Mountain Sun Pub & Brewery
- Price Range: $$
- Accepts Credit Cards: No
- Parking: Street
- Attire: Casual
- Good for Groups: Yes
- Good for Kids: Yes
- Takes Reservations: No
- Delivers: No
- Take-out: No
- Waiter Service: Yes
- Wheelchair Accessible: Yes
- Outdoor Seating: No
- Good for: Dinner, Late Night
- Music: Live
- Best Nights: Fri, Sun, Wed
- Happy Hour: Yes
- Alcohol: Beer & Wine Only
- Smoking: No
- Coat Check: No
41 Reviews for Mountain Sun Pub & Brewery
I was on a search for a pint glass for my collection...My friend and I sat down in a booth only to be greeted by the worst smell of BO ever. The whole place smelt like it. Is this normal, or we lucky enough to go on the one day it permeated everything? We were going to stick it out so I could at least get a beer and a glass. I asked the server if they sold them, and apparently they only sell plain glasses, why would I want a plain glass? She kept rushing us to make a decision of what to drink, and kept repeating, do you just want water, can I just bring you water? Jeez, fine yes, we'll get water. We got up and left as soon as she walked away. Horrible service, horrible smell, and no pint glasses.
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I like this place and I like their beer. This is the place you go when you want dinner to revolve more around drinking, than eating. Don't get me wrong they have good burgers and sandwiches as well, but their beer is king here.
Four things the Mountain Sun should do though:
1. Tell the table wiper person to water-down the damn Chlorox before wiping all the tables before lunch. Seriously, ever wonder what the Chlorox factory smells like? Step inside their doors between the hours of 11:30 am and 1 pm. It smells like someone shot Chlorox out of a water canon into the restaurant.
2. Stop putting an entire industrial-sized-can of black beans on your nachos! Look...black beans are good and I like them but having nearly 400 of the little suckers on your nachos is not cool!
3. Have live music more than one night a week.
4. Whoever keeps stealing the damn Connect Four pieces out of the box on the game shelf, please put them back! Kinda hard to play Connect Four when you have 7 black pieces and 9 red ones. Know what happens??? No one can win the game. Perhaps that is the point.
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aha...just what the Mountain Sun on Pearl in Boulder needs...another Yelp review.
Such a variety of perceptions...I simply must throw in my 2 cents worth, for whatever it's worth....the first correct answer wins a prize!!
It's the plethora of choices of grilled cheese that have made me love this place. I have not tried the grilled cheese at the other location(s) just here. Always good. Verrry cheap. Nice to play a board game here, and I like the friendly service.
When it is crowded at dinner time, it is sometimes a little daunting to make one's way through the gauntlet of the entire length of the restaurant to put one's name on a waiting list. But the upside of this process is that sometimes you can meet a new friend or two while making the pilgrim's progress up to the bar to get on the wait list.
Still, it's a relief to successfully happen in during an uncrowded time.
This is rare. Such is success in the restaurant world.
I love you, Mountain Sun, because grilled cheese sandwiches with real cheese, on whole grain fresh bread, at a reasonable price, are just what I need sometimes, along with your tasty root beer that I enjoy and your many beers 'most everyone else enjoys, and your beautiful absence of TV, which I appreciate greatly.
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The home of my favorite beers in Boulder. Their FYI IPA & Java Porter rival any brew I've ever had the good fortune of drinking.
The food is excellent to decent but very well priced. I would suggest the basil blue cheese burger or the enormous mound of nachos. Unfortunately the delicious chicken wings that are available at the more family-oriented sister establishment, the Southern Sun, are not available here.
The nights to come to the Mountain Sun are Tuesdays and Sundays. On Tuesdays, one can enjoy happy hour priced pints ($2.25!) of their fantastic brews all night long if you're wearing one of their T-shirts/apparel. Don't have a T-shirt ? Well, buy one! They have great designs on them and you'll get a free beer with that purchase! T-shirt Tuesdays do tend to be very crowded and loud, and you may rub shoulders with some of the hippier patrons.
For a more relaxing evening, Sunday nights feature live local music (tends towards folk/blue grass) and a less rowdy crowd. Although there are always people to dance with.
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Tho we don't live in Boulder we visit friends here sometimes. Tho the Mountain Sun is not our favorite place to eat, and it is always so crowded and you have to navigate through the crowds to the back to get on the waiting list in order to get seated, we still like to eat here because of good beer, good music, and good cheap grub.
I've gotta say something about what Sarah M. mentioned...the people who eat at Mountain Sun are generally outdoorsy super health nuts who have probably just been out mountain biking, mountain climbing, jogging, or one of their other triathlete pursuits. This is probably why Sarah did not like the smell of real, active, athletic humans who stop in to get a bite to eat before going home to shower.
We've always had casual and laid-back but passable service.
No place pleases everyone, but I'd rather that a place smell like humans than chemical disinfectants.
Sterility is what I loathe.
'nuff said.
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I have been going to this pub since its inception. They have opened another south of town with very consistent results. Since moving from Boulder I have been hard pressed to find similarly tasty, hoppy brew (and nachos that equal theirs). In my search for tasty, quality, hoppy stuff, a close second in quality, color and flavor in my opinion has been the Standing Stone Brewery in Ashland, Oregon.
At the Mountain Sun, I have to say I love the nachos. A small order is more like a "large medium." Their fearless use of black beans and fresh salsa has made me an addict.
Staff: their baseline service is decent but can be inconsistent in terms of how fast they round on you. On the other hand, they rotate the staff in all positions which gives the place more of a family business vibe.
Beer selection: HOPPY, flavorful, broad spectrum within the hoppy bandwidth...
Fact is, because I don't visit Boulder frequently enough I typically crawl into a pitcher of the nitro Kind and/or Triple X and am quite satisfied.
Well, this is a little bit scary. I live just over a block from Mountain Sun now. That means that when I get home just after four in the afternoon, I have to make a choice between walking to Mountain Sun and having a couple of happy hour priced pints or going to the gym. Anyone care to hazard a guess about how many times I've made it to the gym in the last two weeks?
In the imaginary perfect town in my mind, Mountain Sun occupies a prime location on Main Street. Fortunately, in my real life, Mountain Sun occupies a prime location on Pearl Street and I actually get to go there.
So, good beer, good food, excellent service (why doesn't anyone else copy their everyone is in charge of every table in the place attitude?), and great atmosphere.
Negatives? I'm stretching a bit here to come up with something. It can get a bit loud. But it's a bar, what are you expecting?
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My favorite place on earth...they actually have a Phish poster on the wall and Grateful Dead stickers with tapestries all over. They were playing Phish off of someone's iPod. All I can say is this is Heaven on Earth.
You just don't get places like this in DC area or most of the east coast. Maybe in the Carolina's or up in the north eastern parts but I have looked high and low and the closest thing to "hippie" in DC would have to be Lost Dog or maybe Grog and Tankard but that is a stretch of the imagination compared to Mountain Sun.
I had the Kind Ale and the vegan Tempeh Reuben and it was awesome! I have made it at home once before but this was definitely better. Great crowd, great music, beer and food. If I only I could convince my husband to move to Boulder but I may have to settle for the occasional visit.
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Awesome selection of veggie bar food- I had the tempeh reuben, but it was a tough choice...there were so many other awesome looking options: veggie chili, veggie burritos, wraps, quesadillas, burgers, sandwiches, etc. All under $10.
Great beer too, and friendly service.
The beers were almost $4 a pint which seems a bit steep to me...and the Yahtzee had no dice and no score cards, just the cups. Now what kind of Yahtzee is that??
Oh, I wish they had outdoor seating...
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Meh, the beer is okay here. Pretty good stout. Their other beers are just alright. Sort of on the strong side so that you get a little drunk before you actually taste anything. Food is okay for a pub, but not really better or worse than anything in the area.
This is the best beer pub in Boulder and rivals anything in any other state I have been in. These guys brew everything in the back of the house and I am quite fond of the Colorado Kind and any Porter or Stout they have on tap (and if they have it on Nitro you absolutely must order whatever it is)! They have a late night happy hour which is a steal.
The five stars are for the beer cuz the food is just so so. But seriously their beer turns anything you are eating into gold.
Their beer has the Midas Touch.
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This place is just fabulous. AMAZING burgers, amazing veggie burgers, really huge selection of beer. The fries are so good and most everything I have had there is great. If you are noise sensitive then I would suggest not going on a Friday or Sat night.
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This was one of the best meals we had all vacation. We hit many cities and this place was the stand out. I had the veggie Rubin made with Tempe and a side of french fries made in-house. We hit this place early and got the happy hour prices. We took advantage of the happy hour and tried as many local beers as we could. We tried the XXX Pale, Colorado Kind, FYIPA, Illusion Dweller IPA, and the Oatmeal Stout on my favorite nitrogen pull.
I could have eaten there every night of our vacation if we stayed in Boulder.
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Want to take a peak into a spot where real Boulderites go for a good time? Check out Mountain Sun or its sister Southern Sun. It's a combo microbrewery and restaurant- sure to treat you to a good time!The vast variety of award winning micro brews will not disappoint, the atmosphere is loud and fun, you can bring board games to your table to entertain yourself (yay!), the servers are attentive, friendly and knowledgeable, the food is tasty and the prices are right!! Check out their specials (I loved taco night) and you will be in for an old fashion tasty deal!
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Mountain Sun is like Southern Sun, but worse in several ways: first, it is more cramped, which means the loud music and the loud talk make this place especially susceptible to...noise.....; second, the service here is spottier than at Southern Sun. Why this is, I'm not exactly sure....but the difference was pretty stark; third, it is on Pearl Street which makes parking pretty obnoxious; and fourth and finally, they played some of the worst prog. rock/stoner rock I've ever heard in my life there the last time I was there. Dissonance just isn't cool at a restaurant, especially for 2 hours.
Anyway, go to Southern Sun instead...better service, easier to get to, and less annoying in the noise department. From what I could tell, the food and beer were naturally the same: good and excellent respectively.
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Didn't get to sample any of their food, but it looked pretty damn good.
I was there strictly for the beer. I had some kind of speciality brew - lemongrass something something (super helpful, huh?) - that was down right amazing.
We didn't stay long (we were touring 4 other breweries) but one of the servers agreed to give us a tour even though they were absolutely hopping. Of course, that was after they did their staff bar slam (not sure what the shot was...) Would definitely go back to try the food.
Was also slightly alarmed at the smell of BO around me. I think it was just some of the trustafarians but not something that I'd like to encounter while eating.
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My first restaurant visit in this fine city of Boulder CO!
Blackened chicken sandwich was delicious and it was def. worth the extra buck for french fries.
They have a Monday lunch special where a beer is only 2 bucks with an entree. Will be back for sure.
Love the vibe and funny names for the beer and food. I see many nights here in my future...
Just remember, they only take cash.
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During my 10 years in Boulder, Mountain Sun was my hangout. The restaurant is small with a few bigger tables and some booths. There is nothing like the vibe you get after a day or skiing or whatever, then walking into Mountain Sun for some Kind Ales and a Grilled Cheese. It feels like everyone in the place probably did something damn cool that day as well. TIPS: be ready to wait and stand by the bar for a while until your table is ready, service is not great...but it's worth it.
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Usually I go here so I can beat my boyfriend at checkers... He gets so caught up in his beer and burger that it allows me the opportunity to cheat without him even noticing. All of a sudden, he will come back to the game and he will realize that he is losing... He will scrunch his eyes, take another swig and blame the beer... Little does he know.... Unless he reads this posting.
The big community wood tables, board games and beer galore, make this a great place for a a couple different groups of people:
1) Friends (Especially out-of-town guests who care more about beer than food)
2) Family (Young families are often in there in the earlier part of
dinner-time hours... So time your night accordingly
3) A date where you don't really want to or have a conversation (See, you wont even have to think of an excuse)
4) The Single Parana... A great place to meet the usually boozed up
male... Or hot tom-boy girl hanging out with the guys
I have never waited that long for a table, as the service is fast and
the patrons are extremely hungry for some reason... hmmm, I wonder why?
Other postings scream about the food, I don't feel the same way... I
never find the food to be that great and I am always a little
unsatisfied. On the wellness note, there are healthy sandwich options and decent vegetarian soup picks... Which temporarily keep you away from the fries.
* Star one is a great urban location right on Pearl Street
** Score star two goes to MS for their sometimes free fries while you
wait by the bar
*** Community garden star number three is for nice large tables good for groups or meeting new friends
**** Our final and last star is for having awesome brewed beer and
being a guy magnet... This place can easily be a singles scene as much as a date or family scene... With groups of boys here, Mountain Sun is an ideal place to use that seductive lick of ketchup off of your lipstick that you have been practicing in the mirror lately. He, competition is tough these days, gotta differentiate yourself right?
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Good food . Great atmosphere. Great beer!
Be prepared to wait, even on a Tuesday night. And bring cash.
As a fry aficianado, these rank high! Thin, crispy, tasty, skins on and all. Mmmmmm.....
Mountain Sun = Second-best burgers in Boulder.
That's saying a lot for a hippie joint. Sure, they've got a tempeh Reuben, as one might expect, and plenty of other hippie fare (and a perhaps surprising amount of Mexican food options), but they still know how to grill a piece of meat (all-natural, hormone-free beef, of course).
Their house-made beers are great as well, and I've never had a bad meal, be it a happy hour taco, the burger, a salad, pasta or even said tempeh Reuben.
Complaints: They don't have a TV. Not only that, they refuse to have a TV. Rather pretentious. I'm not looking to be inundated with televisions, but sometimes I just like to go to a neighborhood pub, sip a beer and zone out watching the tube. But overall, this is a minor complaint. I come here for food and to be with my friends, and I'll go to the Lazy Dog if I want to watch TV while I drink. Oh, another complaint. Get a freakin' credit card machine. It's 2007.
Mountain Sun's cool factor in a nutshell: During the great blizzard of 2003, when the entire city had shut down, when police were ticketing people for driving their cars, I walked down Pearl Street (I lived downtown then) to see if anything was open. Everything was quiet and closed--except the Mountain Sun. The place was rocking. Not even a blizzard can stop these people. Rock on, Mountain Sun.
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Visited Mountain Sun while on vacation in Boulder. What a great change from all the other slightly over-priced, over-fancy breweries we visited. We didn't eat anything other than a hummus appetizer (which was very good, and served with brown bread and corn chips instead of pita), but we did sample four of the beers on tap that day and all were tasty. They had a good selection of hoppy beers to keep my fiance happy.
This place is a fun college town pub! It's a conscious organization that brews their own brews and offers free range and organically grown food. Their rasberry wheat ale was good, their guinness-like stout fair, their wine selection not so hot (sort of for the wine in a box crowd), and they didn't offer any pear cider (I hope they do some day...), but outside of those few things, the atmosphere was fun, friendly, and ready to rock out. I enjoyed Mountain Sun.
Awesome microbrewery on Pearl Street. We got a long bench table to sit on for the 10 of us. We ordered nachos, fries, different sampling of there beer (they brew it in the back). It was great, laid back and chill.
Mmm, Junk Buger, Raspberry Wheat Ale, cheap prices and fun & cozy dining. It's often packed - for a reason. Mmm, Mountain Sun!
Oh, the Mountain Sun (Pub and Brewery). What a great place to enjoy the mountains and the sun. Oh, and the hippies. Obviously--you are still in Boulder--so their presence will be KNOWN. Not that I eat burgers, but I hear the burgers hear leave little to the imagination. And the beer--just plain spectacular! (though I don't drink beer either). BUT I know peeps that come for miles! You will leave the Mountain Sun with a smile. You wont leave for a while. BUT when you do....
Good beer and reasonable prices. Not too many choices on the menu outside of the burgers, salads, and fries variety but perfect for apres-sports-activity meals.
Fairly typical burgers and beer place but with more locals than tourists.
Great Beers!
I really like the IPA's and HOP head beers the have here.
Don't miss the
Swan Song IPA
FYIPA
Kind Ale
XXX (the name of the beer)
also Great:
Java Porter
The burger fell apart while I was eating it, juices running down my hands, pieces of bun and lettuce and cheese cascading to the plate. Crispy fries accompanied these fallen morsels as a sort of burger & fries salad.
The beer was dark and good. The waiter was a hippie who was having ... a really good time.
The bill was like $20 for the two of us.
When I manage to get back to Boulder, I'll be back here. No question.
If you like hippy dip shit jam band people go here.
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A SOLID place for some beer and grub!
If you want some straightforward (and cheap) food and some great beer while in the neighborhood of the Pearl Street shopping mecca, this is your place. Specials on the weeknights (things like burger and beer for $7), and a 4pm- 6pm happy hour every day.
The service is efficient (and communal): You need salsa? Flag down pretty much anyone that works there and they'll be happy to hook you up. Be sure to bring cash 'cause that's all they take; there is an ATM in the back; see it on your way to the brewing tanks (and bathrooms).
Yeah, so give a beer sampler a try (they've got almost 20 beers brewed in-house on any given day), but I can personally vouch for the Thunderhead Stout and their imperial IPA (which I think is called I & IPA). And like some other folks said, they've got boardgames waiting in the wings, free for all to play; find an open table and spend an afternoon (after you rock some running/biking/skiing, of course)..
For what it is, a cash-only burger joint with microbrewery and hippies, ultra-friendly waitstaff and campy feel, Mountain Sun totally succeeds. As David Z. mentioned below, the fries are excellent - skin on medium cut non-crispy yet satisfyingly tasty with vinegar. Burgers are also great too. Some other items that are good on the menu are:
quesadillas (with or without chicken)
soups (whatever kind, they're all consistently good - NOT CHILI)
chicken sandwiches
and, of course, beer. I like the browns and the wheats are also good too.
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For the quality of the beer, food and for the low prices, this place is unbeatable for a pint, a (free range) burger and superb pub fries. Of course, it's hardly unpopular, so at peak hours there will be a wait (at the bar).
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I really would have given them 5 stars, but when I ordered my pepper jack burger with "fries"....they gave me a burger with pepper jack and "rice." I'm not kidding. And I DO NOT have a funny sounding accent either. They put rice on my burger. A little airheaded, but once they fixed the burger, it was great, and so was the beers I copiously consumed after I ordered my rice burger.
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A couple other things you should know: they do not accept credit cards and they have board-type games to play while you eat and hangout..
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5 stars for the beer -- they're all good, but I'm particularly fond of the Belgian Dip or the Java Porter off the nitro tap. Easily the best beers I've had anywhere at any microbrewery in any state.
4 stars for the Nachos -- a full order is a perfect appetizer to split between four people when drinking pints.
3 stars for the atmosphere -- pure Boulder -- crowded, noisy, and people hanging around for a long time over books and games. The interior hand-painted and hand-chalked art is wonderful in a summer concert jam band traveler sort of way. People who frequent the Suns are friendly types, usually kind and polite, not jostling and rude and creepy as it can be at similarly crowded places (The Med). While it's loud, it's not frat-boy loud nor sports-bar loud --it's just loud because everyone is conversing and trying to hear/be heard.
3 stars for the food, except for the fries
0 stars for the fries: The Mountain Sun/Southern Sun has the worst fries in Boulder. They are always soggy, floppy, under and over cooked (in the same basket), and bitter. When fries are cooked from fresh cut potatoes, they need to be fried twice -- once at a medium temperature to cook them through, and once at a high temperature to make them crispy. The Mountain Sun is getting it wrong -- cooking them once at a low temp for too long. So I get a salad or chips instead. Their pub fare is otherwise very consistent -- I've never had anything I disliked, aside from the fries. Very bad no good fries. WTF is up with you reviewers who liked them? Do I have an invisible sign on my forehead that says "serve me and everyone I dine with the worst fries you can make" and somehow everyone else gets the good ones? But no! Baskets of fries at adjoining tables look the same! Maybe ya'll have had too many pints before you get your fries!
3 stars for the service: it's kind of slow, but not bad. Not great, but not bad. It can take a long time to get a table, and there's no other bar seating. But if you don't mind standing around in a loud crowd for 45 minutes drinking pints, go for it.
Good beer, excellent food, nice indoor style and cool waitress. I had a spicy chicken burrito. Yum.
Some places just take you back to a time when life wasn't so chain-oriented and dining out experiences felt authentic. This is the ultimate grad student hang out in Boulder and the beer is arguably the best in the city. (I drink anything off of the nitro tap). Coming from Chicago, I had this gleeful moment of reverse sticker shock during happy hour....and the quality of the happy hour beers. The burgers are fine, but come here for the beer and hanging out aspect. Southern Sun is also great, and considerably larger...
Great food/beer. Perfect place to hit after a long day on the bike or skis.
I like this place a lot, especially the ambiance--hippy-dippy. And good iced teas!
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