Whipped Cream Difficulties

George Stranahan, colorful figure.

His family owned the Champion Spark Plug company, so he had family money. He got a PhD in physics, and spent a lot of time doing physics in the late 1950s.

Staring at a blank page one afternoon in 1959, he made a discovery: You can’t do physics alone. You need someone to talk to. Mr. Stranahan dreamed of creating a physics think tank in the Rockies.

So he did:

The Aspen Center for Physics was born. It proved pivotal in the development of the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, for a long time the world’s most powerful particle accelerator, and the formulation of string theory, regarded by many physicists as the most promising candidate for a “theory of everything” that would explain all the universe’s physical phenomena.
Sixty-six Nobel laureates have visited. “I’m convinced all the best physics gets done there,” Tony Leggett, one of those Nobelists, wrote on the center’s website. Another, Brian Schmidt, called the center “the place I have gone to expand my horizons for the entirety of my career.”

He cut back on his involvement in physics in 1972.

…in 1980, he opened a bar near Aspen, the Woody Creek Tavern, where he spent several years mixing drinks while also pitching in for humbler tasks like janitorial work. His daughter Molly Stranahan remembered him as a skilled cooker of soup for customers, including ranchers and cowboys.

He went on to found Stranahan’s Colorado Whiskey (which I have heard good things about, but never been able to find) and Flying Dog beer.

As of last year, Flying Dog was the 35th-biggest craft brewing company in the United States, according to the Brewers Association. In 2010, a “beer panel” convened by the New York Times food critics Eric Asimov and Florence Fabricant to rank pale ales declared Flying Dog’s Doggie Style Classic its “consensus favorite.”

He also did some ranching:

In 1990, Mr. Stranahan’s Limousin bull Turbo was declared grand champion at the 1990 National Western Stock Show, a highly regarded trade show. The price for a shot of Turbo’s semen rose to $15,000.
He quit the business not long after. Even with Turbo, Mr. Stranahan estimated that he lost $1 million during 18 years of ranching.

Going back for a minute, if the Woody Creek Tavern rings a bell with you, yes, that was Hunter S. Thompson’s hangout. Mr. Stranahan and Hunter were close friends.

Mr. Thompson either leased or bought the land he lived on from Mr. Stranahan. The details of the arrangement, intended to be easy on Mr. Thompson, appear to have been lost in a haze of friendship and misbehavior. The first time the two men met, Mr. Stranahan told Vanity Fair in 2003, they took mescaline that hit him “like a sledgehammer.”
“We talked a lot, drank a lot and dynamited a lot,” Mr. Stranahan said about their friendship in a 2008 interview with The Denver Post. “If you’re a rancher, you have access to dynamite.”

For the historical record: NYT obit for Frank Bonner.