Photo by Terry Georgia
Erin and Jacob Crabtree entertain City Star Brewery patrons with a challenging trivia contest on Tuesday nights.

By Terry Georgia
The Surveyor

Cheers, groans, laughter and the occasional mumbled curse fill the air at City Star Brewery on Tuesday evenings. That’s when Humdinger Trivia takes over the patio and much of the indoor seating at the brewery. The friendly and challenging trivia competition draws a big crowd on what would otherwise be a quiet night of the week on Mountain Avenue.
For two hours, starting at 6 p.m., teams compete for free beer and bragging rights at the brewery owned by Whitney and John Way. 10 to 18 teams usually compete, representing a wide range of ages and backgrounds.

Owner, Whitney Way, welcomed the opportunity to bring trivia nights back to City Star. They’d had a trivia competition for several years starting in 2012, but then had to stop when the host of the event moved away. “A little over a year ago,” recalled Way, “a local couple, who were regular customers, approached us with the idea of hosting trivia. We really loved these two, and what they wanted to do was a really good fit. They have such passion and creativity. It’s been very successful.”

That young couple, Erin and Jacob Crabtree, had loved playing trivia at a local brewery when they lived in Austin. “We actually weren’t usually the winners!” Erin recalled, “But it was always so much fun, and the friendships we developed during those Trivia nights inspired us to start hosting!” They wanted to create that same kind of community when they moved to Berthoud. City Star was the perfect fit.

Unlike other popular pub trivia competitions that are generated electronically or drawn from trivia websites, the Crabtrees research and write all their own questions. Each week they spend 3-4 hours developing unusual themes and questions to keep things fresh and interesting. They challenge the crowd with five distinctly themed rounds of ten questions each. “Throughout the week, we both jot down round theme ideas based off things that occur in our daily lives,” the couple discloses, “an interesting thing we heard on the radio, or just something that pops in our heads! We like to think of round categories that aren’t very cut and dry, that we can be creative with!”

They sometimes sneak in similar questions or running jokes a few weeks in a row, which they say is fun for them as they watch regular players figure them out.

“Jacob loves to write “rephrased” rounds,” says Erin, “which is essentially asking for the name of something after using synonyms to describe it.” An example of this might be a “rephrased round” of Arnold Schwarzenegger movies, where a clue might be: “Accurate Deception.” Know the real name of the movie? See the end of this story for the answer.

“A good example of [our] style,” says Erin, “would be a round we titled, “Somebody Call the Doctor!” in which we included questions about Dr. Pepper, Beats by Dr. Dre, scientific names for different kinds of Doctors, memorable character Doctors from books or TV shows, and of course the Robert Palmer song: “Bad Case of Loving You.”

The wide variety of topics and clever themes they devise make the rounds mind-bending, challenging and always fun. The last round is always music with audio clues. The Crabtrees play clips from songs and usually ask teams to name the song and the performer. Depending on a team’s familiarity with different eras of music, this round can be very challenging.
The Crabtrees are also open to audience suggestions for categories and themes for future contests.

Each participating team gets to choose their own team name, which is often a clever pun, thinly veiled innuendo or outright silly. The Crabtrees select and announce their favorite team name each week. “Some of our favorite [team names] have been “The Real Househusbands of Berthoud,” “Not So Sherlock,” “Risky Quizness,” “Harry Potter and the Goblet of Beer,” and one of our regular team’s name is “Liquid Chicken.”

The winning team gets a free beer, and the team that comes in second-to-last also gets one token for a free beer. City Star doesn’t serve food, but craft beers and other drinks are available, and there’s always a food truck outside. Some teams bring in dinner to eat as they play. Next year, City Star is planning a new brew called Humdinger Trivia.

When they’re not researching creative ideas for trivia themes and questions, Erin works as an ultrasonographer for a veterinary hospital, and Jacob recently celebrated his one-year anniversary as a brewer at City Star.

While the couple has no formal plans to expand their trivia business beyond City Star, they’re open to the idea and available for special events. They’ve already created trivia contests for a few events in town. On January 22, City Star will be hosting a ticketed event featuring a history-themed trivia contest to raise money for the Berthoud Historical Society. The Crabtrees are already scouring the history books to make the event memorable.

If Tuesday nights at City Star are any indication, the people of Berthoud are quite clever and clearly have a talent for remembering all kinds of interesting facts and arcane information. Anyone wishing to test their trivia chops, Humdinger Trivia at City Star is free and open to anyone.

By the way, the answer to the rephrased Schwarzenegger movie “Accurate Deception” is, of course, “True Lies.”