Geoffrey Barker and Andrew Pogue met as members of the North Seattle Home Brew Club. They shared a love for saisons and sours. They traveled to mixed-fermentation guru Jester King in Austin, Texas, where they added to their friendship circle. The duo spent years looking for a place to launch their brewery. Eventually they landed in a former home of an orchid retailer, a boxy, lightly industrial building at 936 Northwest 49th Street, in the thick of Ballard’s brewery district. With the help of Jester King, Barker and Pogue opened Fair Isle Brewing in January 2020 focusing on mixed-culture and wild beers, such as saisons, grisettes, bier de garde, farmhouse and American-style sour beers. Today, Peaks & Pints presents an in-house flight of Fair Isle beers — a flight we’re calling Peaks and Pints Beer Flight: Fair Isle.
Peaks and Pints Beer Flight: Fair Isle
Fair Isle Reith
5% ABV, draft
Fair Isle has stated they’re driven by the concept of achieving flavor notes often associated with fruited beers but using vegetables instead, as well as playing with colors with the idea of tasting with your eyes. Enter Reith, a saison with roasted beets and carrots with a bright reddish-purple h. Both the carrots and beets were provided by Farmstand Local Foods, grown in Washington.
Fair Isle Salacia
5% ABV
A collaboration with Blue Dot Kitchen and their sugar kelp grown in the Hood Canal, Salacia saison also is brewed with malted spelt from Eastern Washington for briny notes, mild sweetness and gentle salinity.
Fair Isle Matri
5.1% ABV
Matri is a saison steeped with Washington-grown chamomile and lemon verbena. Aged in oak and fermented with their house blend of wild and feral yeasts and bacteria, Matri is floral forward with tea, mild lemon, and chamomile notes.
Fair Isle Pavia
6.3% ABV
After stockpiling and aging more hoppy saisons in oak, Fair Isle debuts a new hop-forward series of saisons, which includes Pavia. This hoppy oak-aged saison dry hopped with Luminosa hops from India Hops has notes of a mimosa, papaya, and peach gummy rings along with a soft and full body from the oak.
Fair Isle Mataro (Batch 2)
9.9% ABV
Batch 2 of Mataro deviates from Fair Isle’s past renditions as they de-stemmed and crushed more than 1,700 pounds of Mourvèdre grapes from Yakima Valley’s French Creek Vineyards. By de-stemming and crushing, their goal was to minimalize tannins and showcase the fruit qualities of this grape. This vintage drinks like a Lambrusco with notes of violets, plums and bramble berries. Using a blend of multiple oak aged saisons that rested in neutral oak for an average time of 12 months, they re-fermented on the grapes for two months and conditioned in packaging for nine months. The result is a true beer/wine hybrid.
LINK: Peaks & Pints beer and cider cooler inventory
