Fish Brewing in Olympia, WA

From the website:
"From its home in beautiful Olympia, Washington, Fish Brewing Company has been hand-crafting ales of Northwest proportions since 1993. Founded by Crayne and Mary Horton and a few dozen local investors, Fish began operations humbly. With a 15-barrel brew house, two 15-barrel fermenters, and one dairy tank, we brewed for our neighbors up and down Puget Sound. Growing steadily since, Fish is now an award-winning craft brewer with distribution throughout the great Pacific Northwest and beyond."

Later the company moved to produce some of the first commercially available organic beers and are moving toward making all of the beers organic.  They also do some contract brewing for other brewers and have a line of ciders.  Interestingly the cider production has to all be done in a separate area of the brewery on separate equipment due to wierd alcohol laws. 

This was the first stop on my first organized beer tour in Washington state, and took about an hour on the bus from the Bellevue Hyatt.  On the way there, we had some beer trivia with homebrew prizes and exchanged brewing disaster stories, MC'd by a local homebrewess.  Our tour guides were actually investors in the Fish Brewery, hence were very knowledgeable about the place. 



Very cool artwork on the exterior walls

We started with a guided tour of the production facility, housed in a cool historic building.  The guide gave some pretty fun explanations of the brewing process and was quite animated for 10:30 in the morning!  The storage warehouse used to house a 50's sock-hop and had some pretty funny old grafitti that the company decided not to mess with. 

We had a few minutes to grab some sausage and beer samplers at the Fishbowl pub across the street, where the original small brewery was located.  The organic IPA was quite good, and all the beers were tasty.  I would certainly recommend a visit if you are in Olympia, but maybe not worth a trip all the way from Seattle.