Octopus tap.

• Author: Peterson, Eric
• Position: COLORADO COOL STUFF

Best friends since their childhood in Vail, Cody Payne and Ryan Welch went to college at CU and the Air Force Academy, respectively, in the early 1990s. Not too surprisingly, Welch would regularly head up to Boulder to hit parties with his old pal.

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"This is where we ran into the keg line," he says. "We just thought, There's got to be a better way to do this.'"

Fast-forward a decade. Welch, out of the Air Force, settled in Lafayette and reconnected with Payne on that "better way." The duo, who worked in high-tech by day and moonlighted as beer connoisseurs and home brewers by night, added "inventor" to their resumes with their patented Octopus...