Well, the initial plan was to keep posting to the ol’ blog in each new town I visited. But alas, I ended up spending more time drinking beer than I spent writing about drinking beer. So I’ve got a lot of catching up to do.
Hell, I still haven’t written up my awesome journey to the St. Arnold’s brewery in Houston, or the night of bloggers and beer at the Library Bar, and these were weeks before I even left on my Cascadia trip.
I also regretfully missed out on this month’s Session aka Beer Blogging Friday, hosted by the guys over at Hop-Talk.
The northwest is pretty overwhelming when it comes to beer. It’s hard to know where to start. So I guess it makes sense to go chronologically.
The train dropped me off in Portland, where I didn’t even come close to hitting all the bars and brewpubs on my list. But I did make a pretty good dent, stopping at the Rogue Pub, the Horse Brass, Lucky Labrador, the New Old Lompoc, Laurelwood, and Belmont Station.
Next I bussed it up to Seattle, where I visited Hale’s Ales and several memorable bars with unmemorable names in Queen Anne, just north of the City Center. My last day in town, I stayed with the Seattle rep for New Belgium, who took me on a sick pub crawl all across town. We started at Georgetown Liquor, a pub on the south side of town with a vegetarian lunch menu and Super Mario Bros. 3, and ended at Brouwer’s, an amazing Belgian bar with about 60 beers on tap, and hundreds of bottles. It was like going on a guided beer tour of Seattle. Fantastic.
From there I tried my luck hitchhiking and made it up to Vancouver just as the sun was setting. Now Canada is not exactly known for having awesome beer. If anything it is known for archaic liquor laws and overpriced cases. But Vancouver has some excellent microbreweries and brewpubs like Granville Island and the Steamworks, both of which I paid a visit.
Coming back across the border, I took a shuttle bus to the Seatac airport, and then caught a local bus that took me to Olympia. The plan for that day was to thumb it down to Skamokawa, Washington to stay on an organic farm with Conner and Sarah, old friends I met when we were studying abroad in Santiago, Chile.
But it got dark before I could make it down there so I rolled out the ol’ sleeping bag on some tall grass in the woods right next to the interstate and waited for morning. I credit Deschutes and a six dollar bottle of Barefoot Merlot with helping me make it through the night. Damn you Kerouac for romanticizing hitchhiking.
Conner had just bottled some homebrew 13 days earlier, so it was the perfect time to crack open a few bottles when I arrived the next day. It was his first attempt at brewing, and he ended up with a delicious malty amber that tasted more like a brown. Side note: Conner and Sarah have a dog named Barley. What a great dog name!
The next day we went to Eugene, OR for the Oregon Country Fair where there was no beer. But that night we had dinner at Cornucopia, a small restaurant with a huge menu and an impressive beer cooler, as well as 6 or 7 local-ish micros on tap.
After one night in Eugene, it was time to move on for the last leg of my trip, San Francisco. I had meant to grab a beer with Jay of Hedonist Beer Jive while I was in town, but I’ve got loads of old high school friends that live in the bay area and I didn’t even find the time to email him. I know that’s a sorry excuse Jay, but I promise to look you up next time I’m in town. Luckily I had time to hit Magnolia and the Toronado, so no complaints there.
In the coming weeks I plan on recounting some of the great beers of the Pacific Northwest. I also plan on giving Molly and Sage a run for their money by blowing you away with my beer pics. Stay tuned, and thank you for your messages!
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on Jul 31st, 2007 at 5:25 pm
No worries Dave, I probably had a headache that night anyway.
on Aug 7th, 2007 at 1:59 pm
You’re going to have trouble beating Molly on the number of pix you can post to your blog. Now, out spelling her — that’s a different story.