The Mountain Sun of Boulder fame is putting up a new brewery restaurant at the former site of The Milagro Taco Bar on 17th and Vine.

Their beer is good, their tempeh reuben is good, their fries are excellent. Micro brew and french fries, that’s what I like. A lot. It’s a nice, unpretentious addition to this stretch of 17th.

Now I have more than my share of quibbles with hippies, post hippies and much of what is considered, rightly or wrongly, to be part of hippie culture. But you know what part of their legacy I don’t dispute? Food, muthafucka, food!

Here’s an excerpt from an interview with The Nation’s resident contrarian Alexander Coburn. He’s using the example of gourmet coffee, but I’m extending it to microbreweries and the availability of non processed, organic, vegetarianish fare that doesn’t taste like ass.

because hippies in the ’60s decided they wanted to have whole-grain bread and be healthy, and then they also wanted to have properly roasted coffee. And so, they gradually got organic-food stores that actually were quite good, and the bread got better, and there were farmers’ markets. Now, all this happened in the teeth of political onslaughts by both parties who were, of course, in the pay of the food industry.

In my local town of Eureka, Calif., the other day, I went into Pierson’s, which is the main building supply place where you buy stuff if you’re redoing your house and all the rest of it. I looked at their coffee booth. They were selling coffee from nine beans from nine different countries. Nine! This is not some hippie hangout. This is where mighty men with measuring tapes in their waist belts and huge hammers hanging from their trousers ­ that’s where they go. And you could have nine different kinds of coffee. Now that’s progress.

Welcome hippies.