Cashmere Brewing Company

So this place is basically a room with games (pool, foozball, a dartboard), a bar, brewing equipment and a dog. Grain sacks hang on the wall, most of them saying "maris otter" which shows the commitment to high quality ingredients. There were 4-5 beers on tap when I visited, an amber, a pale ale, an ipa, a winter warmer and a porter that had just kicked. It's a 1-man operation, bartending, brewing and all and the brewer said that the ipa was his favorite. Unfortunately for me, I didn't try it. The beer was very good though, especially the winter-warmer which was possibly the best winter-warmer I've ever had. This place is definitely worth a stop, a detour, and a trip to visit.

“We See Things From A Different Pint Of Brew.” Catchy. I don’t know if it’s a Cashmere original, but they print this on their cards and logos. I like it. I like much about the place actually, but with two reservations. One is that they are presently only open three days a week for three hours each day. That’s entirely inadequate. Another is that I drove two hundred miles to enjoy three hours of beer saturation and only three of their seven beers were available.

So my only real complaint is that I would care to have more opportunity to appreciate Cashmere beers, which is no complaint at all. Those precious nine hours of availability arrive on Thurs, Fri, and Sat between 3-6PM. You’ll find the tasting room a block off Cottage Ave. in a restored warehouse whose rough hewn wooden interior makes for a relaxed drinking environment. An assortment of games are available – darts, foosball, pinball and the like. What I liked best was the collection of outdoors recreation gear hanging from the rafters. The usual items are displayed here such as skis, snowshoes, fishing poles and a BMX bike. But there’s also three kayaks and a completely assembled hang glider. A walkway leading from the front door is paved with license plates.

Cashmere opened for business in 2005 with a small brewing system it quickly outgrew. In the summer of ’07 they closed their doors for four months to expand their mash capacity to 10 barrels, while adding more fermenters and purging their operation of its bottling line. There’s talk now that they will soon relocate and reconfigure once again, this time as a full-fledged brewpub with a restaurant. At present they have no kitchen and serve no food, which defines them as a tasting room, not a brewpub. And it’s a bit awkward that the beer taps are not actually behind the bar. To service your order the bartender must grab a glass from behind the bar, walk around the two Australian sheepdogs who live there, and continue on to the tap handles which extend outwards from the cooler. Not too convenient.

But the place feels comfortably like a contemporary country western tavern. It’s spacious, there’s a pool table, and strings of holiday lights wind about the rafters. The jukebox is full of country music though on my visit it was disconnected in favor of an iTunes program on a laptop computer. Stacks of malted grains barricade the brew house like sandbags and contribute a delightful grainy fragrance as you enter the bar.

Two of the three beers I drank were quite enjoyable and would serve any brewpub with distinction. But the bartender confides that, “We’re not much of a microbrew town.” That’s too bad. But I can’t see as that’s likely to change until a microbrewery starts serving beer here for more than nine hours a week. I look forward to that.