Trip logs for Outside the PNW

As a PNWer, who lived in NYC for 2 years and recently visited, I have to say you must hit up Dirck the Norseman (aka Greenpoint Ale & Beer Co.), Other Half Brewing & Threes Brewing. Finback Brewing is also worth your time if you're willing to travel, and Keg & Lantern if you're already in the neighborhood.

 

Make sure you hit up Edge Brewing in Barcelona and say hello from us! Really nice people, and great beer.
Bier Cab (bar/restaurant) by the university has a great bottle list that I believe is available online, and their retail shop should be open now too.
The cathedrals are worth visiting, even with crazy lines. The Gaudi cathedral in particular is completely insane.

 

This isn't a beer focused trip (well, going back to Brussels is) but Edge and Bier Cab are both on the list of places to check out, thanks!

 

Bier Cab is awesome. They have a "live" taplist like Bailey's (it may have even been inspired directly by Bailey's). The food is also quite good and I highly recommend it for a meal.

We ordered a bottle of De Cam Framboise at Bier Cab, and when our server opened it about half the bottle gushed out in explosive fashion. He felt so bad that he gave us the bottle for free (and too bad it was the last one because it was amazing), and also gave us some free dessert. I ordered some other crazy stuff and left a big tip. We came back again a few days later and the same server was there. He remembered us and kept bringing us little extra bits from the kitchen during our dinner. It's an all around great place with great people.

 

Thanks TheeWalrusHunter for starting this thread. I really enjoyed reading about everyones trips and felt that I should contribute.

I recently visited the Central Coast of California for a week and was pleasantly surprised by it's developing beer scene.

San Luis Obispo

Central Coast Brewing - Cool little neighborhood brewery and taproom in North SLO. I think they've been open for 15+ years. Fairly cheap pours and a nice patio for sunny days. I had a berliner and a few different BA stouts that were all quite good. Sewer Stomp (BA Chilli and Cacao stout) and A La Tart (berliner) were my favorite. Bartenders were friendly and told me that they have some sours in the works.

Eureka Burger - Burger chain with a few spots throughout California. Expensive food and beer, but pretty good burgers and an interesting tap list (with the most BA beers that I found in SLO).

Pismo Beach

California Fresh Market - Local grocery store in a strip mall off the freeway. They had the best selection of bottles that I found in a 25 mile radius. Lots of offerings from Almanac, Prairie, Crooked Stave, Telegraph, etc. Plus a ton of California staples and imports. Fairly good prices and a convenient location off the 101.

Hot Shots - Big pool hall in downtown Pismo. Kind of divey so I was pretty surprised by their awesome tap list. They had on BA Ten Fiddy, BCBS, Parabola, some Libertine beers, plus a bunch more. Grabbed some onion rings and played some pool. Not horribly expensive. A great stop to grab a beer by the beach!

Buellton/Los Alamos

FW Barrelworks - About a 30 minute drive (through beautiful wine country even on the 101) south of the costal area. I really enjoyed checking out the barrel room (it was huge and had some very cool chandeliers) which was on your way into the tap room. The servers weren't overly friendly (and had their cicerone certifications framed on the wall haha), but they had a nice selection of Barrelworks beers. The tap room is connected to a FW brewpub, which has food and a lot of regular FW on tap.

Babi's - Little "beer emporium" on the main drag of Los Alamos. Connected to a wine shop (tasting room?) as well. Solid tap list, and a small but interesting bottle selection. Really nice patio with a hip design. The server/owner was really friendly and was apparently dating Sour Jim (the brewer at Barrelworks). He was grabbing a beer/saying hi at the same time as me so we got to chat.

Full of Life Flatbread - Awesome restaurant across the street from Babi's. Had to wait 15 minutes to get a table, but they had a Telegraph saison on tap and a nice porch. It was a little pricey, but the food was amazing. Solid farm to table California cuisine. Very rustic/homestyle. Lots of duck, quail, lamb, etc. Got some awesome appetizers and the best pizza (flatbread) that I've ever had. I'd recommend putting your name on the list and grabbing a beer at Babi's while you wait.

Moro Bay

Libertine Pub - About 30 minutes north of Pismo. Another beautiful drive. Really odd, old dive bar in downtown Moro Bay, right on the water. It is now a completely wild brewery, with barrels shoved into weird places and a tiny coolship when you walk in the door. The back room was smaller and had more of a bar vibe, the front was more of a dinning room with an amazing view of the ocean and sunset. They had at least 5+ of their own beers which were seriously world class, plus 25? other taps. Didn't try any food but the service was great. Talked with the assistant brewer and traded him some de Garde bottles. Definitely a must go to place if you're in the area! (+ I believe they are opening a tap room in downtown SLO)

 

Is that the same Eurkea burger place here in Seattle? It's from California originally.

 

Yeah definitely the same place. I didn't know that they had expanded out of California.

 

Yep, there has been a Eureka at University Village in Seattle for at least a year now. Pretty solid taplist with a nice mixture of California, Oregon and Washington beers. Cheap Almanac draft pricing.

 

Yeah, apparently you can buy to-go from BierCab now, according to a friend who was there last week.

In Madrid, I'd recommend a visit to La Tienda de la Cerveza. It's not the fanciest place, and it's in a bit of a run-down part of town, but the fellow who runs it was super-friendly and excited to talk to us about the Spanish craft beers and open a couple bottles with us, plus they have some of their own homebrew on tap.

 

LIke Madras!!!

Actually Madras is coming along quite fast@

 

You mean Redmond? I don't know of a single brewery/notable beer bar in Madras.

 

Yeah brain fart Redmond!

 

https://www.facebook.com/LouDoggsBrewery

want some "cheesecake" with that beer LOL

and this
https://www.facebook.com/WildWindsStation


good beer everywhere!

 

Good to know about Luelland Orchard, though no updates about the brewery in FB. Cool about the Mecca Grade connection, too. A malt floor in Central Oregon means we've got everything we need to brew beer after the zombie invasion/economy collapse/whatever. Yay us!

 

Trip report ... or, actually, relocation report. I'm now a Midwest field agent. Either consider me a turncoat or something of an agent provacateur, extolling the virtues of PNW beer in the land of FIBs.

I drove across Idaho, Montana, North Dakota, Minnesota, Wisconsin, and into Chicago over 4 days. Didn't have a lot of time for stops but I do have a few observations.

IDAHO

Stopped in Post Falls, visited Enoteca. A bit of a let down. Best selection in the area supposedly but nothing that unique. Perhaps a bit more selection of the local brewery, Selkirk Abbey, and access to O'dells but those were the only real highlights. I was hoping for some more Idaho beer. I've really enjoyed Sockeye's stuff - they are a majorly under the radar brewery, doing some great basic beers in cans as well as canning some very good BA beers - and was dissapointed none was available. A visit to Selkirk Abbey was a highlight. Great brewery and one that I think "we" overlooked a bit when they entered the Seattle market. They're right next to Doma Coffee and a visit there is worth it as well. I grabbed a canister of their dryfly whiskey barrel aged costa rican coffee which smells incredible, makes a killer pour over and, though I'm usually one to avoid adulterating my coffee with milk, goes incredibly with steamed milk ... turning into vanilla and butterscotch.

MONTANA

Unfortunately I didn't have time to hit many of the breweries in Montana due to timing. Many are open for a scant few hours and, being a very large state (trivia: did you know it's the 4th largest state by size? I didn't) it's hard to hit the timing right. But I did hit a bottleshop in Missoula - Summer Sun Garden & Brew (a garden shop ... with a bunch of beer?) - and picked up a number of canned Montana beers most of which are from breweries I've never heard of - The Front, Tamarack, Bitter Root, Lewis & Clark, Harvest Moon, Red Lodge, etc. What struck me about Montana is how many tiny breweries there are. I suppose this makes sense seeing as cities are so far apart and most towns are so small; you can't get huge because no one is going to drive 100 miles to hit your brewery. There are lots of cans and while IPAs are most common there was a surprising number of Scotch Ales. Wouldn't have guessed that the Scotch Ale would be a Montana favorite, but it seemed to be. Stopped at a nice beer bar / restaurant in Bozeman called Montana Ale Works. Good food, packed with people, nice beer selection really focused on local stuff. Had good beers from Carter's, Bridger, Bozeman, and Draught House. In short, Montana struck me as having a really unique beer scene with pretty uniform high quality. Would love to come back for an extended stay focused on exploring the national parks and hitting more of the small breweries.

NORTH DAKOTA

Beer wasteland. Theodore Roosevelt National Park / Painted Canyon is among the most beautiful places on Earth, which was quite surprising. The rest of the state ... drive fast and get out. ;-)

MINNESOTA

Minneapolis is a pretty great beer town. First stop was Barley John's. Under the radar nationally but absolutely world class. This was the best beer I had in Minneapolis. Their basic beers are excellent - a wild rice brown that tasted incredibly nutty with that distinct wild rice flavor, a killer porter - and their special beers were phenomenal. A BA Baltic Porter called Dark Knight, a dunkelweizen called Cobblepots (they seem to have a Batman fetish, which is surprising given the homey / country feel of the brewpub), an Imperial Chocolate Rye Stout were all killer. But that Dark Knight was spectacular. They have a no frills vibe, not hip at all, filled with locals ... an incredible contrast to Surly which I visited later. Next up was Minneapolis Town Hall. I've had a lot of their beer before and loved it. Unfortunately, they are so popular - and I think are upgrading their brewing system or something - that most of the beer was unavailable. I consoled myself with a pour of their incredible Czar Jack, a beautiful Jack Daniels BA RIS. Then on to Surly for dinner. The new place is unhinged. Gigantic, packed, obviously THE hot spot in town, a touch of "going out" vibe and "meat market" on a Friday night, girls in made up and dressed to impress. It's off in an industrial area with room to expand. It's a bit of an adult beer focused Disneyland. They had a number of the canned beers on tap along with some killer tap only stuff such as Todd the Axe Man, Damien, Devil's Work, etc. The food was surprisingly excellent and not just upscale gastropub. Some interesting options. A must vist but not intimate and at too large a scale, I think, to do too much unique / small batch type stuff unfortunately. That said, the draft only options were excellent. Finally, I hit Dangerous Man. Sort of a halfway zone feel wise between Town Hall and Surly. Definitely catering to a young, hip, urban clientele. Packed. And, as with Town Hall, so popular they were running out of beers. They do adjunct porters really well and I had an excellent Pecan Porter. Bottle shops in MPLS also seem solid after going through MT which was almost exclusively local stuff and ND which had horrible distro. MPLS gets much better distro and there are a lot of excellent smaller local producers putting out cool stuff. I highly recommend stuff from Indeed, Bauhaus, Bent Paddle, and a really odd-ball farmhouse brewery called Olvalde.

ILLINOIS

Been here a little under a week and so far have only visited one brewery, Half Acre. One surprising thing after coming from WA is that many of the small new breweries don't open with tap rooms. Tap rooms seem to be something that comes later, once they've grown a bit. Stark contrast to WA and OR where tap rooms seem to be a first tier priority. People here seem to package more and earlier in their existence as well. Finally, tap rooms seem to be exclusively 21+, not dog friendly, and unless I'm mistaken they are the only places you can fill growlers. The limitations on growler fills is almost certainly one of the reasons people package more. Anyway, Half Acre is another young, urban clientele type of spot. They're making a very solid array of IPAs. Funny enough, the one I dug the most, Vallejo, was the dankest and least fruity; they dubbed it their SD style IPA. Looking at ratings, regional tastes in IPAs are apparent. The less bitter, more citrus options are consistently higher rated. The non-IPAs were very solid too. An excellent pilsner, Pony, with some floral notes, almost like lavender; a rye stout, Baume, that was creamy / roasty / coffee driven; a black saison, Lahaksa, that struck me as in a no man's zone between a saison and a porter. Definitely a must stop in Chicago. I've visited a few bottle shops and the first thing I've noticed is that a decent amount of stuff that MW traders try to pass off as limited is pretty readily available on shelves - Revolution's BA beers, a lot of 3 Floyds, etc. Distribution is solid here and there are a lot new breweries popping up all the time: at least 25 new breweries that I was unaware of.

In short, a road trip like this revealed just how interesting, diverse, and booming craft beer is. And reinforced how silly the whale hunting is when pretty amazing beer exists in a lot of unlikely places or comes from unknown breweries.

 

Assuming you've moved to Chicago, I'd be interested to hear your perspective (after you've been there a while) on how limited releases, events etc. go, compared with what you've experienced in the Northwest. In other words, is it really as bad as it sounds from what we read on here? Better? Worse? Different? Please file regular reports from the new PNW forum Chicago bureau.

In general, really envious of a lot of you folks. I've been all around this great big world ... just not recently.

 

Yep, I've moved. Before you get jealous let me state that it's currently 30 degrees here and in the 6 days I've been here it's snowed twice.

I'm hitting Dark Lord Day as well as 18th Street's barrel aged beer fest in April ... so I'll have a bit more insight into the MW chaos. Happy to report back when I have more formulated opinions. So far I see a lot of activity - tons of small breweries opening, generally high quality from a lot of the small / new breweries, more diversity than I expected (e.g. a really nice lager brewery called Metropolitan), pretty good distribution, a much more "bar" centered / 21+ vibe, and fewer (no?) beer only bottleshops + a lot less emphasis on the bottleshop as a destination (e.g. not seeing anything like a Chucks / Bottleworks / Beer Junction / Belmont Station / Beermongers).

 

Don't get me wrong; I'm not envious of you for moving to Chicago. I grew up in St. Louis, and there's a reason I live where I do. That comment was more about some of the travel reports in this thread. I wouldn't mind going back to Spain or Belgium, for example. Been way too long.

Still, looking forward to seeing your reports from the Windy City. Your perspective on DLD should be really interesting.

 

Montana is a lovely beer state.

Step 1: Drive ~7 hours from Seattle to Missoula
Step 2: Crush sh1t - draught works, big sky, kettlehouse, etc
Step 3: Drive ~6 hours to Jackson Hole
Step 4: Go in the woods and stay there a while
Step 5: Crush sh1t. Melvin, Snake River, Grand Teton
Step 6: Return to Seattle, preferably via Missoula

People should be doing this.