Tossed Salads and Scrambled Eggs
Some more outdoor drinking in NYC, and a whole lot of Washington State content
I’ve spent most of the past week in Seattle, slowly getting my post-vaccination travel legs back and visiting breweries again in a place where I felt mask adherence would be high, and therefore my comfort level would be. There wasn’t a single venue I visited where I felt uncomfortable, and most of the taprooms had very clear rules posted at the door and all over their seating areas. It was quite freeing to not feel obligated to order a bag of chips every time I walked into a new brewery, although Washington State’s COVID regulations require food, food trucks, or at least delivery menus be offered at each brewery, so it was easier to stay sated while visiting five breweries in a day. Seattlites hate that I’m telling you this, but the weather was fantastic: two mostly sunny days, two mostly cloudy days (one a bit brisk and raw after some overnight rain), and two absolute bluebird sunny days. Don’t believe any of the stereotypes about Seattle weather; I was able to spend most of my brewery visits outside.
You’ll hear more about the visit in a bit, but hey, let me serve you some New York beer news during this lovely week here in the city…
Your Early April Beer News Roundup
There’s a lot of small developments on the NYC beer scene this week, so I’m going to fire them at you in little bursts to satisfy those of you with short attention spans! Ready? Let’s go:
Open Streets on Vanderbilt Avenue in Brooklyn reopened for the season last weekend, and BierWax has added a bunch more outdoor street seating. Every Friday, Saturday, and Sunday through November, they’ll have additional outdoor seating for your drinking pleasure.
Speaking of Bierwax, Non Sequitur Beer Project is hosting a joint tap takeover with Nyack’s Two Villains Brewing on Sunday starting at 2pm, featuring three beers from each brewery, including the That Don’t Impress Me Much Cold IPA brewed with the Pink Boots Society hop blend for International Women's Day.
If you’re a stickler like me, you don’t count a brewery until they brew a beer. So, as of this week, Alewife Brewing in Sunnyside, Queens is now a brewery! They brewed their first batch on beer in their new facility, a New Zealand IPA, appropriately, on National Beer Day. Look for announcements of its release soon.
When two NYC breweries get together and make a beer, it’s worthy of a mention here: Folksbier and Threes Brewing have released Wellspring, a collaboration doppelbock. It’s the first of the style for the breweries — a 7.5% toasty, rich lager with German malt and hops, conditioned for eight weeks. It’s available now at all Threes locations (including their newest shop in Huntington, Long Island) and via delivery.
Interboro Spirits and Ales releases their annual Ambassador Barrel-Aged Imperial Stout this Friday, with two versions: one aged in Heaven Hill Old Fitz bourbon barrels, the other aged in their old Malt Whiskey barrels and conditioned on City of Saints Coffee and Ugandan vanilla beans. They’re each in 500mL bottles for $18 a piece, and will be available at the brewery taproom Friday starting at noon, as well as on their website for in-state delivery.
Travel Log: A Trip to Seattle
My first day, I dropped my bags at my hotel in Seattle and bee-lined it for an early-afternoon ferry from Seattle to Bremerton to start the trip at Silver City Brewery, a 16-time GABF medal winner who’s surprisingly large for their anonymity outside of Washington State. At the urging of their taproom staff, my first beer was their Copper MTN Maibock — a gorgeous, seasonally-appropriate lager that whet my whistle. I had a small pour of their Fat Woody Scotch Ale, and some of their current best-seller, the Tropic Haze IPA (which was delicious, but far from hazy by our East Coast standards). From there, the friendly folks at Deep Draft Brewing, hidden behind a divey looking pub on a highway frontage road, poured a very nice Black IPA (they’re back, baby!). I hopped an Uber to Port Orchard, where Slaughter County Brewing had an airy taproom overlooking the Puget Sound inlet I would cross on a ferry back to Bremerton. From there, I made quick stops at downtown Bremerton’s Lovecraft Brewing and Dog Days Brewing, which are separated by an alley you can barely fit a car down. Then I caught the ferry back to Seattle and called it an evening on account of jet lag.
Day Two was an afternoon in one of the country’s beeriest neighborhoods, Ballard. I started at Cloudburst Brewing’s all-outdoor, socially-distanced satellite taproom on the west end of the neighborhood, where I crushed an Italian Pilsner and an IPA with Cascade Hops from New Zealand’s Freestyle Farms. Then I wandered over to Portland-based Great Notion’s taproom to watch some afternoon baseball and sip on a Orange Pineapple Mochi Milkshake IPA, which is probably best described as “sorcery.” I hopped across the street to pick up some cans from the brewery that has held the title as my favorite in Seattle for many years, Reuben’s Brews. Then walked around the block to Urban Family Brewing’s newest and largest location in Seattle, where I sipped beautiful farmhouse ales for most of the rest of the afternoon. Feeling I hadn’t gotten my share yet, I wandered a couple blocks to Fair Isle Brewing, a relative newcomer that’s making some of the best beer I had in town — The Bobbi, a saison with Loral, Citra, and Mosaic, was the best of the bunch there. Was that enough? No. I scarfed down some pizza and did quick stops with long walks in between at Snapshot Brewing, Flying Bike Cooperative Brewery, and Lantern Brewing — all very competent neighborhood breweries, a concept that you often don’t find at all in a city, let alone three times in the same night.
Day Three was mostly focused around catching up with friends in places that favored social distancing, including a filling lunch at Elliott Bay Public House in Seattle’s Lake City neighborhood. Next, it was up to Cairn Brewing, just north in Kenmore, which poured a fantastic rye lager called Sammamish River Rye. Hellbent Brewing, back down in Lake City, was another standout, with a Helles Lager that I appreciated sipping on while watching a wild Gonzaga-UCLA game. The following morning, I woke up to the news that my easy-like-Sunday morning plans were unnecessary (see the Brewery Visit of the Week below), before visiting two breweries in the southern part of Seattle and another two in Renton, Washington.
My last two days were spent mostly working, but I did manage to visit Dirty Couch Brewing in Seattle’s Interbay neighborhood, where I got to meet with fellow beer scribe and subscriber to this newsletter Ben Keene over glasses of Plummet Graph, a unique sour ale with Italian Plum and Yunan Gold Black Tea. I also went to a Seattle Mariners game, which I will wax poetic about in this week’s Beer of the Week. Apologies in advance (and already) for all the Pacific Northwest content.
Brewery Tracker
Total brewery count: 2,131
New breweries in 2021: 57
Breweries visited over six days visiting Seattle last week: 23
Breweries visited in Washington State total: 100
Brewery Visit of the Week
Brewery #2126, The Good Society Brewery & Public House, Seattle, Washington (Visited 04-Apr-2021)
When I’m plotting out a day of brewery visits, I’ll often check social media to make sure they’re open. Especially if that day of brewery visits is Easter Sunday. So when I checked The Good Society’s Instagram account on Sunday morning, I was surprised to discover they were not just open, but open early… with a beignet pop-up, no less! So at 9:30 in the morning, I hopped on a bus to West Seattle to visit the 2020 GABF Small Brewpub of the Year, The Good Society. It’s another spot that definitely falls into the category of “neighborhood brewery” — a brewery not necessarily flocked to from all over, but one with a very loyal customer base that wanders in on a Sunday morning from a few blocks away.
I felt like the only stranger in the place, but I was welcomed with a friendly smile, and immediately offered a taste of their new hazy IPA, Neon Bunny Eyes. It was the start of a wonderful late morning, accompanied by some amazing beignets from Jet City Beignet. I camped out under their streetside tent and warmed myself in the chilly air next to the heater while I sipped on their Urban Farmer Saison and Love is Love Vienna Lager.
Apart from wanting to point out that this spot is worthy of its GABF title (which, by the way, was awarded in their first year — they celebrated their first anniversary last month), The Good Society’s mission is worth highlighting, too. Their intention is to create a sense of community around beer, by being welcoming, accepting, and charitable. Already, they’ve donated over $8,700 to non-profits in Seattle, including the West Seattle Food Bank and the Social Justice Fund NW. Their mission of community is something I felt the second I walked in, and the charitable mission makes me feel good about the beer I drank… which, I guess, already did the job of making me feel good.
Geographic Transport Nerdity of the Week
I took three different ferries while I was in the Seattle area, including one where I was the only passenger on the boat (this is a familiar situation for me). Washington State boasts the largest ferry system in the United States, and the second largest in the world — only behind Istanbul. In the before times, it carried over 24.1 million passengers annually and included an international route to Sidney, British Columbia. Despite all these impressive numbers, the Staten Island Ferry is hot on its tail — those orange vessels carried 23.9 million passengers in 2017.
Beer of the Week
Asian Style Lager
Chuckanut Brewery (Bellingham, WA)
Rice Lager
4.8% ABV
After a pandemic, there’s nothing like your first ballpark beer. And I wanted to make it count, so after scoping out the beer selection at the Mariners’ T-Mobile Park, I accidentally found a beer from one of my favorite lager breweries in the Pacific Northwest: Chuckanut Brewery. I spent a weekend in Bellingham, Washington just a few months before the pandemic and blocked off time on my schedule in advance to enjoy the beers at both of their locations. This beer was hidden away in a food court, and I only stumbled upon it because I saw it on tap after rushing towards the ballpark’s Din Tai Fung stand for their Vegetable and Mushroom Buns. They paired perfectly with this beer — crisp and clean with carbonation that dances on your tongue. At $13 for a 24-ounce pour, it’s by far the most expensive beer I’ve had since last March, but it was worth every penny as I watch the Mariners get walloped from my one-person, socially-distanced pod on the third base line — a far cry from my last ballpark beer back on September 21, 2019.
Long Read of the Week
This is probably way too inside baseball, but we lost a valuable voice in beer last week. The anonymous founder of Worst Beer Blog on several social media platforms shut down his accounts. His anonymity gave him the ability to speak truth to power about the ugly side of the beer industry: racism, sexism, union-busting, exploding beer cans, Covid denialism, and countless other topics that hurt the industry as a whole and should be highlighted and confronted. At Vinepair, Dave Infante has a Worst Beer Blog obituary — something I didn’t know I needed. While you’re at it, subscribe to Fingers, Dave’s Substack, for some good long reads.
One More Thing
If you didn’t understand the reference in this week’s subject line, or if you’ve had it stuck in your head while reading this whole newsletter, here’s an extended version that I didn’t know existed until now. You’re welcome.
Happy drinking!
Really enjoy reading this each week. Good to hear what's going on in the beer scene. Sitting outside at TALEA last week got to talking to a couple at the next, socially distanced, table got to share some breweries they weren't familiar with and the New York Distilling Co (The Shanty) across the street. Nice to speak to people again.