Elysian & West Flanders Brewing Make Super Bowl Wager

With all of the Super Bowl hype between the Seattle Seahawks and Denver Broncos that keeps building with each new day this week, there’s a nice friendly wager happening between two breweries from Washington and Colorado. Seattle’s Elysian Brewing will be putting up their Seahawks against Boulder’s West Flanders Brewing and their Broncos to see which team and brewery comes out on top.

The terms of the wager are significant. The head brewer for the brewpub of the winning city’s team will be flown to the losing team’s city, at the loser’s expense. There they will take over the brewery’s equipment and staff to brew a beer of their choice on that brewery’s equipment.

To raise the stakes even higher, on tapping day the losing brewery must fly the winning brewery team’s flag for two weeks or until the beer is gone, whichever comes first.

“I cannot wait to see the Seahawks flag raised in Colorado” says Elysian co-founder David Buhler. “The NFL’s top-ranked defense against the top-ranked offense makes this one of the most epic Super Bowl games ever. But the Hawks secondary is going to dismantle Manning and our offense will be in Beast mode”

West Flanders co-founder Mark Heinritz is not worried about such predictions. “The state of Washington,” Heinritz says, “has excellent breweries, incredible hop fields, and the second-best football team in the NFL. The Broncos will beat the Seahawks.”

“I already have the Broncos flag folded up in a Fed Ex envelope with Elysian’s address,” says West Flanders head brewer Brian Lutz. “The Seahawks are a great team, but Manning and the Broncos are gonna stampede to victory in New Jersey.”

Lutz says he is compiling a list of premium Colorado-grown ingredients to use in the beer he intends to brew in Seattle. “The beer’s gonna be delicious,” he says, “but it may leave a bad taste in the mouths of Seahawks fans.”

We always hear about politicians getting involved in these types of wagers so its nice to hear that the craft beer movement is taking some of the steam from those blowhards.