Peaks and Pints argues that autumn is a super season, at least when it comes to food and drink. What we eat and drink this time of year evokes memories more easily than what we consume in other seasons. This is the time of year we dust off crockpots and Dutch ovens for soups and stews, filled — at least right now — with the remaining harvests of our local farms. This is when we flock to orchards for fresh-picked apples, and when we scoop out globs of pumpkin seeds for roasting. We drop cinnamon sticks in hot cider, and
You fancy, Elevation False Summit Fancy Pants Sunday: Elevation False Summit Elevation is a fitting name for the Colorado brewery, situated at 7,464 feet above sea level in Poncha Springs, a mere 15 miles from the ski slopes at Monarch Mountain. Popular with locals as well as the multitude of outdoor adventurers who flood the area every summer to hike neighboring peaks and raft surrounding rivers, it has become known for seasonal, barrel-aged brews that transport taste buds to new, er, heights of flavor. Xandy Bustamante, Sheila Bustamante, Carline Walsh and head brewer Christian Koch opened
The historical epoch of Armistice Day began with the Nov. 11, 1918, signing of a ceasefire between Germany and the Allied powers of World War I. President Woodrow Wilson initiated it. In the South Sound, we’re reminded of war’s impact more often than people in most other cities. But even so, it’s not often enough. Our freedoms, our heritage and the way of life we enjoy today are made possible because of our military veterans. Today’s 100th anniversary of Veterans Day honors all of America’s veterans for their patriotism, service and sacrifice. And for their families, there is no better
Crooked Stave Artisan Beer Project was founded in 2010 when Chad Yakobson completed his master’s thesis on wild yeast fermentations. The Coloradan used his research to launch a brewery and distributor that would produce 100 percent Brettanomyces-fermented beers. The Denver brewery brews with Colorado floor malted barley as their base malt, produced exclusively for them by Leopold Bros Distillery. Crooked Stave features Colorado grown hops in many of their recipes, and work meticulously with whole fruit and only whole fruit, most of which is grown in Colorado. Today, Peaks and Pints presents a flight of Cooked Stave beer that we
Californian Gary Fish established his brewpub concept, Deschutes Public House, in downtown Bend in 1988. Named after the Deschutes River, Deschutes Brewery was Central Oregon’s first brewery. Fish hired John Harris (founder of Ecliptic Brewing Co.) from McMenamins. Legislation and a growing provincialism for locally crafted beers soon turned the microbrewer of Mirror Pond Pale Ale and Black Butte Porter in obscure Bend, Oregon into a macro success, as the state’s largest brewer by barrel count. Still family and employee owned, the brewery is known for brewing a diverse line-up of award winning beers including the popular Fresh Squeezed IPA,
Scottish style beers can be a malt lover’s dream beer, with its smooth sweetness and body. The epitome of malty, scotch ales are boiled twice as long as ordinary beer, caramelizing the sugars to build these deep flavors of maple and molasses. Recipes may include peat-smoked malt, which can lend smoky, earthy tones to the aroma and flavor. Scottish ales commonly fall into four general types: Light, Heavy, Export and the Scotch Ale. Historically these distinctions carried labels of the shilling currency, which reflected the price charged per barrel of beer in the 19th century. For example, 60 shilling was
Hey cooler baggers! Peaks and Pints has Finnriver Fire Barrel, Paradox Tart Noire, Silver City Bourbon Barrel Aged Old Scrooge, Great Divide Barrel Aged Yeti Imperial Stout, Dogfish Head Indian Brown and Two Beers Tipsy Toboggan in the cooler. Peaks and Pints Six-Pack 11.7.18: Woodtastic How do you feel? Exhausted? Relieved? Joy? Despair? It will take a while to sort out this divisive midterm election. Want good news? It will take at least a week or two for the 2020 campaign to start. Finding green shoots in the fire-ravaged fields of our political system can be
Founded in 1997, Brewery Ommegang has been bringing Belgium to America with resounding applause. Designed with a traditional Belgian farmhouse in mind and built over a former hop farm in Cooperstown, New York, all of Ommegang’s beers are brewed with traditional Belgian ales in mind, courtesy of Belgian beer exert Don Feinberg. All of its bottled Belgian-style ales are re-fermented in the bottle, also known as bottle-conditioning. The beer is dosed with a small shot of yeast and sugar before it’s closed up. The yeast eats that sugar in the bottle and carbonates the beer naturally. It may have a
Though there’s some dispute as to their origin, we can say generally the IPA’s genesis began with the British Empire in the mid-19th century. These brews — noted for their floral aroma, earthy flavors and solid hop expression — quickly became drinking staples, and when the style jumped the pond a century later, it kick-started a hop-bomb craze. Now IPAs are the most popular craft styles out there, with drinkers embracing bitterness, hops and appearances that shine bright like diamonds. Well, there’s a new sheriff in town, and craft beer has a new style to play with: milkshake IPA. Made
Pears require a delicate touch. In baked goods, their simple sweetness can seem one-dimensional, and their subtle flavor is easily overwhelmed — when loaded down with heavy spices, pears have a tendency to fall flat. Where apples are crisp and bright, more than capable of holding their own against an array of bold spices and a lengthy cooking time, pears are buttery, mild, and tender, necessitating a different approach. In classic French cuisine, pears are often poached with vanilla beans in wine, and for good reason. The wine’s fruit-forward acidity perks up the mellow pears, while fragrant vanilla beans amplify
You fancy Anchor 2018 Christmas Ale! Fancy Pants Sunday: Anchor 2018 Christmas Ale Since 1896, Anchor Brewing Co. has been producing beer — decades before modern bottling started in the 1970s. The San Francisco brewery is famous for its Steam, or California Common — a type of lager that is made with lager yeast (which usually ferments at lower temperatures) at a higher fermentation temperature. Since breweries in the 1890s had no ice to chill the boiling hot wort, the beer was pumped to the roof of the brewery and chilled with the cool breeze coming
Jeremy Warren is widely admired for his mastery of hops, especially with his signature beer style, India pale ale. In 2012, his Knee Deep Brewing Co. exploded onto the scene when the brewery’s Hoptologist won the prestigious Bistro Double IPA competition in Hayward, California, besting the legendary Pliny the Elder, among others. In 2015, Warren left everyone knee deep in tears when he departed the brewery. In March 2017, he and his head brewer, Jeb Taylor, opened Revision Brewing Company in Sparks, Nevada — one of the largest, hoppiest breweries in Sparks for $2 million with a chill taproom and live music.
Stop by Peaks and Pints and grab a six-pack of Kulshan Kitten Mittens, Ninkasi Sleigh’r, Fort George Vision Quest, Fort George 1000 Years of Silence, Silver City Old Scrooge and belching Beaver Swerve City. Peaks and Pints Six Pack 11.3.18: Going Big You’re going to catch the 7 p.m. screening of The House With a Clock in Its Walls at neighboring Blue Mouse Theatre. You’re going to witness a dictionary-obsessed, recently orphaned fourth-grader discover the house he’s moved into is the nexus point for all manner of apocalyptic hugger-mugger. You’re going to see Cate Blanchett head-butt
Long before the arrival of Europeans, Native Americans were producing maple sugar to flavor their food and as a valuable item for trade. Colonists learned the technique from Native Americans and used maple sugar in place of cane sugar, which was then an expensive luxury. Nicknamed the sugarbush, the sugar maple yields sap that is boiled and concentrated into one of the best reasons to wake up any morning: an amber or golden maple syrup to douse pancakes and waffles — or add to craft beer. It’s healthful, too: high in manganese and zinc, maple syrup is touted to help strengthen
Winter beer is a slippery category that used to comprise slightly boozy ales brewed with spices and dark fruits, but has long since metastasized to include not only those traditional “winter warmers,” but also just about any damn thing a brewery’s marketing department feels like hanging a snowflake on. Slapping a reindeer label on a coffee stout does not make it a winter beer. Winter beers are much darker in color, ranging from a deep amber to a rich black, with distinctively festival flavorings such as notes of dark fruit, roasted barley, chocolate, coffee and bitter hops. The emphasis is
In 2011, Tacoma musician and homebrewer turned professional brewer Matt Coughlin and four friends pointed their compass toward the Olympic National Park. They made their way through rugged terrain, past thick rainforest and across melting snow along the Bailey Range Traverse. Trekking between Mt. Ferry and Pulitzer Peak the hikers came across the most enchanting spot to pitch a tent. They called it “Cool Camp.” Coughlin recounted his magical backpacking adventure as he and his fellow Double Mountain Brewery brewers guided Peaks and Pints through the brewing process of our new house IPA. As he recounted glorious mountain peaks and
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
It’s beginning to look a lot like Christmas in our cooler: Crux Snow Cave, Wolf Tree Spruce Tip Ale, Sierra Nevada Celebration Ale, Anchor Our Special Ale, Reuben’s Holiday Gose and Iron Horse Cozy Sweater. Peaks and Pints Six Pack 10.30.18: Ho Ho Ho A card. A card, with a nice family snapshot, maybe a short personal note. The perfect thing. Times have changed, wildly and fast and obviously. Then again, maybe not so much. Of course lots of people still send out real holiday cards, pose the family either awkwardly or — in the case
Peaks and Pints celebrates its two-year anniversary with a series of prefunk celebrations that kicked off Saturday, Oct. 27 and runs through Thursday, Nov. 1. In honor of our Cool Camp IPA we brewed at Double Mountain Brewery in Hood River, Oregon, we’ve dubbed our string of anniversary parties, “Cool Camp Week,” with Double Mountain in the house for the beer release on our true anniversary date, Nov. 1. Peaks and Pints’ Cool Camp isn’t the first cool camp in Tacoma. That honor goes to Tacoma Girls Rock Camp — an organization dedicated to empowering youth in the South Sound
Peaks and Pints camped out at Double Mountain Brewery in early October 2018 to brew our new house IPA, Cool Camp IPA. Photo credit: Andrew Russo Story behind Peaks and Pints Cool Camp IPA In 2011, Tacoma musician and homebrewer turned professional brewer Matt Coughlin and four friends pointed their compass toward Bailey Range in the Olympic National Park. Coughlin couldn’t hide his wide smile. Even though the 8-day, 120-mile hike couldn’t be called a cakewalk, it was less strenuous than his day-to-day duties as a Double Mountain Brewery brewer. The Hood River, Oregon, brewery’s rapid
Hard cider, when done right, can be as good as beer or wine. Better even. Think about what we’re working with here. Beer starts as starchy water. Wine starts as grape juice. Hard cider starts as apple juice. There are 7,000-plus apple varieties to choose from in various colors, shapes, and flavor profiles. Further, apples thrive across America. Cider was one of the most popular drinks in America from colonial times to the 20th century. In 1920, the 18th Amendment went into effect, Prohibition started, and cider was cast to the margins of drinking culture until the first half of
You fancy Unibroue Ale Gâteau Forêt-Noire! Fancy Pants Sunday: Unibroue Ale Gâteau Forêt-Noire Let me drink cake! I’m not going to lie. It’s been day. A middle of the night Proctor District power outage set me back hours before today’s Belgian beer day and all its keg coupler changes, flights to write and digital menu boards to fix. Throw in a couple flash floods, a leaking coupler, a couple crucial items not in their designated spots and a computer that interjects a string of e’s 22 times a day, and I need a beer — a
Belgians produce more than 1,100 varieties of beer, a few you can taste at Peaks and Pints’ second annual Carnivale de Belgian Beerloo today — an all-day nod to Belgian beers in conjunction with Peaks and Pints second anniversary week-long celebration, Cool Camp Week. Belgian beer is known for having quite the alcohol content. It can be pricey, but has quite the bang for the buck compared to our domestics. Each brand has their own special glass designed to accentuate the best attributes of the many types of beer. Many of the beers formulations go back hundreds of years, perfected
Peaks and Pints’ Cool Camp Week, a week-long celebration of our second anniversary, kicks off today with the Beer Industry Geeks Flight Battle featuring Rich Jamieson of Alpha Distributing and Mike Bosold of NW Beverages pitting from their respective catalog of breweries against each other. Each picked a sour, a lager, a double IPA, a scotch ale and an imperial stout with Peaks and Pints customers picking the best beer flight. That’s right, you judge; simply pick one of the two, $12 flights and enjoy the deliciousness. When the clock strikes 11 p.m. the rep who sold the most flights
Brothers Steve and Scott Houmes — who witnessed the leisure suits, 8-track tapes, Ziggy comics and yellow smiley faces in the ’70s — went on to become restaurateurs. In September 1996, they added craft beer to their lives when they teamed up with brewmaster “Big Daddy” Don Spencer and opened Silver City Brewery in Silverdale, Washington. The Houmes’ mission was to create happy, community-oriented restaurant and craft brewery. In 2004, the Silverdale Chamber of Commerce named Silver City Business of the Year. Smiley face. However, those living outside Kitsap County donned sad faces as MacFarlane’s Scotch Ale and the other
As the cat days of autumn crest upon the beer world, a familiar collective roar gathers volume. That’s right, it’s once again time for the seemingly perpetual beer complaint of mid autumn: Beers such as winter warmers and Christmas-themed beers are being released earlier than many believe they should, even though we’re still a couple months before the official start of winter. Yes, we’ve entered wet, often windy part of the year frequently devoid of sunshine, but without any of the charms that our customary 1-inch of snow can bring. Peaks and Pints will hang on to autumn, at least
Hey Cooler Baggers! Check out what’s in our cooler: Stone Mojay IPA, Midnight Sun Tundra Wookie, Brewery Ommegang Mother of Dragons, Midnight Sun Son of Berserker, Hale’s Piney IPA and Airways Space Church IPA. Peaks and Pints Six Pack 10.24.18: Nerds Who writes all the best-selling books? Nerds. Who directs the top grossing Hollywood movies? Nerds. Who creates the highly advanced technology that only they can understand? Nerds. And who are the people who run for the high office of the presidency? No one but nerds. Who put together today’s Peaks and Pints’ Six Pack? Nerds.
An avid homebrewer and former employee at Stone Brewing Co. in Southern California, where he worked in the communications department, Jacob Mckean founded Modern Times Beer in the Point Loma neighborhood of San Diego in 2013. For the first year Modern Times didn’t brew an IPA — and when they finally did, it wasn’t a West Coast hop bomb that helped put the San Diego beer scene on the map. Today, the brewery has a stable of year-round offerings, monthly special releases and rotating seasonal beers, as well as tons of special release and one-off batches — from hazy IPAs,
Located 500 miles away from the nearest state, there’s likely a lot you haven’t heard about Alaska. Sure, you could probably guess dog mushing is the official state sport, but did you know a 13-year-old boy designed the state flag? Again, not a shocker — 17 of the 20 highest peaks in the U.S. are in Alaska, but did you know Alaska has a law against giving a moose beer? Thankfully, there isn’t a law against Peaks and Pints offering you a beer brewed in Alaskan, which we are doing in today’s beer fight, Craft Beer Crosscut 10.23.18: A Flight
pFriem’s Mexican Lager is a nice, mellow, easy drinking Vienna lager that’s well-balanced, refreshing overall and pairs well with our spicy sandwich special today. Photo by Pappi Swarner Peaks and Pints spicy sandwich paired with pFriem Mexican Lager Spicy foods cause a burning feeling is because they contain an irritant, such as capsaicin in jalapeños. These irritants bind to receptors on the tongue, which signals to brain to counteract. If you’re reading this post, our guess is that you counteract with craft beer or cider for an initial wave of relief. But, capsaicin won’t dissolve in
Hard cider, once the prevailing nectar of colonial days past, is having a renaissance. Though it was knocked off the radar in the mid-19th century, the recent interest in craft beer has taken artisanal cider along for the ride. Hard cider is tapping into the beer and wine markets as well as the gluten-free trend, and it is developing an identity of its own. And for hyper-local aficionados, there’s no lack of appeal when it comes to regional varieties of apples influencing flavors from batch to batch. Enough chit-chat. Let’s get to drinking. Enjoy Peaks and Pints Monday Cider Flight
You fancy Jolly Pumpkin Forgotten Tales of the Last Gypsy Series II, Volume I Fancy Pants Sunday: Jolly Pumpkin Forgotten Tales of the Last Gypsy Blender Chef Celina Tio built her foodie following with TV appearances on shows like Top Chef Masters and Iron Chef America, but her profile in Kansas City has been on the rise since her days as executive chef at The American restaurant, where she received the James Beard Foundation Award for Best Mid-West Chef in 2007. She left in 2008 to launch a series of neighborhood fine dining spaces in Kansas
Happy National Apple Day! That’s right; Oct. 21 is National Apple Day. Apple pie. Apple sauce. Apple crisp. National Apple Day celebrates the apple in all its various forms and reminds us that apples are shiny, tasty, and healthy. “An apple a day keeps the doctor away,” “Apple of my eye,” and “as American as apple pie” are all very common phrases in our language. Be it good health, familiarity or love, all are used to denote something we hold to be very important to our concept of culture in America. They also call attention to a humble fruit that
In 1989, believing that Kansas City was suffering from light-beer fatigue, John McDonald launched Boulevard Brewing Co. with two more robust choices, Pale Ale and Bully Porter. In 1992 he introduced Unfiltered Wheat. McDonald is a pioneer in creating a craft beer culture in Kansas City and beyond, redefining American beer as Boulevard grew from a small-scale brewery to the largest in the Midwest. Boulevard’s two top-selling flagship beers, Pale Ale and Unfiltered Wheat, were instrumental in developing a market in Kansas City for craft beer. The latter makes up more than half of Boulevard’s business, helping the company become
Dexter, Michigan’s Jolly Pumpkin Artisan Ales is the first brewery in the U.S. to oak barrel-age 100 percent of its beers. Ron Jeffries — AKA Brewmaster Spooky, AKA Captain Ron — founded the Jolly Pumpkin with his wife, Laurie, in 2004, and their beers have since gained international recognition and received multiple gold medals at the Great American Beer Festival. Jolly Pumpkin takes great care in maturing their beers. Each brew is fermented in open-air tanks and aged in oak casks. The beers are then further matured in the bottle with the addition of more yeast, also known as bottle
Black Raven Grandfather Raven, Matchless The Jacket, Block 15 Story Of The Ghost, Reverend Nat’s Abbey Spice, 7 Seas Boobytraps CDA and Everybody’s The Cryo IPA sit in Peaks and Pints’ cooler. Peaks and Pints Six Pack 10.19.18: Hundred Acre Cooler Winnie the Pooh and all of his pals from the Hundred Acre Wood have to help their now-grown human pal rediscover his imagination in the flick Christopher Robin now playing at neighboring Blue Mouse Theatre. There’s an unusually, and refreshingly, abrasive aspect to Christopher Robin that raises it above the usual run of children’s movies.
Happy National Chocolate Cupcake day! Cupcakes can be traced back to 1796 when there was a recipe notation of “a cake to be baked in small cups” written in American Cookery, by Amelia Simmons. The earliest known documentation of the term cupcake was in 1828 in Seventy-five Receipts for Pastry, Cakes, and Sweetmeats in Eliza Leslie’s Receipts cookbook. In England, they were (and still are) called fairy cakes due to their diminutive size (they tend to be smaller than American cupcakes). Australians refer to them as patty cakes. Cupcakes have been popular for decades, but in the past few years have become especially trendy
In 2006, Chris Nemlowill and Jack Harris flew to Virginia Beach, Virginia to salvage an 8.5-barrel Saaz brewing system and drive it across the country to install it in their soon-to-open Fort George Brewery in Astoria, Oregon. While traveling with the equipment strapped to a flat bed, they met up with a tornado that nearly spread the brewery across a Nebraska cornfield. This became the inspiration behind the name Vortex IPA. Before the tornado, though, their U-Haul broke down in Rabun County in northeastern Georgia. The tow truck diver said, “You’re not from around here are you?” They replied, “No,
For the most part, sour beers are divided (roughly) into two camps: beers that are long-fermented and aged in wood barrels, using a yeast strain called Brettanomyces and acidifying bacteria, such as Lactobacillus and Pediococcus; and beers called “kettle sours” that are acidified with bacteria prior to fermentation and spend their time in warm stainless tanks rather than oak barrels. Taking the barrel route normally demands at least six months of fermentation before bottling, and the beers often go through another fermentation process, while in bottle, which adds a few months (at least) before they get sold. Kettle-sours, on the
Peaks and Pints Six Pack 10.16.18: Tech N9ne Tacoma How fast is too fast? Rapper Tech N9ne’s supersonic lyrical delivery tests the boundaries of human comprehension. The Kansas City-based MC was bestowed his name thanks to his ability to spit out words with the speed of a TEC-9 semiautomatic weapon. Tech N9ne later gave his handle a double-entendre by stating the “tech” was short for “technique” and “nine” representing the number of completion — therefore his name signifies his total ability to rhyme like a champ. OK. Tech N9ne plays Tacoma’s Temple Theatre this Friday, Oct. 19. Stop by Peaks
Peaks and Pints has Three Magnets Coffee Tompkins, Revision Hops In A Can, Evil Twin Molotov Heavy, d’Achouffe N’Ice Chouffee, Aslan Simcoe Slice and Three Magnets WOOHOO! X in the cooler. Peaks and Pints Six Pack 10.15.18: Fly You To The Moon Peaks and Pints may never know the exact words Neil Armstrong and his wife, Janet, spoke in the hours before he boarded Apollo 11, but we think it was, “Dammit, Janet, I love you.” The latest Neil Armstrong flick, First Man, screens at The Grand Cinema. Ryan Gosling is Armstrong — from his days
The term “farmhouse cider” stems from traditional cidermaking days when cider was made on a farm and its adjacent orchard was where its fruit was grown, in very small batches, utilizing timeworn techniques. Many makers believe farmhouse cider is more than a region of apple origin or a fermentation method — it’s a philosophy that yields a beverage with a strong sense of place. Others believe farmhouse cider is generally produced from fruit grown onsite or just down the road. A true farmhouse cider is also unfiltered, unpasteurized and produced with minimal intervention from the cidermaker. Our cider flight today
Peaks and Pints celebrates second year with Cool Camp “Hey, guys, Double Mountain Brewery suggests we call our second anniversary brew and new house beer, Cool Camp IPA,” says Ron Swarner, co-owner of Peaks and Pints and the guy writing this story. “Sounds pretty cool,” replies Robby Peterson, my business partner and the cool guy whom overseas our kitchen, among other things. “Should make plenty of happy campers,” adds Justin Peterson, our third business partner, twin to Robby and the cool guy who overseas the business side to our bottle shop, taproom and restaurant in Tacoma’s Proctor District. Peaks and
Fancy Pants Sunday: Rodenbach Vintage 2015 The Beerumnati are abuzz about “sour beer,” as breweries increasingly try their hand at tart saisons, garnet Flemish ales and lambic-inspired fruit beers. This means that the word “sour” gets thrown around like sprinkles at a cupcake convention, but it applies wholly to Rodenbach Vintage. While the original Rodenbach is a blend of “young” and oak-aged red ale, the more than 200-year-old Belgian brewery’s limited vintage release is unblended, every ounce of it matured for two years in a single wine barrel. During the beer’s long slumber, live yeast chow down on residual sugars,
