nights are filled with live music by blues luminaries like John Lee Hooker Jr., and the Oskar Blues beer on tap is legendary – particularly the flagship brew, the aggressively hopped Dale’s Pale Ale.ĭale’s Pale Ale is named after Dale Katechis, the man who started Oskar Blues. The original Oskar Blues Grill & Brew in Lyons doesn’t look that impressive from its shopping center exterior, but inside it’s all southern hospitality and bluesy rock’n’roll. In the last decade, Lyons’ fame has spread even further thanks to Oskar Blues, a funky Cajun restaurant which begat a brewery which has rapidly evolved into an internationally renowned beer empire and epicenter of the “canned-beer apocalypse.” LYONS HAS BEEN FAMOUS for more than a century as the gateway to the Rockies, an almost absurdly beautiful town surrounded on three sides by Technicolor red sandstone mountains. September/October 2012 CL issue of Colorado Life Magazine)