For some, Lyons is simply a stopover town on the way to Estes Park. For others, it is the fertile garden where legendary craft brewery Oskar Blues took root in 1997.
For Eric Kean, though, Lyons is home. “I grew up here. I went to school in Lyons from first grade through twelfth grade,” he says. So he had a front-row seat not just to Oskar Blues’s rise from tiny startup to canning pioneer to one of the largest and most recognized craft breweries in the country, but to the three-decade-long growth and expansion of craft beer in Colorado in general.