The Holy Mountain is not Rainier

    OK, we do venerate Mt. Rainier around here, put it on our license plates, the Washington quarter coin, and all that.  Some folks might call it sort of mystical, maybe sacred.  But when the folks who started Holy Mountain Brewing went to thinking about a name, they went with the title of a 1973 movie by Mexican director Alejandro Jodorowski and the title track of a 1993 album by a metal/stoner band called Sleep.  Besides. Rainier was already taken in the beer world.
   Holy Mountain pushes the envelope.  This is not your typical 2 IPAs and a Hefe brewery.
They do some Belgian styles, they make lagers, and they do have a couple of ales (pale and stout).
Some of the Belgians are sours,  A saison is aged three months in a foudre (new word for me, means a huge wooden fermenter, like forty barrels huge) with Brett yeast,  There's a Grisette, a sour farmhouse, lots of new age beers like that.

Holy Mountain brews 10-barrel batches and uses 20-bbl fermenters, plus the foudre.  Had to use my new word again,

The location is on the waterfront well north of Belltown,  The trains run on the tracks right out the back door: the Amtrak came whistling by as I was sipping last week.  The ship in the background is the USS Boxer, in port for the annual Seafair weekend.





In a city that sees a new brewery open just about every month, Holy Mountain has made some waves in its first year of existence.

(Visited 07/29/15)