Airways Brewing Company: Kent, WA

Our third stop on the Washington beer scene was another departure, no pun intended.  First we had been at a fairly large production brewery with brewpub, then a midsized brewpub, and now arrived at tiny production brewery in a sprawling office park.  There was a tiny carboard sign out by the curb saying "Beer" with an arrow pointing to deeper amongst the rock-lined soulless walls of this park.  With a shrug, we entered this miniscule tap room and bellied up to the bar to try some beers, don't judge a book by its cover after all. 

We were greeted by ex-homebrewer Alex Dittmar and his wife Dione who served up some tasty samples and told us their story.  Despite this being the smallest brewery we saw on the trip, everyone was impressed by Alex and the similarity of what he was doing to expanded homebrewing, including mistakes and advice about how to make that jump.  He had started out his career as a commercial pilot, hence the name of the brewery.  The brewery even has an old Boeing nose cone over the boil kettle.

His first big "hit" with a beer was the Sky Hag IPA, named after the crusty and cantankerous old stewardesses who fly the not-so-friendly skies.  He was out of the beer, but opened up a spigot and served us some directly from the secondary fermenter where it was dry-hopping nicely.  Based on that sample I really want to try the finished product!

Harmon Tap Room: Tacoma, WA

The second stop in our first beer tour of the Seattle area was Harmon Tap House in Tacoma.  This place is very new, under two years old, and has a clean upscale feel for a small brewpub.  This is the third site for the company, with most of the commercial bottled beers being brewed in the original facility. They have a dark back room called the Harmon Underground where they often have live music.  There was a brief tour of the brewery by the head brewer, though I didn't think to record his name for this blog.  I blame all the good beers!  I think he enjoyed giving a tour to a group that actually had tough brewing questions for him, and not having to explain what malt is...

We had a lunch of spaghetti and a very nice salad whilst sipping on beer samplers.  I met some great folks on the bus and we shared beers in order to try them all.  One beer had some diacetyl, but otherwise all were very pleasant.  The stand-out was their Anniversary IPA, which was dry and balanced and remains one of the best of the style I had while on my trip.  Not too shabby for a small brewery surrounded by big guys!

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. 

Elysian Fields

Having arrived in Seattle, I was greated by two good friends Pete and Genevieve, who took me out on the town. Since I really wanted to return to the Elysian Fields Brewpub, we headed out there.

I really love the industrial-meets-arty-meets-big-fish-tanks look of this place. They had about 16 of their own beers on tap with some nice guest taps as well. The Avatar Jasmine IPA was really unusual and worth a try! I really liked a set of pale ales made with experimental as-yet-unnamed hops called Beaker and Bunsen. Meep!

The food was excellent, steak frites with blue cheese butter. I was jealous of my colleagues' lamb shepherd's pie though...

I have very pleasant memories of randomly being at this pub for their Great Pumpkin celebration a few years back, when they changed all their taps to serve pumpkin beers.