Anchor: Pilgrimage in S.F.

    Spent last weekend in the San Francisco Bay area, hanging out with old friends and fitting a few brewpub stops in the edges of the weekend.  Anchor Brewing was a must-see; Liberty Ale was my first taste of craft beer, back in 1984, and I still remember the amazement on my taste buds. 
   Anchor puts a "founded 1896" statement on their labels, and a company with the Anchor Steam label registered and all has been around since then. It limped through the Prohibition years and came back in 1933, but 30-plus years later it was on life support.  That's when appliance heir and recent Stanford grad (! Beat Cal!) Fritz Maytag bought it, in 1965, and started bringing it up to speed.
   Maytag began with an intense focus on sanitary brewing and to this day the crew all wear white coveralls.  The big (125-barrel system) mash tun (front left), lauter tun (rear) , and brew kettle (front ruight) are the first bits of apparatus seen on the tour.

The unneeded barley filtered out in the lauter tun goes to a local dairy farm, in major quantities.

Several levels below the kettle action, rows of fermenting tanks line up like soldiers to age the dozen or so ales and lagers Anchor is preparing to bottle and send--so they say--to all fifty states.

The tour continues through the bottling line and ends at the tasting room/gift shop which also has some noteworthy art on the walls.  I was impressed by some shots of Janis Joplin and the band, Big Brother and the Holding Company, when they visited the brewery in 1967 and hoisted some pints for the camera. 

When you look at the founding years of some of our most venerable craft brewers now, 1983, 1984, 1986, you have to be awed by what Maytag kept alive years before that. I sure was.

(Visited 7/27/12)

Updates: Foggy Noggin, Bellingham festival

   After lunch at Mill Creek on July 14, I headed down to road about seven miles to Foggy Noggin in Bothell, to see that business was booming at this nanobrewery in a garage. I would guess I saw fifteen cars parked on the street out front and as many as the long driveway could hold, another dozen.  Upwards of fifty beer lovers were sitting or standing around, working on pints or sampler flights.  Jim has added a Rufus IPA to his lineup, a growler's worth of which I took home.  As I noted on an earlier post, his first ales were all named for some aspect of PAC-10 football.  If Rufus fits in this naming pattern, the allusion escapes me.
   A worthy innovation I saw here: a cold case of pre-filled growlers, like Kulshan does here in Bellingham.  Given that FN is only open Saturday afternoons, and the line in front of the taps was pretty long, anything that speeds the process is good.

   Query:  How many places in the northern hemisphere are chilly enough to warrant wearing a parka in the 22nd of July:  Chukchi, Alaska...Reykjavic...the outer Hebrides...and sometimes Bellingham. Such was the case last Sunday when the Brewers by the Bay festival, put on by the local Rotary, opened across the street from Boundary Bay.  Eighteen brewers from Washington set up, and eleven from up and down the coast (and Big Sky from Missoula). If the gray, almost-rainy day broke 60 F on the thermometer, it would have surprised me. 

The turnout was not quite what it was for the April Brewsday festival here, but it was still good.  Old Schoolhouse came over from Winthrop with a keg each of their Imperial Stour and Imperial IPA. Gettig a 5-0z glass of either of those, for a $1 sampling token, works out to 20 cents an ounce, a good  deal less that the price of a bottle on the shelf. Dick's Brewing came up from Centralia with some Scottish Ale, the latest in their Dedication series (dedicated to their late founder Dick Young) and it was excellent, too.

Mill Creek: northernmost point of empire

   Several years ago, I heard that the McMenamins were planning to rehab some worthy old school building in Bothell, north of Seattle, and I got to wondering if their pub listed in nearby Mill Creek was this project.  Not!  The McM's spot in Mill Creek is in a very humdrum building, facing a Safeway and other mall denizens.

I stopped inside to check my memory.  Over a gardenburger and an Infra-black IPA, I learned from my server that the Mc's are enmeshed in the complications of rehabbing an old building in Bothell, have been for several years now.  This little pub will remain the northernmost outpost of the Mc's Portland-based empire. 
   The brew uses their IPA formula for a base and then adds malts from their Terminator Stout.  Pretty good.
(Visited 7/14/12

North Sound brings heavy brews to B'ham

  The folks at North Sound Brewing, just down the road in Mt. Vernon, came to the Green Frog here last night, with hi-test kegs.  I tried their Stovka Imperial Pilsner, 9.0% abv, deceptively smooth and reasonably tart (IBUs in the 50s).  Then I moved on to the Sucellus Imperial Porter, 9.5% abv.  To quote brewer Kurt's notes, it "richly coats your tongue with smooth, dark chocolate and the kind of velvety goodness that makes you think the whole world loves you."  His enthusiasm for all things Irish includes the flowery phrase, but it is most apt here.
   Oh, I won an NSB cap in the swag drawings, too, first time for that.
(tasted 7/11/12)

Updates: Kulshan, Horse Heaven, Yakima Craft Br

    Kulshan Brewing, here in Bellingham, has been open two and a half months now and continues to draw good crowds.  The unique feature here is their growler exchange plan.  Inside a refrigerated shelf space they stock growlers filled with their four principal ales, filled by counter-pressure.  This method, also used on a bottling line, means the beer remains fresh in the growler until you open the cap at home.   A conventional growler fill,  from tap to your growler via a hose, begins losing its freshness right then. 

Jim the barman cites this as one of several advantages of the growler exchange program.  Another is the assurance that the customer is buying beer in a sterilized jug.  How often does a beer lover grab a dusty growler out of the trunk of the car, give it a quick rinse in the brewpub, and watch the brew flow into his growler of dubious cleanliness? 
    Assuming you have entered with an empty Kulshan growler, you choose a full one from the cooler, put both on the bar, and $10 plus the empty buys you the filled growler.  Now, they will fill growlers from other establishments in the conventional way, for $12.  Jim told me they sold 252 filled growlers the first week, ran out of new ones to fill, had to wait some time for a reorder to arrive, and then began adding more customers to the exchange plan.  He said that on one day in mid-June they rang up sixty-odd growler sales, including 22 first-time sales.  This looks like a solid sales plan!
(Revisted 6/14/12)

   I stopped off at Horse Heaven Hills Brewing in Prosser on the way back west a couple weeks ago. Last year, I saw another customer enjoying a stout float and thought "that looks tasty."  So this time, I tried one.  A scoop of vanilla in a sundae cup of their dark cherry stout, 4.9% abv.  Have a look:

(Revisted 6/2/12)

   That same day, I pushed on to Yakima for the evening and stopped by Yakima Craft Brewing to see what was new.  Their interesting Belgian brews, Good Monkey and Bad Monkey, were not on tap, so I had to
  

White Bluffs Brewing: Hanford's edge

   I saw the front of this little brewery last year; the bus the federal government uses for tours of the Hanford Nuclear Reservation are based in an adjacent building.  Came back recently when they were open.  The name, White Bluffs, refers to a series of cliffs along the Columbia River, and also to a place that had been a small town until the government took it and Hanford over, completely, in 1943 to create plutonium for the atomic bomb.  The view from the front of the brewery is a healthy stand of sagebrush, about the only thing that grows around here without irrigation.

     Inside, brewer/owner Mike Sutherland operates a two-barrel system to create a nice assortment of ales with emphasis on the farmhouse or saison style.

His flagship ale is called Biere de Garde or MissChievous (depending on one's grasp of French pronunciation, perhaps).  The French version would hail from a farm somewhere in Wallonia, a region in Belgium.  The menu here offers this explanation of the term:  "Farmhouse Ale" depicts romantic images of simple country beers brewed on old farms...as a matter of necessity.  It was a simple brew made with no thought to dazzle."
    The Biere de Garde checks out at 6.7% abv and a not very tart 27 IBUs.  The first taste is richly malty; a bit of fruitiness comes later.  I checked out definitions of farmhouse and saison on wikipedia, BeerAdvocate, and the Great American Ale Trail, and they were all over the map.  On one point they do agree: the farmer aimed for an alcohol range of 5% to 8%.  The idea was to refresh and hydrate the farm workers during the harvest without getting them hammered.  Methinks this would call for a session-type strenght of less than five percent.  But maybe Belgian farmhands back in the day could knock back a couple pints of 8% and go right back to haying.
     Mike makes three more farmhous styles listed on his website, Biere de Ambre, Biere de Mars, and Biere de Noel, as well as a dozen or so more conventional brews.
(Visited 6/2/12)

North Carolina: a stop in Raleigh

    I took a day away from the Philadelphia visit last month to pop down to Raleigh, NC and hang out with a couple I've known since the late Paleocene era.  We had dinner at the Boylan Bridge Brewpub, with a nice view of downtown Raleigh for a backdrop.

Paul and Linda were kind enough to share a meal of pub fare with me, rather than dining off their splendid backyard garden.  We sampled the Trainspotter Scottish Ale, the Southbound Stout, and the Rail Pale.  (Note: the Amtrak station is just down the hill, hidden by the wall in this shot).  They do make a Pullman Porter here as well, though it was not available the day we stopped by.
     Raleigh is the state capital, the home of N.C. State U., and one corner of the Research Triangle, with Durham and Chapel Hill.  I was told it robustly supports four craft breweries; time only allowed this one visit this time.
(Visited 5/23/12)