Redmond's newest: the Hi-Fi shop

  In one of those business parks in Redmond, a couple of miles north of Microsoft, the beer tourist can find Hi-Fi Brewing, about a block down from Black Raven.  John and Cathy Carothers and friends  opened Hi-Fi last August  and themed it to celebrate the days when music was distributed and sold on 33 ⅓ vinyl records. The decor is just right for the theme.

The wall shown on the right is a woofer and tweeter simulation (yes, children, there was a time when a tweeter meant a speaker just for the high frequencies) with some genuine turntables in a display case. The album covers shown above are just there for colors and shapes; no specific artists. There are even a couple of lava lamps for 70's junkies.
The beers are grouped under "Current Playlist" (the standard brews) and "Limited Edition" (the seasonals and specials). Standards are an Englsih Pale, a Kolsch, an IPA, a Porter, and.an ESB.My choice was a Mix Tape #2, billed as a British IPA/American Pale blend. Decently hoppy but not over-the-top.
The system has a fifteen-barrel capacity and is visible through a glass wall in the taproom. A deli across the street is there for edibles.

(Visited 3/20/14)

Dirty Bucket: Woodinville tour complete (for now)

     En route to the Washington Brewers Festival last year, I visited four of the five craft breweries that opened in 2012 to keep Redhook company.  Wasn't able to catch Dirty Bucket Brewing then, as they had very limited visiting hours, just Saturday afternoons as I recall.  Since then, they have expanded their hours, their brewing capacity, and soon will expand their physical space.
     The setting: as locals know, Woodinville is Wine City for Washington, where all those good grapes from the dry side of our mountains go to ferment and be bottled. Dirty Bucket shares a business park with several of these vintners.

Steve Acord and his wife, Sharon Wagner-Acord, started out here with a half-barrel nano system in April 2012.  Within a year, they were able to put in a three-barrel system and seven-barrel fermenters and bring Ryan Lago on board as assistant brewer and tasting room manager.

(Steve leaving Ryan with some last minute thoughts before he heads out of town)
   The tap list on Feb. 15 appears over Ryan's head.  The name of the brewery is reflected in some of the beer titles.  Why dirty when brewers are so fanatical about clean equipment, waging constant war on bacteria?   You can't have really clean tanks unless you have a dirty bucket to show how hard you've been scrubbing, Steve says.
     I tasted a couple of brews with names outside this pattern.  Black Lab Chocolate Stout (5.5% abv, 38 IBU)  coats the tongue like a brownie just out of the oven.  Heart-healthy dark chocolate and something called cocoa nibs, husks left over from chocolate-making, impart special tastes to this one.  Full Nelson Hoppy Black Ale (7.0% abv, 100 IBU!) are named for Nelson, New Zealand, from which Dirty Bucket imports Sauvin hops.  In large quantities, no doubt.  These hops create herbal, earthy flavors in the mouth and after savoring a bit, one can hardly believe that IBU count.  It's a good reminder that this measures the parts per million of iso-alpha acids in the finished beer, not the subjective bitterness.  My go-to source for explaining this stuff is Tasting Beer by Randy Mosher: he explains that "bitterness tastes stronger in a weaker beer, so it's really the ration of bitterness to original gravity that matters."  And that 7.0 alcohol percentage indicates a high original gravity.  This was a beautifully balanced ale.
     Dirty Bucket bottles on premise and is in the process of contracting with a mobile canning service for their IPA.  I have one more pic of the tasting room in the back, with their apt motto writ large.

(Visited 2/15/14)

Bottles--true recycling at Bayern & Double Mountain

   Most of us put the glass bottles, along with the cans, in a recycling bin and feel a little better about our green cred.  The brown glass beer bottles almost always end up crushed into cullet, melted down and cast into new bottles.  A very few more stoutly made bottles get washed, sterilized, and refilled.  One brewery doing this is Bayern Brewing in Missoula, Montana.  Bayern has been around since 1987 and recently spent over $250,000 on a bottle washing machine.  Ryan Newhouse, in his new book Montana Beer, reports that this apparatus can wash and sterilize up to 8,000 bottles an hour.

    Now Bayern is not getting 8,000 bottles back every hour or even every week.  And even if they were to take in a lot of brown glass bottles formerly containing Bud or Rainier or something crafty like Moose Drool,
those bottles would end up in the same cullet plants, melted down and recast.  That's because the typical brown bottle, known as one-way glass, is not sturdy enough for multiple refillings.  A true re-usable bottle is thicker and stronger than the one-way version, and of course more costly.  Like 47 cents a bottle compared to eleven cents.
     Those numbers were given to me by Matt Coughlin, the main brewer at Double Mountain Brewery in Hood River, Oregon.  Matt came up to Bellingham to host a brewer's night at The Green Frog and then to play his guitar and sing as part of a nice-sounding duo at the Frog that same night.  Double Mountain beers come in half-liter bottles, subject in Oregon to the five-cent deposit law.  The brewery pays double that, ten cents, to get its bottles back from consumers, and also pays several cents to retailers, groceries and bars, that pay out the nickel to redeem these empties. Once the brewery collects a worthwhile load of Double Mountain empties, they are trucked over to Missoula.
     The environmental cred is substantial.  Double Mountain quotes a study that figures the carbon footprint of multiple use refillable bottles is about one-forth that of one-way glass bottles and one-seventh that of aluminum cans.  Bayern needs to get more craft brewers on the refillable bottle bandwagon like Double Mountain to get full use of its bottle washer.
(Visited Bayern 01-17-14)

River City (we got trouble right her in....)

  OK, I had to recall that great song from The Music Man to lead into a story on Spokane's River City Brewing, but this new brewery is not making trouble or anything else that rhymes with Pool.  They are making a signature red ale--I guess it has to be signature as the red is even in their website name.  When the name river city has also been used by breweries in Sacramento, Jacksonville, and Witchita, you have to do something to stand out.
   Spokane's River City Red is a nice malty ale, moderately strong (5.6% abv, 16 IBU) that goes down easy. The taproom has been open a few months and a deli next door makes all kinds of sandwiches you can bring in.  The tap list from a few days ago gives an idea of the varieties offered here.

   Some of the names date from the brewers' prior incarnation as the Coeur d'Alene Brewing Co.  The guys who had been brewing over the line in Idaho decided to run a smaller system in a bigger city.
   The back wall displays some of the swag they sell.  They seem to be very bicycle-centered here, like the Pedlar in Seattle.

(Visited 01/17/14)

Iron Goats in Washington: several meanings

   Search the terms Iron Goat & Washington state; the first hit is likely to be the Iron Goat State Park, a trail in Stevens Pass along the old route of the Great Northern.  A massive avalanche there in 1913 took out two snow-stalled trains and 93 people.  A second hit will be either a trash-recycling sculpture in Spokane's Riverfront Park, built for the 1974 Expo, or Iron Goat Brewing, a brewpub east of downtown, founded in 2012 by two homebrewing couples: Greg and Heather Brandt and Paul Edminster and Sheila Evans.
   The 8.5 barrel system comes from Bozeman, where it originated Spanish Peaks' Black Dog Ale line. After Spanish Peaks relocated to California, its hooked-on-Montana staff launched Bozeman Brewing Co. and used this gear until they outgrew it and sold it to these Spokane folks.
   What they make here pays homage to the namesake goat. Me, I tried and liked the Goatmeal Stout (5.6%, 29 IBU, good coffee-and-chocolate malts).  Other choices had names like Head Butt IPA. Garbage Pail Ale, and Impaler IPA (evidently the house favorite).  Pix didn't turn out but it was a nice stop.
(Visited 01/17/14)

Slate Creek Brewing: new in Coeur d'Alene

     A mile or so north of downtown Coeur d"Alene, Slate Creek Brewing has been up and running since last March.  Two brothers, Ryan and Jason Wing, turned a former car wash into a two-barrel system with a friendly pub.  Slate Creek is a popular kayaking and fishing stream, tributary to the St. Joe River, and the beer names tend to reflect the brothers' enthusiasm for the outdoor recreation opportunities so abundant in the panhandle.

   The four core beers are a pale (the juniper-scented Norse Nectar, delicious tang), 6 weight IPA (a fly fishing term), Salmon Run Red, and Double Black IPA (a/k/a cascadian dark ale). Between the rotators and the seasonals on the right side of the board, I found two (2) brown ales, called Wingnut Brown and Backcountry Brown.  The Wingnut (4.5% abv, 22 IBU) had that long-lasting mouthfeel the good browns all have.
    Down in the lower left corner of the board is a price for Nalgene growlers.  Nalgene is the plastic so often used in water bottles for cycling and backpacking; this was the first time I had seen it applied to the beer growler market.
    An elaborate bit of graffiti art decorates the entrance from the parking lot.

The Wings have lift-off, it would appear.
(Vistied 01/17/14)

Wallace Brewing: a brewing gem in the Gem State

    Wallace, Idaho: what a legendary spot.  The last traffic light on I-90 for years, bordellos run quite openly through the 1970s, silver mines slowly playing out...and now tourism for the 900 plus people still living there. Some of whom work at, and most of whom, I dare say, drink at Wallace Brewing, or have since it opened in 2009.  The brewery sits right on the main drag.

   The bar inside was a friendly spot; a couple other guys at the bar were also getting their Inland Ale Trail passports stamped (this Spokane-based promotion includes five breweries in the Idaho panhandle along with eleven Washington operations).  The beers coming out of the eight working taps all had names celebrating some aspect of Wallace history, the mining, the working girls...my choice was a 1910 Black Lager that recalled the year of the huge forest fire.  Timothy Egan's fine book about this fire, The Big Burn, starts and ends in Wallace.  The black lager was a smooth malty concoction.  A tasting note related that the malt was steeped in cold water for 24 hours prior to going into the 15-bbl brew kettle.
    An unusual feature at Wallace was posting technical notes on the recipes for some of the beers on the glass window looking into the brewing works.

    Some of these notes even include the style guides published by the Brewers Association, setting out the parameters of a classic ale or lager type.
    The decor is all history-themed.  A mannequin of a working girl sits atop the back wall, more or less over the entry to the mens room.  In in all, a most enjoyable stop;

(Visited 01/17/14)