They have approached us all: The helpful mother or doting dad who deals Girl Scout cookies in the office. And we’ve all been the happy recipients of those colorful boxes of Thin Mints. Well, happy to tell you, but Peaks and Pints has been pushing Girl Scout cookies boxes too. Girls Scouts have been selling cookies to fund troop activities for more than a century now. We’ve been selling for a week — well, the ones we don’t eat. Oh, Thin Mints. You’re delicious, come with like 1,000 cookies in one box AND your crispiness is perfect for dunking into beer. Stouts and
Aloha 7 Seas Hula-Weizen! Local Suds: 7 Seas Hula-Weizen Let’s get this out of the way: The coconut isn’t a “nut” at all, but is rather the fruit of the coconut palm (if you want to get even more specific, it’s technically a “drupe” belonging to the same family of fruits as peaches, plums, mangoes cherries and olives). Call it what you will — from water to oil to sugar, coconut is STILL having a moment beyond the coconut water at the crossfit gym. 7 Seas Brewing released its second of six scheduled Bridge Series craft
Peaks and Pints’ barbecue pulled pork sandwich special pairs well with Matchless Brewing’s Pick-N-Pale Pale Ale. Peaks and Pints Pulled Pork Pick-N-Pull Peaks and Pints offers a pulled pork and coleslaw sandwich special today. Although this is a relatively simple dish to make, pulled pork has an intense variety of flavors. The savory meat, sweet onions, garlic and orange juice are complex enough, but then the addition of barbecue sauce and coleslaw take the flavor profile to another level. The varying flavors in the sauce, plus the fat from the pork, suggests that the dish needs
Go bananas today with craft beer to celebrate National Banana Cream Pie Day. Who made that designation is unclear, according to the website daysoftheyear.com. The major banana companies Chiquita and Dole are noncommittal about the day on their websites. Maybe for them, every day is banana day. But knowing that somewhere someone arbitrarily picked March 2 as National Banana Cream Pie Day was cause enough for Peaks and Pints to give the fruit its due by creating a beer flight of banana flavors. Yes, hefeweizens rule this beer flight as the top-fermenting Bavarian yeast Torulaspora delbrueckii, which German brewers refers
Seattle native Josh Pfriem began homebrewing while at Western Washington University in his early 20s then moved to Utah as a ski bum. He worked at Utah Brewers Cooperative for a few years before moving back to his old college town of Bellingham to brew at Chuckanut Brewery, where he helped win the Great American Beer Festival Small Brewpub of the Year in 2009. He moved to Hood River, Oregon to work at Full Sail but left in December 2011 to open pFriem Family Brewers — across the highway from Full Sail along the banks of the Columbia River —
In 2010 — with his Siebel Institute education, training in Germany and Belgium, and degree from Yale tucked under his arm — Ben Edmunds opened Breakside Brewery in the quiet Woodlawn neighborhood of Northeast Portland as a restaurant and nano-sized brewery. Breakside expanded to a 3.5 bbl brewhouse while winning their first medal at the Great American Beer Festival in 2011 where they have earned medals each year since. In late 2013 the brewery expanded operations to Milwaukie, Oregon with a 30 bbl production brewery. In 2014 Breakside was awarded with the highly coveted Gold Medal for American-style IPA at
Long before the Portland neighborhood of St. Johns finally hit its long-anticipated growth spurt, the Occidental Brewing Co. set up shop near the bridge and quietly started brewing some of the best German-style ales and lagers in Oregon. Thanks to an expansion into a Wursthaus, you can get a grilled brat, as well as a number of other options, to go with your Bohemian-style pilsner. Occidental Brewing Co. was founded in 2011 by Ben and Dan Engler. Focusing on largely traditional continental European beer styles, Occidental has won numerous awards. Peaks and Pints officially welcomes Occident to Tacoma tonight, pouring
It’s Twosday! Double Deschutes Brewery Reserve Series Five reasons to grab these two Deschutes Brewery Series sours from the Peaks and Pints cooler. … 1. Reserve series are where breweries really strut their stuffs. 2. Did you know that you can mix some beers? Well, you can. Here are two examples of what that tastes like. 3. These beers came all the way from Bend, Oregon. It would be a shame to ignore them.= 4. Big beers build big friends. 5. They’re delicious! THE AGES, Deschutes Brewery: Gueuze-inspired, mix of foeders and small format oak barrels
Czech this out! In April 2019, Peaks and Pints will host the Tournament of Beer: Northwest Pilsners. Chosen through a nomination process, the top 64 vote getters — the cream of the crispness — will compete Monday through Friday on our website, April 5-27. Through online voting, Washington and Oregon pilsner drinkers will pick daily winners until the best pilsner in the Pacific Northwest is crowned. It’s just like March Madness, only with way more Saaz hops. What is the best pilsner in the Pacific Northwest? Vote for your three favorites below before midnight Thursday, Feb. 28 here. We’ll randomly
In late 2010, Corvallis homebrewers Aaron Sarnoff-Wood and Lee Larsen filled a gap in the college town’s drinking scene — cider. The duo opened 2 Towns Ciderhouse crafting unique ciders brewed with the traditional English and French-style’s tannic apples, Oregon grown, of course. Named after the cities of Corvallis and Eugene (Larsen’s a Beaver; Sarnoff-Wood a Duck), 2 Towns believes “… that the long history of cidermaking demands respect and deserves to be done right,” states the cidery’s motto. “Starting with the highest quality whole ingredients from local farms, we take no shortcuts in crafting our ciders. We never add
You fancy, Lindemans GingerGueuze! Fancy Pants Sunday: Lindemans GingerGueuze “Now, let’s party!” yells someone in the Destiny City Film Festival VIP Lounge, which also doubles as the Peaks and Pints’ no-named events room — when not filled with screenwriters and directors participating the film festival held at the Blue Mouse Theatre this weekend. If a director picks up a film camera inside the pop-up lounge, we imagine she or he would camera whip-pans to the Lindemans GingerGueuze bottle, our Fancy Pants Sunday star. Indeed, Fancy Pants Sunday is our weekly column that champions high ABV, complex
The Sixth Annual Destiny City Film Festival has been screening at the Blue Mouse Theatre in Tacoma’s Proctor neighborhood since Friday, Aug. 22. Festival Director Emily Alm presented more than 35 dynamic films from around the world, filmmaker Q&As, a free screenwriting panel and more. After the 2 p.m. screening of the documentary Earthrise — the story of the first image captured of the Earth from space in 1968 — followed by My Indiana Muse — a documentary on artist Robert Townsend and his muse, Helen — Peaks and Pints will host the closing party complete with a film inspired
Fort George Matryoshka variants at Peaks and Pints According to old-school spellcheckers Merriam and Webster, the term imperial means (1) anything relating to an empire or emperor, or (2) something of superior or unusual size or excellence. The first definition was what British brewers had in mind when they started making imperial stouts, and the second is why many American craft brewers are using the term for a variety of beer styles today. We call it an imperial stout because that’s become a brewer’s custom. It began in the 1700s when English brewers were favored by the Russian court. Catherine [the
The Beaver State is a beer mecca and it is considered by many to be one of the top craft-beer states in the nation. At last count, Oregon counts nearly 300 breweries, leads the nation in craft beer drinkers, has colleges that condone brewing beer as an academic pursuit, displays a trophy case with too many top medals at the Great American Beer Festival to mention and is the second leading hops producer in the country. Its largest city, Portland (aka Beervana), has more breweries than any other city on earth, and cities such as Bend and Hood River have
You know the story. Longtime homebrewer Mike Montoney scores a brew system from closed Battenkill Brewing of Poulsbo, apprentices on a professional with Brad Ginn and Mark Hood of Sound Brewery, goes on to brew awarding-winning craft beers under the Rainy Daze Brewing brand. The story received another hit of joy when Rainy Daze’s Goat Boater IPA won Peaks and Pints’ Tournament of Beer: Washington State IPAs in 2017. Tonight, Peaks and Pints pairs Rainy Daze craft beer with Girl Scout Cookies, as well as host the can release party for Rainy Daze Pusherman IPA. In celebration of tonight’s festivities,
It’s not really white. And it’s not necessarily Belgian. But Belgian white beer — witbier in Flemish, bire blanche in French — is undeniably flavorful and refreshing. White beer originated in the eastern part of the province of Brabant, about 25 miles southeast of Brussels. The city of Louvain and the nearby village of Hoegaarden (pronounced “who garden”) were famous for their white beers. The more than 400-year-old style nearly went extinct in the mid-20th century, until Pierre Celis single-handedly revived the witbier in 1965 from his barn in Hoegaarden. Just as German wheat beers are sometimes called weissbier, witbiers
For beer nerds reared on hoppy IPAs and chocolaty stouts, sours are rarely a love-at-first-sip experience. Like stinky cheese and dry-aged beef, drinking sours means entering a realm where descriptors that sound off-putting — gym-sock musk and barnyard funk — can suddenly become holy grails of flavor and aroma. Sour beers can show rustic, earthy and winey notes. Some are rather light and elegantly acidic; some are darker and vinous, while others are exceedingly funky and sour. For our beer flight today we take a look at the tart and funky side of sours — the earthy side. Typically quite sour
Destiny City Film Festival — now with more beer The Destiny City Film Festival is a homegrown, true-Tacoma community event, inspired by our city’s nickname — The City of Destiny — and is built to showcase the best independent films from the Pacific Northwest and beyond housed in the Blue Mouse Theatre in Tacoma’s Proctor District. Curated by former Tacoma Film Festival director Emily Alm, the sixth version of this film fest kicks off Friday, Feb. 22 and runs through Sunday, Feb. 24 with the closing party at 3:30 p.m. at Peaks and Pints bottle shop, taproom and restaurant. After
Apples were among some of the first crops grown in colonial America. Potted seedlings and bags of apple seeds were brought over on the Mayflower. The Bible-thumping Puritans were not teetotalers. Apple orchards in colonial America usually meant one thing: hard cider. Apples flourished in the fertile soil and friendly climate, and soon apples were a key part of most colonial farms and menus. When a young George Washington ran for Virginia’s House of Burgesses in 1755, he didn’t shell out for drinks — and lost the election in a 271-to-40 landslide. Undeterred, Washington ran again in 1758. And this
Look around at today’s craft beer world: A tidal wave of new breweries is concocting a tsunami of new beers. New brews — especially anything labeled IPA — arrive at a dizzying pace — many hazy, some with lactose and more and more with no residual sugar. They’re frequently “dropped” in special, limited releases and then disappear. People gobble them up and look for the next “new.” This trend bugged beer author Stephen Beaumont, concerned over the decline of flagship beer sales. Flagships are core beers that breweries produce year-round, generally meant to be readily available, lining store shelves and
Valentine’s Day conjures up visions of classic couplings: Romeo and Juliet, John and Yoko, sweet fruit and chocolate. Combine those latter two with some beer, and you have a three-way that will warm the cockles of the most demure drinker. In celebration of the Hallmark holiday, Peaks and Pints presents a beer flight with that shares the flavors of the usual Valentine’s day gift: chocolate covered fruit. Indeed. While the bitterness of an especially hoppy beer might not be ideally suited (unless, of course, you were recently dumped – when bitterness might be appropriate), there are a number of offerings
Peaks and Pints Tournament of Beer: Northwest Pilsners nominations open Czech this out! In April 2019, Peaks and Pints will host the Tournament of Beer: Northwest Pilsners. Chosen through the nomination process below, the top 64 vote getters — the cream of the crispness — will compete Monday through Friday on our website, April 5-27. Through online voting, Washington and Oregon pilsner drinkers will pick daily winners until the best pilsner in the Pacific Northwest is crowned. It’s just like March Madness, only with way more Saaz hops. The soft water-to-grainy malt battle of Northwest pilsners grand champion will be
You’ve heard the old saying, “When life gives you lemons, make lemonade.” Well, the same sort of goes true for when life gives you snow. When Mother Nature dumps loads of the white stuff onto your neighborhood, then make the most of it with by drinking lemon-forward craft beer, or something. Using lemon in beer is nothing new, but, perhaps because it is labor intensive and costly to add fresh citrus zest to a beer, it is still rare. The most straightforward way to brew lemon craft beer is to add a small amount of lemon juice to the beer
Tacomans awoke to find their cars are being held prisoner in the slushy clutches of residential streets. The light, fluffy snow that fell like crazy this past week morphed into a nasty, oatmeal-ish, wheel-grabbing goo when temperatures broke above the freezing mark and snow turned to rain today. Slush can be just as dangerous as ice because there can be bits of ice in that slush for slippery sliding situations. Also, wind and speed will send giant slabs of ice on the tops of car and trucks into the air. Plenty of back roads are still iced over, especially in
Apples were among some of the first crops grown in colonial America. Potted seedlings and bags of apple seeds were brought over on the Mayflower. The Bible-thumping Puritans were not teetotalers. Apple orchards in colonial America usually meant one thing: hard cider. Apples flourished in the fertile soil and friendly climate, and soon apples were a key part of most colonial farms and menus. The popularity of cider in America grew as the nation’s territory expanded. Then, the Temperance movement and popularity of German lager squashed the hard apple cider movement … until 2013. Zealous connoisseurs grow dissatisfied with the
“What’s new?” is a phrase Peaks and Pints hears daily. In fact, that phrase was heard daily between 1985 and 2003, the years craft beers exploration and trying something new was definitely a thing. In 2019, though, that means some drinkers — in their relentless quest for Untappd check-ins and tried-it-first bragging rights — have forgotten the flagship, core beers that first grabbed their attention. The hashtag #FlagshipFebruary seeks to correct that. For the uninitiated, a flagship beer is usually a brewery’s core offering, the beer it built its reputation on — New Belgium Fat Tire, Sierra Nevada Pale Ale, Widmer
Since Greg Koch and Steve Wagner founded it in 1996, Stone Brewing Co. has been producing an ever-expanding line up of well crafted and often in-your-face beers and interesting collaborations. Stone’s gargoyle mascot watches over each of these beers, attempting to draw in their ideal consumer and to scare off the Keystone-swilling undergrad that stumbled into the display. Don’t let it intimidate you. Known for its bold, flavorful and largely hop-centric beers, Stone has earned a reputation for brewing outstanding, unique beers while maintaining an unwavering commitment to sustainability, business ethics, philanthropy and the art of brewing. Today, Peaks and
The family-run Urban Family Brewing in Seattle’s Magnolia neighborhood has stealthily crept under the radar for several years. Now it’s finally getting the recognition it deserves with its approachable atmosphere (think board games and old school video games), food trucks that circle through, and — namely — by brewing some of the best small-batch sour beers in Seattle. The brewery just announced their plans to move across the Ship Canal to join the Ballard brewery district. “The team at Urban Family is grateful to the Magnolia community for their support, and will miss being in the neighborhood,” owner Andy Gundel
Peaks and Pints Cooler Bagger 2.5.19: Cigar City Cigar City Brewing is the fastest growing among American Top 50 craft breweries, boasting the #2 best-selling craft six-pack can in the U.S. in Jai Alai IPA with other year-round and seasonal offerings complementing. National and international awards and accolades have garnered attention for the Tampa Bay, Florida brewery since its first brew day in 2009. Cigar City is now at Peaks and Pints … via a collaboration with its sister brewery, Oskar Blues. BAMBURANA, Oskar Blues/Cigar City Brewing: This imperial stout, brewed with figs and dates, is double barrel-aged — in
Thanks to the school children who put white crayons in the freezer, placed ice cubes on the porch, and wore their pajamas inside out last night, freezing weather has delayed pop quizzes for a second day. Indeed, the snow has descended, the temperature is below freezing, and the cars are crashing. What is a craft beer lover to do during Icezilla? Peaks and Pints’ first thought is of dark beers. Their flavor tends to be big and chewy and demands that you slow down and savor them. After all, when a cold wind is whipping around outside, who wants to
Citizens of Tacoma: The white stuff falling from the sky is called “snow.” Here are some things you can do while it’s here. … Peaks and Pints Monday Cider Flight 2.4.19: Snow Day Sit inside and stare with melancholy out the window. Dress up as a poor English boy and stare with melancholy into someone else’s window. Peaks and Pints Monday Cider Flight 2.4.19: Snow Day Look into a mirror and repeat the mantra, “I am a snowflake. I am beautiful and unique. …” Go cardboard sledding at Pt. Defiance. Try public transportation. Trust us, it’s never boring. Protest the
A whole lotta people are going to watching Super Bowl LIII this afternoon — several million, in fact. Some will be cheering for the New England Patriots, while everyone else (except for fans of the New Orleans Saints, of course) will be pulling for the Los Angeles Rams. Whichever team you happen to be rooting for, it’s certain to be an action-packed affair. Or maybe you’re in it just for the commercials. If you’d like to check out the big game in style (or somewhere other than your cousin’s house), Peaks and Pints will be screening the game on all
It’s Groundhog Day! This morning a blameless Punxsutawnian mammal popped its head out of the ground to see what all those reporters are doing, and the national network morning shows fill two whole segments without breaking a sweat. And Peaks and Pints is not talking about Ned Ryerson. You know, Ned! Ryerson! Needlenose Ned? Ned the Head? C’mon, buddy! Case Western High! He did the whistling bellybutton trick at the high school talent show? Bing! Ned Ryerson got the shingles real bad senior year, almost didn’t graduate? Bing, again! Ned Ryerson, he dated your sister Mary Pat a couple of
“Milk is for babies! When you grow up you have to drink beer.” So declares Arnold Schwarzenegger in the 1977 film, “Pumping Iron,” (Seriously, it’s a classic. If you haven’t seen it, add it to your Netflix.) But the decision of whether to drink milk or beer now seems as anachronistic as Lou Ferrigno. The craft beer boom has injected new life into the milk stout, an English classic that withered with the advent of World War II and the milk rationing that followed. Milk stouts, trendy as they may be, are definitely here to stay. Also called “sweet stouts,” milk
Art Larrance was no stranger to the Oregon craft beer scene when he established Cascade Brewing in 1998. He partnered with Brewmaster Ron Gansberg, who oversaw the design and installation of the Portland brewhouse. Together, they took their more than 40 years of combined brewing experience to create fantastic sour beers inspired by an abundance of Oregon fruit. Each of their beers is then aged on wine barrels from the Northwestern Oregon region. Cascade Brewing is a pioneer of the sour beer movement, with all the gold medals and world-class titles. In celebration of our all-day Tartuary Winter Sour Beer
Peaks and Pints has 650 different kinds of craft beer and cider for Super Bowl Sunday. Peaks and Pints Super Bowl Six Pack Suggestion II Peaks and Pints Super Bowl Six Pack Suggestion II offers six more craft beers to accompany the fistful of chips and dip Sunday. DARK HYMN RASPBERRY BLACK SOUR, Urban Family Brewing: Step into the black with this oblation. Boasting notes of chocolate covered raspberries, with a delightfully rich and complex body, this raspberry black sour ale will take you on a journey into the darkness. 7.5% MAGNOLIA SAISON BATCH #6, Urban
Washington, Oregon, and Idaho’s panhandle grow 97.8 percent of the hops in the United States. Anchored by its famous Yakima Valley, Washington alone accounts for almost 74 percent of the domestic industry. Today, Peaks and Pints takes a look at hops found outside the United States, but brewed in the States, for our daily beer flight. The US topped Germany in hop production in 2009, 2013, and 2015, but otherwise Germany produces the most hops in the entire world- roughly one third of the world’s entire hop production. The “Hallertau” in Bavaria is the largest continuous hop-planting area in the
Peaks and Pints Porter and Stout Shoutout What’s the difference between a porter and a stout? Basically the difference is the inclusion of roasted barley flavor in stout versus roasted the malt profile of porter, as well as the acceptable presence of sourness and bitterness should be higher in a stout. Porter was born out of the need to address a shortcoming of London’s water, writes beer historian Christopher Mark OBrien in his book Fermenting Revolution. The hard alkaline water lent itself to dark, malty beer. In the late 1700s if you were talking stout you were merely talking about
The range of style variations and forms the fermented apple can take make cider a unique libation, unlike any other. Today, cider is making an astronomical comeback in North America, and consumption of this beverage continues to rise at a staggering rate. Given the robustness of the craft beer world and the fact that cider drinkers are often converted beer geeks, it should come as no surprise that hard cider sales are rapidly gaining strength. As hard cider sales continue to increase, more and more new cider flavors are popping up across the nation, and on Peaks and Pints Monday Cider
You Fancy The Bruery So Happens It’s Tuesday! Fancy Pants Sunday: The Bruery So Happens It’s Tuesday Black Tuesday, Oct. 29, was the fourth and last day of the stock market crash of 1929. Investors traded a record 16.4 million shares. They lost $14 billion on the New York Stock Exchange, worth $205 billion in 2019 dollars. During the four days of the crash, the Dow Jones Industrial Average dropped 25 percent and investors lost $30 billion. That was 10 times more than the 1929 federal budget. It was more than the United States spent on World War I. After the crash,
First grown by in Kent, England as a chance seeding in 1861, Richard Fuggle brought his namesake hops to market in 1875. Fuggle hit its peak in 1949 when 78 percent of the English hop crops were Fuggle. Today, Fuggle continues to be grown in the UK in addition to Oregon and Washington state, though the US version is slightly less potent than its English counterpart. Originally used as a bittering and aroma hop, it is more recently used as primarily an aroma hop. Fuggle is also used in breeding and is parent to Willamette, Cascade and Glacier hops. The
File Under: things that get you buzzed. Like many folks, you might be a slave to chemical rituals. Caffeine in the morning, and booze at night. In the name of efficiency, Peaks and Pints recommends combining the two at every opportunity. The pairing of roasted barley with roasted coffee is so natural; it’s almost surprising these stouts and porters didn’t catch on sooner. But coffee beers didn’t really start to percolate until the mid-90s, and even now they are far from a staple even among craft breweries. But almost no one argues with the inspiration — porters and stouts tend
Portland, Oregon’s five boroughs consist of 95 neighborhoods, each of which is represented by a volunteer-based neighborhood association, from St. Johns in North Portland to Arnold Creek in the Southwest. All of these places are rooted in city history and lore — and all are constantly changing. When you think of the Pearl District, does it bring to mind beat-up warehouses, desolate rail yards, and brewery brownfields, or the chic and stylish neighborhood it is today? Does Chinatown conjure images of rough frontier beginnings, or high-end art galleries? When Peaks and Pints thinks of the Kerns neighborhood, we think of
Did you know 98 percent of barley grown in the United States would never make it into your soup? Barley is refined to make barley malt — a key ingredient in beer and is also grown for feeding animals used for food. But, back to the beer thing. Barley, a member of the grass family, is used to make most beers because its carbohydrates are particularly well suited for malting. The malting process breaks down carbohydrates into sugars, which provide unique flavors and fuel for fermentation. Roasted barley, one of the darkest grains in the brewing process, is characterized by an
