Visiting Seattle (Spring 2016 Update)

Headed to Seattle today for work, planning on hitting a few breweries or beer bars today and also Wednesday afternoon. The list in the OP will be my starting point, but specifically today or Wednesday is there anything local on tap that is a can't miss? Mostly IPAs, Stouts, BA Stouts, Sours, etc.

Thanks for the advice! I know Fremont, Holy Mountain, and Cloudburst will be on my agenda but trying to fill in with spots that may have other local / West Coast must haves.

 

Hit up Reubens as well. Download the BrewNotice app for taplists all over the city.

Also, today is the last day of Seattle Beer Week, so there are probably some fun things going on.

 

Thanks. I'm now stuck in Atlanta waiting for another flight to Seattle. Anything in the Bellevue area that I could stop at late this evening?

 

Depends on how late you're talking. 9 or 10 is probably the latest the few breweries there are open. I always thought Bellevue Brewing had decent food and beer. Geaux Brewing is taproom only with occasional food trucks. Their beers are real good. They also might make you feel somewhat close to home with their New Orleans vibe taproom.

 

Not scheduled to arrive until 8PM and will have to pickup the rental car and make it up that way still. May just have to delay any beer stops until tomorrow night unfortunately.

 

Malt and Vine is open until 10. Looks like everything else closes at 9.

 

Lot No. 3 is a restaurant that's open to midnight. Was there once and they had a decent craft beer selection on draft. Website shows they have a rotating Holy Mountain tap handle. It's right downtown Bellevue if that's where you are staying.

 

Geaux and Resonate are both open until 10.

Untappd makes it look like they've got Dawnbringer on tap at the moment. Probably your best bet for late Sunday night craft beer in Bellevue.

 

Don't know your local laws and scene so this may sound stupid, but our grocery stores often have great selections and sell until 2am, in case you want to settle in at your hotel more than go out.

 

Good point. There's a QFC and a Whole Foods in downtown Bellevue. I think the WF over there even does growler fills.

 

Tavern Hall in Bellevue Square mall doesn't have the best selection despite their name, but they have some decent choices if you're from out of town and a few rotating taps that can be decent. I believe Top Cutter is always available, and if the website is current, they have Holy Mountain's Celestial Lineage.

 

Thanks to both of you for the suggestion, our Whole Foods at home is a good beer stop for out of towners as well. I think I'll stop at WF Bellevue tonight and save brewery stops for evenings this week after work. Cheers!

 

Get yourself a six pack of Reubens' Daily Pale.

 

Glad you had a good time and sounds like you did some serious work to hit so many solid places. However, when did we (Fremont) become "same as it ever was"? Is this a thing? A good thing? We are only six years old, but are we taken for granted already? Do we eat our young this early?

Question for the forum: do we seek the new or the good and what is the nexus? What is the future? To wit, Boneyard is still amazing but are not "new" in our new world of ridiculous choices, do we fail do recognize quality? Are Cloudburst and Holy Mountain doomed to become the next "good, but have you tried...." breweries? Is Fremont already there? Have I had too much beer during SBW and miss the point of this trip recap?

 

I meant it as a good thing. I've never had a bad beer, never been when there's a giant crowd [despite how it seems that everyone else says it's almost always standing room only], always had pleasant staff, great prices and a good time.

In retrospect I understand how it might sound negative, but I meant it in the way there's not much more of any ways it could've been better than any of my other trips [which have been equally been great] unless you want to start closing off to just my friends and I or giving out free beer.

It was a great stop, and it's been consistently a great stop every time I'm up in Seattle; Thus the "same as it ever was."

 

I think that part of this is at a certain point people have repeated the same things so many times that they feel like they're unspoken truths. At a certain point, barring catastrophic downward spirals, people just assume people know about the ones who've proven themselves in and out. To use Portland as an example, I'm not usually one to recommend Hair of the Dog not because I think ill of them, but because subconsciously it's repeated to the point that feels like common knowledge about beer in Portland. While there is definitely people who're constantly looking for and comparing new shiny thing to their old shiny things that are still shiny, just not new, I don't think it's the only driving factor. Especially here in this regional forum where we seem to try and beat down the hyped up horde as much as we can.

Maybe a little bit, when doing these kinds of recaps I mainly like to bring up new experiences to get others opinions on something I didn't really have until now [then]. I've been to Fremont 12ish times and this one was a quick stop off on a long walk during a hot day, so there wasn't much to write about that I already haven't said. I also stopped at Brouwer before stopping at Fremont, but I had even less to say about that for the very same reason.

 

Damn, I could sip my beer and ramble an answer on and on all night on this topic ...

It saddens me, but one thing the average modern craft beer geek does not have is an attention span (I'm not saying this in regards to @Strangestbrewer I should add). In another thread when I called BCBS "hyped" someone responded that it can't be hyped because that would imply "barrel aged beer" was a fad. Fad isn't what I meant, but in a way, in the beer world everything popular is a fad in a sense, due to how quickly the masses abandon that which isn't latest great or maybe too easily procured.

Hell, I remember when Masala Mama was a big deal. It's a great beer, and even though I haven't been lucky enough to have it in more than five years, I'm sure it's still wonderful. The (according to my memory) long time #1 rated IPA on BA is surely virtually unknown now among the average BA user. It would be easy to do a roll call of beers that once dominated talk on the BA forums that now are considered somewhat blase, or overlooked altogether: Dark Lord, Stone Imperial Russian Stout, Storm King, Speedway Stout ... the list goes on and on. All are still great beers in their own right but they aren't new great beers. They aren't barrel aged. They are not difficult to get. Honestly, if Dark Star had been available in 2005 it would be on this list as well (I mean that as a compliment)!

In Fremont's case, you produce some awesome beer, but it probably loses some sexiness points in the eyes of average beer geek due to the fact that it's quite easy for most of us to obtain almost as much as we want/can afford, and it's priced very reasonably. You take mercy on us and make a good amount, so it's possible to find it months after release.

I used to chase beers, but I gave it up when I realized almost every beer craving I had could be quenched by a brewery closer to home, and at the very least within the NW. I expect a lot of other beer geeks in the NW will reach the same conclusion with time. And fortunately, we're only a fraction of the people that are consuming craft beer these days. Weekends at Fremont can be a madhouse, and I don't really believe all those people are beer geeks that are willing to line up for some big release of limited, barrel aged, small batch beer. No, those people just want to drink something that tastes good and (hopefully) isn't brewed by someone evil.

Fremont has both those bases covered in spades. Sorry for the long missive (written with the aid of delicious Fremont Summer Ale). Hopefully this is even slightly coherent.

 

This is actually what I assumed when I read it myself. For a moment I wondered if you meant what Texwild himself mused, but I was certain it was meant as a compliment more than anything else. Mostly because I couldn't fathom someone knocking Fremont for being ... Fremont!

And I don't think the price thing can be overstated. It does somewhat boggle the mind that I can walk out of Fremont with a growler of Universal Pale or whatever for what ... nine bucks? The prices in general have always been beyond reasonable. And on top of that they do so many great things for our community too? Sorry to get political, but if more American businesses approached capitalism in this fashion our country would be in far better shape.

 

I admit I might've just left too much up to whoever reads it to either: realize I put them in descending order of impressions during the trip thus hoping people would realize that it was either 'above solid' [and the two things above it were first impressions], look at the rest of my post and realize that it I had nothing bad to say in most of it so infer that it was good, or expected them to fill out their own idea of what I meant by that [and since the worst thing I've ever heard anyone say about Fremont was it was too busy, means that I'd had gay ol' time].

Unless I'm explicitly negative on here, interpret my ramblings as positive. Things I'm expressly negative about that I can think of off the top of my head: the Fat Heads brewpub/branding/location, hype & hoarding, and Sierra Nevada pushing the term 'wet hop' as a false flag to distract people from realizing that their usage of 'fresh hop' on Celebration making no sense.

The negative thoughts on most of my many trips to Seattle [outside a few random beers] revolve around lack of seating but that might because I'm usually there on weekends and I tend to bring the sun with me for some stupid reason.

 

In our modern world, 6 years is an eternity. In 2010, smartphones weren't ubiquitous, not much good beer was available in cans, and Uber was just an evil fantasy. Now, anyone who doesn't have a smartphone does so as a choice, great beer in cans is all over the place, and Uber is an evil reality. I don't remember Fremont making a big, splashy entrance onto the beer scene, in the way, say Holy Mountain has, but yeah, Fremont has taken on the role of established citizen. Six years from now, new, hyped breweries will have come along, and faded into the background. There will always be a new toy that folks are interested in, that doesn't mean we still don't like the old toys, just that we don't talk about them as much.