Boulder County’s craft beer explosion isn’t done yet — or that’s the assumption for the owners of a new wave of breweries-in-planning that are shooting to open this year. We count at least eight breweries that have made some degree of progress toward opening.

West Flanders is in this bold new group of breweries that’s making a specialty out of a particular style. While the recent addition to Boulder’s beer scene does produce an IPA, a stout, a pale ale and a few other standards, it’s all about the Belgians here. When we stop by for a Monday lunch, there are four Belgian styles on tap, along with actual Belgians from actual Belgium in bottles and on a guest tap.

Food assistance in Boulder County has increased rapidly in the past five years. Since April 2007, clients of the Boulder County Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) have jumped from 8,848 to 21,250 as of April 2013, a 240 percent increase.

At some point, I think we all lost the ability to identify beer flavors.

Savor, dear readers, the rare industry that doesn’t require constant branding and marketing. There are tons of opportunity for branding in the craft beer industry, of course, but there isn’t a pathological need for it like with cars or cookies or coffee or most everything you can think of.

But when Baile came by, we couldn’t help but ask whether the Cucumber Cream Ale was ready. Soon it was sitting in front of us, and I was, as I said, filled with fear, dread and doubt. And you thought writing about beer trips was all fun and games.

At 9.4 percent ABV, Funky J ain’t no joke. It pours pitch black with a red wine aroma, and the first taste isn’t far off that mark either.

Much is made of Boulder County, and particularly the city, being different from the rest of the country. I can’t speak to that as a whole, but I can say it’s pretty different from my hometown in Northeast Ohio. And nowhere was that more apparent than Shine Restaurant & Gathering Place.

We have a tendency here to be fascinated with the new. Uh, we’re journalists. This whole beer tour was inspired by the explosion of new breweries in the county in the last few years. But celebrating Boulder’s beer is just as much about the long-standing as the new, and we’re certainly not ignorant of history.

There’s a lot of sharing on our beer tour. When I describe six of a brewery’s beers in this column, I didn’t order six beers. I just brought five people. We pass everything around, and even trade or give away beers we don’t care for.