Elliott Bay, the original. Plus index for 2011 WA stops

    West Seattle, the part-industrial, part-funky section, linked to the rest of the city by a couple of problematic bridges...this is where the Elliott Bay Brewing Co. started out in 1997.  The location is squeezed into the middle of an urban block on South California Street, giving it a cozy feeling.

  This was its look in early December, on my way to the Winter Beer Festival at Hales. Elliott Bay doesn't run quite as many taps as they do at the newer Burien location, and did not appear to have as many certified organic ales here.  That is evidently a function of space, as the philosophy appears to be the same: better-than-average pub food, lots of local artists on the walls, and plugged-into-the-community feeling.
(Visited 12/02/11)

Alphabetical index of Wash. breweries seen in 2011
    name                   city                   month posted
Airways Br.           Kent                   1
American Br.         Edmonds            3
Atomic Alehouse  Richland             5
Columbia Valley   Wenatchee         7
Elk Head               Buckley              2
Elliott Bay Br.      Burien, W. Sea.  1, 10, 12
Elysian Br.            Seattle                8
Ice Harbor Br.      Kennewick         5
Icicle Br.              Leavenworth       4
Iron Horse Br.      Ellensburg          1
Laht Neppur        Waitsburg            5
M.T.Head Br.       Graham              1
Maritime Pacific  Seattle                 1
Powerhouse Rest.Puyallup             2
Rattlesnake Br.    Richland             5
Riverport Br.       Clarkston            5
Seven Seas Br     Gig Harbor         3
Skye Book&Br.  Dayton                5
Snipes Mt. Br.    Sunnyside           5
Twin Rivers Br  Monroe               1
Two Beers Br.    Seattle                 1
Yakima Craft Br Yakima               2

Last Italy stop: Birra Udine

   Way up in Italy's northeast corner sits a region called Friuli-Venezia-Giulia (mercifully shortened to FVG by almost everyone), bordering Austria on the north and Slovenia to the east.   Trieste is the largest and best-known city while Udine, in the center, is a pretty town with a fine brewing tradition.  Moretti started out here before moving to Milan and becoming huge.  The tradition has been revived by the brewpub  Birrificio Udinese, located in one of the few modern buildings in the old town center.

If you follow the link, note that the address ends simply as "bire.it."  "Bire", a cross between Italian birra and German bier, is in the Friulian language, an Italo-Germanic-Slavic mixture that is unique enough to be considered a distinct language rather than a regional dialect.
     Inside, the Udine pub has some interesting design features.  One wall has glass panels through which the various barley grains used in brewing are displayed.

   I tried a mug of their red double malt while sitting at bar stool #24 and surveying the brew kettles.  Here, as is often the case in Italy, the customer pays the cashier first and then receives the product; the tables and stools are each numbered for the server's benefit.

Note the copper bar, which is a nice design touch to integrate with some of the brewing apparatus. Here is another copper serving space in front of some of the fermentation tanks.

They claim the copper bar is a central European tradition, which would make Udine a nice threshold for visiting the great beer sites of the Czech Republic, Austria, Slovakia, etc.
(Visited Oct. 4, 2011)

Amarcord in Le Marche: 2nd stop

   Le Marche is the region just east of Umbria and Tuscany, across the Appenines and on the Adriatic coast. We went there for a farm-stay vacation for several days, at La Tavola Marche.  This place is run by Ashley and Jason, a young couple who met at Seattle Pacific U. and who have lots of Wash. ties.  The last day there was the eve of white truffle season, quite a big deal in those parts.  The truffle hunters and their highly trained dogs (the pigs have been retired) were all set to go on the first day of October.  A town a few kilometers from the farm, Apecchio, was putting on a truffle festival all weekend and we drove over to check it out.
   Well, when we got there, a town from the 1400s with a couple thousand people, we discovered that truffles weren't the only big deal that weekend.  A banner by the town hall proclaimed Apecchio's other claim to fame.

 Yes, little Apecchio was calling itself La Citta' della Birra because it had two craft brewing operations, Collesi and Amarcord.  We weren't able to learn much about Collesi, but Amarcord was quite a story. We met Gianni Pierini, a brewmaster at the works just outside the town, and sat down with him for some brews and beer chat.
    Gianni knew something of the American craft beer scene, as Amarcord has an arrangement with Brooklyn Brewing which enables the company to export its bottles to the U.S.  They stick with the four styles on the poster and the website, a blonde ale, a red ale, a double malt, and the Tabachera, a 9% powerhouse of uncertain style (it was not on tap this first night of the festival).  Gianni was thinking about seasonal ales such as the pumpkin ales so many brewers make this time of year here. He quizzed Mark, a homebrewer from Michigan, who had made a few pumpkin ales, on his methods.

(L-R: yrs truly in the WABL t-shirt, Gianni, and Mark).  Mark got to tour the brewery the next morning, but we had to return the rented Fiat to Bologna by noon and missed the tour.
(Visited 9/30/11)

Birrificio Lambrate in Milan: 1st Italian stop

   I began a trip to Italy by flying to Milan and spending first weekend there.  Navigated their metro system with daughter Tennyson and her guy Gregg to a non-touristy part of the city where craft brewing is practiced at Birrificio Lambrate .  Let's begin by noting a few differences in beer drinking in Italy.  First, there is no minimum age for consumption.  I still have a fondness for Peroni, my first legal beer fifty years ago when I was a callow 20 in Florence. Second, although the wines are justly famous and often fabulous, Italians do like beer and often order it rather than wine with pizza.  However, what is ordered is often mass-produced lager.  In Milan and the north, that is usually the local Moretti, with its pale  lager, or Peroni's  Nastro Azzurro from Rome, also a pale lager.  Nastro Azzurro means Blue Ribbon in Italian but this is not an homage to Pabst.  However, you can get more interesting brews here and there, and the Lambrate folks had drawn quite a crowd as we approached the pub on a Sunday night.

Yes!  People are drinking beer out in the street and society is not crumbling!  Well, not because of this, anyway.  It was just pretty crowded, inside.

We viewed a selection of about six taps; five of the eight they list as year-around brews and one special, called K-Beer (more on that later).  I tried the Porporra, a nice pale ale, which went well with some tasty antipasto.  There was no mention of selling bottled product, although we had seen a bottle of their Lambrate in a nearby shop earlier, and a shelf under the mug collection displayed bottles and glassware that may have been for sale.

We learned that they do have kegs and taps in a few ristoranti and bars.  Their web site has some nice features, like recommended glassware and food pairings.
     About the K-Beer: it was a dark ale with a sort of licorice taste, more like anisette or the Greek ouzo.  I left a note asking what was in it, and Alessandro Brocca, one of the partners, emailed me that they put some perilla, imported from Korea, in with the hops at the end.  Perilla is a member of the mint family that is in fact used in anisette and similar liqueurs. Odd taste but so are the local ales made with lavender.  I wonder if the Strange Brewfest in Port Townsend ever gets a perilla-flavored ale?
(Visited 9/25/11)

Elliott Bay's Burien pub

   Staying in a SeaTac motel the night before flying off to Italy, I decoded the Seattle Metro bus schedules and rode up to Big Al's and then Elliott Bay, in their Burien location (they started out in West Seattle and are still there, too).  Here's a pic of their equipment and the suburban scene out the window.

They were running over a dozen taps of their own products, about half being their certified-organic line.  I sort of recall (notes lost in travel) trying a pint of Wit von Boorien with a Mexican appetizer.  This is one of the non-organic series, named for Peter von Boorien, who emigrated from the Netherlands and started this town during the Klondike gold rush boom in the 1890s.
     They have a couple of elegant looking shuffleboard tables in the back, and evidently some organized competition takes place there.

The service was good and the atmosphere convivial.  As for the organic thing, this is more about making a statement than producing a better taste.  For vegetables like tomatoes or peppers, yes, it often tastes better.  But malted barley after an hour or more of boiling...who could tell?
(Visited 9/22/11)

The Crystal: McM's score a great Portland location

     Last month I took my nephew and his wife to Portland. We stayed at McMenamin's Crystal Hotel downtown--what a great location!  For starters, Powell's bookstore is just two blocks away. One block away, you can catch the 10th Street streetcar, which has a stop up the line right at Bridgeport Brewing.

   The Macs also own the Crystal Ballroom next door, which is a popular venue for all sorts of bands. The hotel itself has a cozy basement pub, where we heard four ladies from Monterrey making good music that paired well with the usual McM's beers like Terminator and Ruby.
   Each room appears to have been decorated to honor some particular music performer or group.  I had the John Lee Hooker room.

(Visited 7/26/11)

Elysian Fields, hard by the stadiums

    Elysian Brewing operates in several fun locations in Seattle, Capitol Hill and Greenlake and the new production facility they are building near Georgetown Brewing in SODO.  But the biggest crowds, the standing room only rushes, have to be at their Elysian Fields brewpub, after the Seahawks or Sounders have played a game in the Clink (formerly known as Qwest Field) or the Mariners have played b'ball at Safeco. The pub is across the street from the main entrance to the football/soccer stadium and a block from Safeco.

   Ducking in on a quiet day (the NFL was still on strike, the Mariners were on the road running up a horrible losing streak, and the Sounders were idle), I tried a White Woods Wit, a tasty brew made from an improbable recipe.  Imagine pale barley malt, malted and unmalted wheat and white flour in the mash. Bittered with North German Brewer and Czech Saaz hops, with coriander and orange in the boil, and lemongrass, ginger and tamarind in the fermenter. It paired nicely with a selection of salumi from Armandino Batali's charcuterie shop a couple of blocks away in Pioneer Square.

(Visited 7/13/11)