Barley Brown's: A good port in a storm

Last December, driving across the country to temporary quarters in upstate New York, I was barely a day out of Bellingham when I was slammed by one beast of a snowstorm in Oregon's Blue Mountains.  The nearest town to take refuge in was Baker City, and o happy day!, this little city had an excellent little brewery.  Barley Brown's has been gathering medals and critical acclaim almost since Tyler Brown launched the business in 1998.  As a recent article in Northwest Brewing News notes, since they began entering national competitions in 2005, they have won ninety medals at the GABF, the World Beer Cup, and the North American Beer Awards.

The cozy pub (particularly so when two feet of snow have fallen outside) is built around the original and still working four-barrel system. Brown and friends opened a twenty-bbl production brewery and taproom right across the street, which serves a wider population, as far as Portland, 300 miles to the west, and Boise, 100 miles east of here.

The best seller is Pallet Jack, the standard IPA. Brown's makes a nice variety of ales and lagers, included an eponymous Brown Ale.  Their coasters are a clever idea--linked with the taster

flight trays, the coasters have space in the arrows to write down one's choices.  The customer enters his or her choices and hands the coaster to a bartender who fills the order as requested.

This visit was logged on 12/17/15.  Two days later, I had traveled as far as Laramie, Wyoming (the snowstorm that stopped me in Oregon didn't extend that far but the winds across I-80 were something else) and had an excellent dinner at Altitude Brewing there.  I came away with no photos but the card of head brewer Jared Long, who brews in a strict German tradition and who asked me to remember him to the Kempers at Chuckanut when I next got home.

In Canada's other end: Ontario's Silversmith Brewery

  OK, the eastern end of Ontario is not all the way across the country from our B.C. neighbors, but it's still a long ways off.  While catching some plays at the Shaw Festival in Niagara-on-the-Lake, I happened on one of the new craft breweries in this winery-laden town: Silversmith Brewing.

The pub, pictured here, is in a former church, an Anglican house of worship dating back to 1892 or so.  The brewing business began here in 2011 and it primarily serves the on-premise consumption and sales of bottles and growlers here.
The founders, Matt and Chris, proclaim their dark lager the flagship brew and I found it rich and balanced.  My companion, here for the wine and the plays, tried the hefeweisen and said she liked it.
The brewing system, also on the premises (I defer to those schooled in ecclesiastical architecture to name the room off to one side of the main chapel) looked to be in the seven-barrel capacity range, although the rating would be in hectoliters as is usually the case in Canada.



(Visited 10/09/15)

Spinnaker Bay sails through Rainier Valley

   Hillman City is one of Seattle's least-famous neighborhoods, a stretch along Rainier Blvd. in the southeast quadrant.  Among the desiderata of urban living this district had lacked was a brewery of its own, but not since Spinnaker Bay opened its doors a couple of years ago.  The founders, Janet Spindler, who brews, and Elissa Pryor, who manages the business side, claim to be the state's only brewery that is 100% women-owned.                                      

Here's Elissa giving me a little tour of the brew system, while Janet, like any brewer, is cleaning vessels and gear in the back.  The fermenters each have a female name, and the brite tank is one you don't forget, Phyllis Chiller.
    The pub in front is a convivial area and had a good crowd on a weeknight. A lot of the beers have nautical names--Spinnaker Bay itself is a place in the south end of Lake Washington, a couple of miles away, where the owners live and keep a sailboat.  The names of the beers reflect this love of the water--Fraid Knot, the Pale Ale, the Hummer (not the monster SUV, this term has a meaning in sailing, too) and the Little Dinghy Blonde, what they call their Kolsch.  I had a pint of the Dinghy Blonde that had been soured in a bourbon barrel (below), and it was an amazing out-of-the-box taste.

(Visited 10/4/15)

More garages of Marysville: At Large

    One of the longer lines at the Everett craft beer festival last month stretched out in front of the recently launched At Large Brewing Co.  Opened last April by Jim Weisweaver and his wife Karen, At Large

grew out of Jim's increasing commitment to homebrewing excellence and an academic assignment for Karen.  She took a business class where the term paper was to be on the startup process for either a hypothetical business or an actual business.  As Jim had been filling their garage with bigger and better homebrew gear, they decided to create the actual business for her class paper.
They make beer one full barrel (31 gallons) at a time,  finishing in a brite tank enclosed in a chilled glass compartment.
    The styles are classics, nothing exotic.  A couple of IPAs. a brown, a pale, and a blonde, I'd Tap That, which was one of the hits at the festival.

Another was a watermelon infused cream ale, which Jim made only because the festival wanted every brewer to dispense one beer through a randall.  "I'm no fan of fruit beers in general," Jim says, "but they make the rules, and as we've only been open since April, we cut up some watermelon and went along." The couple have day jobs and brewing is something done in the evenings.   "If I could brew all day long, I'd have a dozen styles up," Jim says, "but I can't so I don't."

(Visited 09/05/15)

Up in the pass: DruBru

  Snoqualmie Pass:  doesn't that seem like the kind of place that needs its own beer?  Of course ti does.  That's the mission of Dru Ernst, founder of DruBru, a 15-bbl brewery and taproom located right near the 3,000-ft summit of the busiest pass through the Cascades.  Open since last October, it survived one of the

least snowy winters on record, showing that even without the usual numbers of skiers at the nearby ski area, a good beer can prosper.
  The styles Dru favors are generally continental European (Belgium and Germany most-favored nations) and in the session-strength range, abvs ranging from 4.5 to just under 5 percent.  I tried a glass of the Schwarzbier. brewed ale-style (no lagers here) at 4.8% and 37 IBUs. A nice rich caramel taste.
There is no bottling, only keg sales, which DruBru self-distributes mostly along the I-90 corridor, from West Seattle to Yakima.
(Visited 08/26/15)

The previous newest brewery in Snohomish Co.: 5 Rights

   Had I made this stop in Marysville on the fourth of August, just before Sno-Town opened, I could have labeled 5 Rights the newest brewery in a county where they keep popping up like mushrooms after the rain stops.  R. J. Whitlow and his family rolled up the garage door to reveal their tasting and growler-filling room on July 3.

  So whence the name, I asked.   Are the five rights some codicil to the Rheinheitsgebot, the Bavarian purity law?  No, no, they said, it's a principle in the nursing profession when giving medications: be sure it's the right patient, the right drug, the right dose, the right route, and the right time.  R.J.'s wife Kristi is an R.N. at the Everett Clinic, and she evidently has a key role in brewery operations, too.
  The lineup on the first Saturday in September was about a dozen styles, with some interesting twists.  The brews are sorted into three sets: regularly made beers under the Over-the-Counter heading, seasonals are RX or Prescription only, and the special imperials fall under the Nurses' Orders heading.

Heading the Over-the-Counter offerings was Nellie's Nectar Bavarian Hefe, the tap handle for which is pictured on the right.  Mme. Nellie, mother of one of the Whitlows, was present last Saturday, though not pouring--she had a granddaughter doing that.  We had some laughs about her selling the naming rights, though, in light of the UW Husky stadium becoming Alaska Airlines Stadium last week.  The Hefe, my growler take-home choice, was full of clove and banana flavors: it won a tasting award at the Evergreen Fair in Monroe recently.
   Another interesting angle was the stout options.  There was a straight oatmeal stout and a coffee oatmeal stout, both 5.4% abv.  The coffee was not beans in the boil, but cold-brewed coffee (a 24-hr process I had not heard of).
  There were the usual IPAs, pales, an amber, etc.
It does sound as if 5 Rights is still on track to stand out from the crowd.
(Visited 09/05/15)

Badgering the witness? No, Badger in Wenatchee!

     A couple blocks south of the heart of downtown Wenatchee, in a corner of a huge, block-long former fruit warehouse here in the apple capital, the thirsty traveler can find Badger Mountain Brewing open most afternoons. The last time before this I saw it was from an Amtrak window at sunrise, riding the Empire  

Y

Builder back to Everett. The train tracks are visible just beyond the parking area.
    Badger Mountain opened its taproom early in 2013. with a 15-bbl system and 30-bbl fermenters turning out enough beer to distribute kegs in a three-county area and to pass Columbia Valley Brewing as the largest beer maker in Wenatchee.  The styles cover a wide range. from stouts to wheats to an experimental sour.  A pizza oven at the end of the bar, and a barbecue food truck outside, parked on weekends, makes food an option.

     Dave Quick, pictured here to the right, is the brewer and principal owner.  He is demo'ing a new fruit-fly gun, one that fires a tiny burst of table salt, lethal to the flies that proliferate this time of year.
   My tasting notes have disappeared but I had a couple of excellent pints, including an apricot ale and a coconut porter.




(Visited 08/25/15)