Once, it brayed with fire-wheels and horse screams, the great red doors flung wide as soot-kissed men hauled brass and fury into Tacoma’s North End infernos. Engine House No. 9 was born in July 1907 with ash in its lungs and civic duty in its bones, a stalwart Edwardian firehouse stitched from brick and steam just uphill from the port’s restless tides. It outlived the horses, outlasted the quake, and dodged death by disrepair until, in 1971, two journalists from The Tacoma News Tribune—Win Anderson and Bob Lane—purchased the boarded-up relic and began resurrecting it with ink-stained hands and reverent stubbornness. By 1972, they had transformed the bottom floor into a tavern and the upstairs into an apartment, making it the first historic building in Tacoma to be restored and repurposed by a private business. And there, amid vintage pull-down ladders and whispered ghost stories, Tacoma’s first post-Prohibition brewpub flickered to life in 1995, a small 7-barrel system next to a firepole still slick with time. Engine House No. 9 didn’t just serve beer—it exhaled history, fermented nostalgia, poured time itself into pint glasses with names like Rowdy Dick and Tacoma Brew.

But like all good phoenix stories, the spirit grew too big for its brick cocoon. In 2011, the Xitco and Paradise families—collectively known as X Group—acquired Engine House No. 9, breathing fresh life into both the food and the fermentation. Under their stewardship, and with Shane Johns commanding the brew deck like a saison-slinging mystic, the beer began to outpace the walls that once held it. By 2019, E9 Brewing officially broke off from the tavern, establishing its dedicated brewery and taproom across town in Tacoma’s burgeoning Historical Brewery District. Gone was the vintage tavern clutter, replaced by oak foeders and stainless clarity, by saisons aged under silence and sours spoken in ancient yeasts. Still tethered to its firehouse soul but no longer confined by it, E9 became the city’s wild yeast oracle, conjuring beers that hum with reverent funk and barely restrained joy. The name endures. The fire burns cleaner now. The story continues—across town, across tongues, across time.

Peaks & Pints E9 Beer Flight: The Firepole Five

E9 Tacoma Brew

4.8% ABV

Tacoma Brew is no ordinary golden pour—it’s a resurrection in a pint glass, a whisper from the malty past of a city that once fermented dreams by the barrel. Brewery Director Shane Johns, E9’s wild-yeast alchemist and fermentation historian, didn’t just recreate a beer—he summoned a legacy, reimagining the original Tacoma Brew once crafted by the long-lost Puget Sound Brewery, a pre-Prohibition juggernaut that helped make Tacoma the hop-soaked darling of the Northwest in the 1880s. E9’s version, a Kölsch-style ale cold-fermented on their house yeast, is a gentle marvel: floral, crisp, low-key heroic, with noble hops and just enough malt backbone to carry the weight of history. This beer doesn’t just nod politely at its origins—it revives them, one clean, golden sip at a time, a glass raised not to nostalgia, but to continuum—to what was, what’s become, and what Shane Johns still coaxes from the fermenting ether of Tacoma’s brewing soul.

E9 Brewing Bonjour Mademoiselle Aria

10% ABV

Bonjour Mademoiselle Aria is not just a Belgian tripel—it’s a love letter in liquid, a golden hymn to lineage and levity, brewed by E9’s Shane Johns as a tribute to his daughter, Aria, whose name now echoes in the yeast-sung arches of every pour. At 10%, it doesn’t whisper—it sings, high and bright with esters of green banana, pear, and melon, with just a flirt of orange peel and spice drifting through its champagne-bubbled veil. Dextrose sharpens the finish, stripping the sweetness like lace from velvet, leaving a dry, contemplative hush on the tongue. It’s Belgian tradition reinterpreted through a father’s heart, filtered through Northwest funk and firehouse legacy, and crafted to toast the kind of beauty that’s born, raised, and bottled in Tacoma.

E9 Brewing Spaceships IPA

6.2% ABV

Spaceships is E9’s citrus-fueled launch sequence disguised as a hazy IPA—equal parts tropical breeze and hop propulsion, dry-hopped into orbit with Citra, Strata, HBC 586, and a kiss of New Zealand Cascade. It doesn’t float; it soars—grapefruit thrusters, mango vapor trails, and a subtle piney guidance system that keeps the sweetness from drifting too far into juicebox territory. It’s your low-orbit cruiser for navigating the cosmic in-between: bold but not bludgeoning, soft but never flabby, like a West Coast IPA that read too many Terrence McKenna books and decided to slip into something more pillowy. It’s the beer you crack open when your tongue needs to feel a little gravity, but your mind wants to drift.

E9 Brewing Pogoistick Nelson

6.3% ABV

This is E9’s hazy hop daydream on a trampoline with Barbarian yeast doing its juicy ballet while New Zealand’s enigmatic Nelson Sauvin hop pirouettes through clouds of white grape, lychee, and stone-fruit sorcery. This is no brutish IPA bombast; it’s pure bounce and breath, a misty orchard romp in silk slippers. The haze rolls in like late-summer fog over vineyard hills, softening the edges, coaxing your palate into a state of citrus-splashed reverie. It drinks like a wine country fever dream filtered through lupulin and low light—ripe, radiant, and entirely uninterested in the tyranny of clarity. A joy-jolt in a glass, Pogoistick doesn’t just land—it levitates.

E9 Brewing Mind & Time

7% ABV

Mind & Time is E9’s lucid thunderclap of a West Coast IPA—pine-laced, mango-muscled, and dry as a Zen koan whispered through resin. It’s what happens when hops are treated like holy scripture: Idaho 7 Cryo, Belma, El Dorado, and Cashmere collide in a tropical-mirage supernova that finishes with the clean, crystalline snap of clarity itself. This isn’t haze—it’s revelation. A beer that remembers its roots in bitterness but elevates the form with fruit-forward finesse and citrus-slick geometry. It’s the IPA for hop heads who also read poetry, for trailblazers who pause to watch the sun set through lupulin-filtered air. Mind & Time doesn’t shout—it resonates, clear as a bell and twice as heady.

LINK: Peaks & Pints beer and cider cooler inventory