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)