The Ways to Glenside, PA

Upon first hearing of The Ways Restaurant and Brewing Co., I had to wonder what sort of ways they were talking about.  "Let me count the ways" [how I love you], in Elizabeth Browning's poem?  Or "knowing how way leads on to way" in Robert Frost's Road Not Taken?
None of the above!  Way is the surname of two brothers, Tim and Steve, natives of the town next door, Jenkintown, who opened this cozy pub about six months ago.  Steve Way operated a popular food truck, Smokin' Tacos, for some years and played at home brewing on the side.  Tim Way spent some years as a nurse in an ER and then opted for pro-level brewing with studies at the American Brewers Guild school in  Vermont and a turn at Weyerbacher in Easton, PA. 
 

Tim makes beer on a ten-barrel system with a novel array of finishing tanks: four fermenters and six brite tanks.  The brite tanks link directly to six of the dozen taps behind the bar.  The other six dispense from kegs, three of their own and three guest taps. I tried two different stouts to go with a bowl of Guiness beef stew, just right on a chill December afternoon.  The first was Attache Case, an English style stout, sweeter than Irish versions, dry-hopped with Fuggles and EKG hops (5 % abv). Next was a pint of August West, an Oatmeal stout with local coffee and chocolate added (6.6%) type which came next.  Both delicious in their different "ways".

The pub was doing a good business

in gift cards and growler fills this last Saturday before Christmas.  The other beer choices in the local offerings were four IPAs, a Helles, an Alt, and a fruit lager with blueberries and tart red cherries in the mix. Rapidly becoming a neighborhood fixture.
The Ways' logo features the intersection of a highway and a railroad's tracks, which describes the pub's location perfectly.  It sits smack beside the SEPTA lines to Doylestown and Warminster and is a stone's throw from the station. 

(Visited 12/21/19)

Inland Empire Festival in Spokane

A good time on Friday, Sept. 20 on the outfield grass of Avista Stadium, home of the Spokane Indians baseball team.  Coming in, I noticed a plaque telling the world that this is one team that can call itself the Indians without controversy.

Some thirty-plus brewers had set up on the outfield grass: a few, like No-Li here in Spokane and Bale Breaker in Yakima get over the mountains to Western Wash, while most do not.  The barley growers have an association and had set up a stand reminding us that all our favorite styles begin with their crops.  And the hop union was there, as well.
In downtown Spokane a craft beer incubator has opened up, a building where entrepreneurs can move out of their garages and start brewing commercially.  I met one, TT's Brewing, that had just graduated from the incubator and opened up their own brew space recently. 
(Visited 09/20/19)

Ambler's Tannery Run: home of the Splatch

Ambler, PA: a delightful Philly suburb with memorable one-off beers at Forest and Main and a flat-out elegant old movie house showing art house flicks.  Coming out of an exhilarating two hours with Elton John's biopic Rocketman, I spied a new brewery right across the street: Tannery Run Brewing.

Open to the street in the good weather, the brewpub sits in a re-purposed old brick building, yes, once a tannery, and built over a small creek, which are called runs in this area.
The brewery's taproom opened last St. Patrick's Day, about fifteen weeks ago.
The tap list offered a good selection of popular craft ale styles, some IPAs, saisons, wheats, stouts, etc.  To most of them the word "splatch" had been appended, so my first question to one of the brewers was "What's a splatch?"

It means "split batch," Tim said.  "Which means we cook up a batch of wort in a big mash tun and then we split that batch between two brew kettles sitting side by side and add different hops and yeast to each kettle as the recipe calls for."   Thus, out of the same grain bill they get Ambler Oracle (a pale ale, 4.9%) and a Jasmine Man (Belgian strong dark ale, 7.2%).  Some of the splits are logical, a milk stout and an Irish dry stout.
In the picture, the mash tun is in the center, brew kettle #1 is to the right, and brew kettle #2 sits atop the hot liquor tank behind the mash tun.  I tried the milk stout, a good creamy example of the style.
Time will tell whether splatching leads to unusual tastes or is more of a brewer's budget technique.  Tannery Run has a good vibe and a busy social presence.
(Visited 06/13/19)

The devil is up the creek in South Jersey

       I rolled into Devil's Creek Brewing Co. in Collingswood, New Jersey a day after their third birthday party (the same day my granddaughter Ella was turning five!).  No beer for Ella but plenty was flowing at the brewery's taproom.
      Collingswood is a dry town; the fancy restaurants on the main drag are all BYOB.  The only exception to the local prohibition law in the Garden State is an establishment for the manufacture of an alcoholic beverage.  The brewery is allowed to sell what they make here, by the glass, the growler, or cans to go.  No  guest taps, no wines or ciders, no food made on the premises, no TV screens, or anything else that seems pub-like.  But when they opened three years ago, Craig the bartender said

the lines went two blocks back. The novelty of getting a foamy mug without BYOB is still going strong.

   The 7-bbl fermenters need a double batch from the 5-bbl brew kettle in order to fill.  The production space and the taproom out front have the corner suite of a new building called The Lumberyard (what the space was for eighty-odd years, until Lowe's and Home Depot did it in).  The owners, Kathy Ganser and Anthony Abate, are actively involved in the business--she brewed one of the IPAs and applied her graphic arts background to designing the distinctive artwork here.
     Well.  My first four-oz flight had to be Birthday Cake (4.3%, 12 ibu), a cream ale putting out intense notes of raisins and cinnamon.  They made this for the second birthday in 2018 and had to bring it back.  A cleansing sip of water before the second taste, a delicate Pear Gose (5.1 %, 6 ibu).  Round three of the four flights was Caramel Apple Brown (5.4 %, 20 ibu), a malt-forward ale that delivered apples to the nose and caramel to the tongue--a medal-winner at a recent festival in Atlantic City.  The last was McBeer, an Irish take on the brown ale style (4.5%, 22 ibu) with honey for alcohol and sweetness.

The devil supposedly seen in the area in the 19th century looked a bit like a dragon, a chicken, and a kangaroo, according to art director Kathy.  I was delighted to find, among the glassware for sale, a pint in this curvy shape.  Most breweries sell tumblers, tulips, maybe pilsner glasses but this shape is a personal favorite.
Cheers to New Jersey!

(Visited 05/19/19)

Garden Path: stretching the concept of what a brewery is

The sign outside the building proclaimed it a brewery.  The familiar aroma of malt mashing away in a tun was lacking, but that depends on when a small brewery gets cooking.  I entered the taproom of Garden Path Fermentation,  near the Skagit County Airport in Burlington, Wash., looking at a bar with eight or nine tap handles ready to pour. Then I peeked through the glass into the production area in the back and saw nothing but barrels, hundred of wooden barrels. Where was the mash tun, the brew kettle, the cone-bottomed fermenters?
Amber Watt, one of the brewer-owners, took a small tour group into the back and explained the

unique process here.  She and her partner, Ron Extract (real name!) contract with Chuckanut Brewing, just a quarter-mile down the road, to produce the wort for Garden Path.  They truck the wort here, cool it down,  and usually put it in one of the half-dozen foeders seen here.  They pitch their unique yeast here (more about that in a moment) and get the souring fermentation underway here before transferring the beer to wine barrels.
The yeast they culture from local flora in the verdant Skagit Valley; several dozen carboys in a corner of the space are devoted to this process.  They normally pump the yeast into their yeast brink, clean out the foudre, and repitch to the next batch from the brink.  No two batches are alike here, and when they bottle, each batch is numbered on the label. 

Amber and Ron picked up a tank from a dairy in Wisconsin and have repurposed it as a coolship for some of their beers.  Here, they fill half the tank with hot wort from Chuckanut, and let the temperature attenuate overnight while the rest of the batch is cooled in the heat exchanger and taken to a foudre for yeast pitching.  The coolship half of the batch is hopped with whole flower hops and then added to the foudre half and let them ferment together.  "Our house culture is pretty hearty," Amber says, "so it takes over really quickly."  This process results in two beers, The Wet Hopped Ship and The Old School the New. 
All beers are bottled with a dollop of honey from an apiary a few miles up the Skagit.  "We want to use local ingredients whenever possible," Amber said, "and brewer's priming sugar was nowhere near as local as this honey."  I had a pint of the Wet Hopped Ship last St. Patrick's Day and small samples of a couple others, enough to aver that if your sour taste buds are on, you will encounter delicious flavors here.

(Visited 03/17/19)

Victoria Beer Week, take 2

Five years ago I went to Victoria, B.C., the capital of the province and a touristy cruise-ship stop, for their second-ever beer week.  This month I got back to the event and found all breweries I had stopped off at in 2014, all seemingly thriving. I stayed in Swan's Hotel and Brewery for a night; Swan's had a deal on some small second-floor rooms right over the pub, discounted for the noise factor, and I took one.  But the pub was being remodeled, was closed, and I missed the decibel experience.
Canoe Brewing, a block from Swan's, seemed unchanged, still with the great waterfront view and the stylish interior.   But the next stop on my Saturday afternoon stroll was to Phillips Brewing Co., and

In 2014 Phillips was a straight production brewery in the B.C. mode, growler fills just a few hours a week and bottle sales just in bombers. Today, a jazzy new sign heralds a lively brewpub, a dozen house-brewed styles on tap, hockey on the tube, and growlers filling up every day.  My server told me this had happened in 2016 with more changes like a line of soft drinks and canning for the beers and the pop.
Phillips has definitely seen big changes.
Beer week in Victoria is a series of events curated/produced/imagined by festival staff, led by beer writer Joe Wiebe.  The Saturday night program was called All About the Wood, a celebration of barrel aging.  A dozen breweries from across B.C. brought beers they had aged in a variety of barrels--bourbon, wines of all sorts, gin, rum, tequila.  Some poured from kegs, some from bottles.
Brewers or knowledgeable people from the brewery fielded questions about this process.  Bourbon barrels, by law, can only be used for bourbon once so they are available to brewers after that, with plenty of oak still on hand to mingle with the whiskey flavors. Wineries and distillers of other liquors get more use out of a barrel before they sell it.  Dageraad Brewing in Burnaby brought their Cuba Libre, a Belgian dark ale aged in rum barrels.  Well-used rum barrels, the brewer said, some used so many times they were falling apart and leaked too much beer to be usable.
An unusual taste was Quintus, a dark saison brewed with figs and sumac berries and aged in whiskey barrels.  Torchlight Brewing came over the mountains from Nelson, over on the eastern side of B.C/

Sunday morning I walked up Government St. past Phillips and then past Vancouver Island Brewing, founded in 1984 and still going strong.  The city had posted a rezoning notice to the effect that VIB was applying for a pub license for on-premise sales, just as Phillips had done.  A left at the next corner took me past Hoyne and Driftwood, side-by-side production breweries as they had been five years ago.  A couple more blocks and I was at Moon Under Water, another pleasant experience from 2014.  Maybe three dozen people had gathered, all home brewers here to learn from Clay and his brewing staff by following the early steps of making an ale on the small pilot brewing system.  The ticket here included a sandwich and a pint of your choice--I chose Creepy Uncle Dunkel, which was the same beer I had here five years ago.

The picture on the right shows the homebrewers jotting notes on the brew day worksheet the Moon folks provided.  The three tanks over the stored kegs caught my eye.  I wondered if they were horizontal fermenters.  No, Clay said, they were a new Dutch-made system for delivering beer to the taps in the pub out front.  Saves time switching out kegs and delivers more consistent beer to the front of the house. 

So all the breweries I had seen in 2014 were still going strong in Victoria, in several cases growing and adding new features.  A great beer town.
(Visited 03/02-3/19)

Snohomish: a new ale trail and PBJ in acan

The attractive town of Snohomish, Wash., about a dozen miles east of Everett, has gone from no breweries to six in just that many years.  I've visited each of them and posted my notes here.  When I read a story in Northwest Brewing News about ale trail programs in other areas in the region, such as those in Bend, Bellingham, the South Puget Sound, and the Inland Empire, I was keen to check out the new Snohomish Ale Trail.
I started at Sound to Summit Brewing, still operating in the same business park off Bickford Ave.  The doctor and dentist couple who launched this brewery have sold it to the folks who own Lost Canoe Brewing, the next nearest and next oldest brewery in the town.
I took an ale trail program to Lost Canoe after collecting one stamp at S2S.  I was happy to see Lost Canoe was fermenting in sturdy metal tanks now (the last time they were using plastic tanks they had to hang in chains from the ceiling).  Here I had a pint of peanut butter porter, and then noticed a new mini-crowler machine that could fill 16-oz cans.  How cool is that!  A pint for here, a pint to take home.  The bartender said she could pour a blend right in the can, half peanut butter porter and half raspberry wheat ale.  Two stamps and a conversation can to take home.

I checked into a B&B a couple miles out of the town and took a nap, time to metabolize the intake. Later, restored, I checked in at the Spada Family Brewery's taproom, in the downtown area, for one of their signature sours, and then out to Haywire Brewing, still in the old dairy farm barn. Supper was a burrito from Ixtapa and a pint of Loose Rooster at Sno-town Brewing, all at the same corner on 2nd St. Hot IPA made with the peppers Frank's mother grows down in Arizona.
The sixth brewery here, Scuffypunk, was not open in my time frame so will have to bring my dance card back there another time. 
(Visited 02/10/19)