Three Breweries Show Seattle's Range

I spent a few days last week in Seattle, ostensibly to see Reuben’s for a story on their 10th anniversary. (Look for that soonish.) I couldn’t help but let my eye wander a bit, though—and my nose and tongue, and I managed to visit a few breweries along the way. As recently as a decade ago, Seattle’s brewery scene was a bit bleak. It was on the vanguard of craft brewing in the 1980s, but then things went stale. Boy, has that all changed.

Seattle now contains a thicket of breweries as dense as anywhere in the country, along with several that receive national attention. What impresses me is how good they are as a group, and how distinctive. The three I’d like to tell you about are good examples of the city’s diversity, and why Seattle is at or near the top of the country’s most interesting beer cities. They each tell a different story about Seattle, and hint at how rich the offerings are there.

Métier

A month ago I wrote about the Métier/Reuben’s mentorship project, the Mosaic State Brewer’s Collective. It sharpened my desire to see the brewery and taste the beer (I’d had exactly one can to that point), so I pinged Dreux Dillingham and he agreed to show me around.

Métier is in a funny moment. It’s a small brewery located in remote Woodinville, a half hour northeast of the city in a modest space in an industrial park. It’s the kind of place many breweries start, and most never escape. Métier, on the other hand, is in the process of going big. To use a local example, it would be like seeing Nirvana at a scruffy venue in front of 300 drunk punks the day after they released Nevermind. You sense everything’s about to change, but it hasn’t, quite.

Métier opened a new taproom this past weekend in Seattle’s Mann neighborhood, east of downtown. That will give it a foothold in the city, boosting its profile. But that ain’t the half of it. Métier has also partnered with the Mariners to open in the brewpub space Pyramid recently occupied right next to the stadium. The ballpark is surprisingly central in the city, and this site will have a year-round crowd.

It sits along a development called Steelheads Alley, which is a nod to the old Negro Leagues team that once played here. It also points to the DNA of Métier, a Black-owned brewery founded with an explicit goal of making craft beer more accessible to BIPOC drinkers. On my visit with Dreux, these values infused the way he talked about the beer and brewery and what they hoped to accomplish. Some of it is explicit, like the Black Stripe line they hope will seem approachable for BIPOC drinkers, or merely implicit, in the brand and brewery strategy owner Rodney Hines and Dillingham, the General Manager, have charted out.

Ultimately, it’s a brewery, and I wanted to actually sit down and drink some beer. Dreux started me out with their kölsch, and that was a good move—it’s a spot-on example, with toasty malts, delicate hopping, and stone-fruit esters. The rest of their line was familiar, a blend of IPAs and lagers as well as experiments and one-offs. It’s a solid lineup, and one that is already beginning to express a house effect. You won’t find much in the way of hazies here—the IPAs are clear and zingy.

As we drank, I asked Dreux if they ever used wine in the beer. He came from that world, and worked for more than a decade as a winemaker. That’s when things got interesting. Well, he said, they did have a Riesling saison on. As I sipped it, he admitted he didn’t see much potential in these wine-beer hybrids. “I just don’t see clearly where those flavor profiles meld. The red wine stuff, I don’t know, the color impact—they’re just too separate to me.” That was very much at odds with what was happening in my mouth. It was tremendous.

Admittedly, it wasn’t a red-wine hybrid, and Dreux mentioned another project, a witbier aged in Chardonnay barrels still in the wood. So maybe he was mainly skeptical about reds in beer. But in the saison, that Riesling really worked. It had a lovely floral nose, which immediately grabbed me. The wine added a fullness and what almost seemed like a creaminess, and the fruit blended perfectly with the saison esters. It was elegant, refined, somewhat vinous, but very obviously a beer.

I think that may have been why Dreux didn’t love the blends—the idea of a nice wine being overwhelmed by a beer just didn’t sit right. He hollered to head brewer Michael Daly, who was in the brewery, and had him pull a bit of the witbier from the barrel. It was also really well-done. Again. the word that came to mind was “elegant.” He became a bit more animated as we talked of wine, and I hope my appreciation encourages them to keep up with the wine—it could become part of that house character.

Lucky Envelope

This was one of those serendipitous discoveries. At the end of day two of my visit, as my old body was starting to run out of gas, Ben Keene suggested we stop into Lucky Envelope. Ben is a writer who recently took a job at Reuben’s, and a friend. We try to meet when we’re in each other’s town just to catch up. He had singled out Lucky Envelope a day before and encouraged me to go. It has been a fixture of Ballard’s brewery row for years, but is one of those little places every city has that for whatever reason hasn’t reached a state of buzz. Locals know and respect it, but it hasn’t pierced the consciousness of our-of-towners like me.

By very good fortune, we arrived as co-founder and head brewer Barry Chan was sitting down for a post-shift pint. I started with his multi-award winning helles, which he wisely calls “Lager.” (People still have no idea what a helles is.) Ben introduced me and we all stood and chatted while sipping lagers (Barry was drinking the classic brewer shiftie, a light lager called “Lite”). I got the background on the brewery, and was surprised to discover it was founded in 2015. This is the trouble with a scene as dense as Seattle’s—I miss stuff.

The brewery is known for its culinary-inspired beers, which draw on the spices and dishes of multiple Asian countries. I was about to order one of those when Barry mentioned the brewery’s coolship. Coolship? He referred me to a guava beer they had on tap, a blend containing 75% spontaneous ale. I glanced at the blackboard, which made no mention of this. It was amazing! Reuben’s also does a spontaneous not far away, so I had my second sample of Seattle terroir. The local Brettanomyces seems to be a real winner. It’s fruity and clean—none of the funky compost and barnyard stuff. With guava, it was lightly acidic, bright, and refreshing. I suppose it might have made sense not to mention the spontaneous base there, too, because that beer tasted very little like a lambic, but nerds like me would love to know.

What impressed me so much was that this was a small brewery with a modest taproom nested within that welter of Ballard breweries, and here they had a wonderful spontaneously-fermented beer flying under the radar—along with some great lagers. And that was leaving aside the beers for which they’re known—and which I’ll have to return to sample. When you assess a city’s overall beer scene, it’s these kinds of places that either expose a town as not quite there yet, or reveal its depths.

Machine House

The last stop, on my trip back south to Portland, was a brewery I have known well for a long time. Bill Arnott’s Machine House has been a steady and insistent champion for cask ale, motoring along through lean times, a slightly awkward (but gorgeous) location, and a pandemic. I’m not sure what factors have led to this small cask revival in Portland, but regular disbursements of firkins and bottles of bitter and mild to places like Belmont Station and the Horse Brass surely played a role. If nothing else, Bill has shown that there is a market for cask, if you’re willing to commit to it.

The brewery is situated in Georgetown, south of downtown, a neighborhood bounded by industrial tracts, rail, and highways. It’s precise location, however, is the original Rainier brewery—and even more precisely, the machine house therein. (The name makes more sense if you’re standing in front of the brewery.) It’s sort of a pain in the ass to get to, and it definitely feels a bit cut off from everything but the little commercial district it inhabits, but once you get there, it’s an amazing and atmospheric oasis.

I found Bill peering into the mash tun where he was making an homage to/evocation of Fuller’s Vintage Ale. It’s not much of a kit, but after nine years, Bill knows how to use it. A Brit, he got his start rather randomly at Tipple’s Brewery in Norfolk. As a young man, he managed to get a job there, though he hadn’t brewed before and wasn’t looking for a brewing job. “I was just looking for a job,” he said. “Could have been a postman.”

Fortunately, it wasn’t, and his love of beer blossomed. He followed a girl to Seattle, and the rest unfolded as those things do. He’s a cheerful, self-effacing guy (“Well, I’m English”), and he downplays his skills as a brewer. “I know how to make cask ale,” he told me almost apologetically. Brits, raised on the stuff, seem to think anyone could make a delicious, faultless 4% ale. They’re wrong. These beers are hard, and one of the reason Machine House has become a beacon for cask is because Bill’s are really good.

The 7-barrel, second-hand kit is hinky, but it works for infusion-mashing. He uses (predominantly) Golden Promise malt and English hops, doesn’t tinker with Seattle’s soft water much, chooses one of two English yeast strains (Timothy Taylor and Fuller’s) depending on the beer he wants to make, and employs open fermenters. Especially thanks to Covid, he sells beer in package (including popular $40 5-liter pouches), but these are ales meant to be enjoyed on cask.

We tasted through several of them, which was a joy. My experience has been limited largely to bottles, so it was a pleasure long in coming to taste them as they were meant to be served. I need to reserve a few hours (and a nearby hotel room) to really enjoy them by the pint, but even in halves I could appreciate their moreishness. Fans of mild might never make it to any of his other beers. “Tons of chocolate malt. That’s how we get loads of character in a low-ABV beer.” It’s full-bodied and even fuller-flavored, a wee titan of character. In addition, he has a rotating cast of bitters (regular and best, though Americans don’t know the difference), as well as specialties. Everything I tried was great.

The beer that captured my fancy, however, was a collaboration with neighbor Lowercase Brewing. It resembled many of his beers: Maris Otter malt, Fuggles and Golding hops, weighing in at 4.8%, and served as all his beers are, on cask. You know this beer, right? Maybe not. The one unusual ingredient is the lager yeast, and my, what a difference it makes. The beer, London Lager, looks and tastes for all the world like something out of Franconia. It was a revelation—and illustrates the potential of a cask engine to showcase more than just classic British beer styles.

This is just a tiny taste of Seattle. With something like a hundred breweries in the city (depending on how you define “brewery” and “Seattle”), one could go a great deal further. It’s a random sampling in one way, but perhaps that’s also useful, because it offers a bit of texture to the diversity the city offers. We’ve long given up talking about best beer cities (thank god), but Seattle should certainly be on a short list of beer destinations. It is without many peers. I need to visit more often myself!