Pike Brewing shows it doesn’t have to be Siegfried’s funeral pyre

Part of the brewing kit in the pub, the rest lurks below

As the dominoes fall and the disinterested call wolf and those with a stake aim to stake their lives on a different way of doing things, here is a refreshing route, a three cheers, hip-hip-hooray way in which a brewery changes its structure.

I’m writing about Pike Brewing in Seattle, which has been around since 1989, when founded by Charles Finkel (though he sold it in 1997 before buying it back in 2007); Finkel also started the influential beer importing company Merchant Du Vin. Last week, in the midst of what seems an on-going beer equivalent of March 1918 on the Western Front, he declared that he’d expanded the ownership group of Pike Brewing to include three key, long-term employees. The story can be read here.

I’m pleased about this, having spent a very enjoyable afternoon with him back in late May when working on a Seattle-Portland Pacific Coast road trip for the Sunday Times Travel Magazine (it’ll be out next year). We’d first met at Michael Jackson’s funeral in 2007 and when I turned up in Seattle I headed for his brew pub at the heart of Pike Place Fish Market, where singing fishmongers serenade their customers and the smell of grilled chicken fills the air.

Finkel was in fine form having had spent lunch launching the first beer in his Pike Locale series, a light golden beer called Skagit Valley Alba, which used local malted barley from the eponymous valley and Yakima Valley hops (the barley farmers had been at the launch). The beer had an aromatic lemony nose, and was crisp and light on the palate with a dry finish, a refreshing corrective to the exceptionally hot day.

He was a genial host, taking me through the beers that his team produced in the brewery below the pub (a brief visit made me think of a cross between the Tardis and a Bond villain’s lair); the pub, meanwhile, is like old England transported out west, with plenty of dark wood and several massive spaces whose walls and shelves were devoted to beer and brewing ephemera. As we tasted a glass of the peaty Kilt Lifter Scotch Ale, he waxed lyrical about the foodie reputation of Seattle and Washington.

‘Washington is the largest onion, potato, cherry, mint, lentil, apple and hop state. Add to this salmon, crab and other shellfish equaled by few places. We also have more than 250 breweries. People say that it is the damp winter weather that encourages people to stay inside and read (we also have one of the highest library usages in the country), eat and cook.’

He was chatty, enthusiastic and friendly (he seemed disappointed I wasn’t able to join him, his wife Rose Ann and friends on a boat for dinner that night, but I had to head out early) and above all he was passionate about the beer he made. On my trip I enjoyed plenty of resiny, headily hopped West Coast IPAs but what I wanted to try that day was his brewery’s take on the traditional styles that American breweries first picked up on in the 1980s (we had a tripel that used Westmalle yeast, a saison that was more Belgium than Soriachi this, Citra that). He talked about Sam Smith, whose beers he first brought into the US in the 1980s, Michael Jackson, the White Horse and food and beer and the afternoon slipped away. He had to go, I had to go. I hope to meet him again (not at a funeral I hope), and I like how he’s dealt with his brewery — which means it doesn’t always have to end in the brewing version of Siegfried’s funeral pyre. 

Death becomes the Pine Box

‘Bruce Lee was brought here when he died and his coffin was carried out by Steve McQueen and Lee Marvin.’ A pause in the conversation. A sip from a glass of Speedway Stout — chocolate, vanilla, booze, darkness visible. I looked at the man next to me at the bar, friendly, tattooed, probably politically aware in a way I’m not, willing him to continue the conversation, he was drinking North Coast Old Rasputin. ‘I guess there would have been others helping to carry it but the Cooler King and the Wand'rin' Star man are the guys.’

In Seattle at May’s end, stumping the streets, listening to the singing fishmongers in Pike Place Market and asking the barman at the Elysium bar Avatar why the place was so quiet on a Wednesday night, I went up the hill to Pine Box. A former funeral home (this brief home to Bruce Lee), this was the bar that most people I met recommended I should visit. So I did.

Inside, there was hip-hop in the background, which I always used to enjoy, and stools at a long bar, with 30 taps behind, the steel glittering in the light. Robust, young, friendly, lively, noisy — I liked the noise, the starling like chatter, it reminded me of a Brit pub on a Friday night, people unafraid to have a few beers and make sounds that might frighten those who come in with a smartphone and a list with which they would like to tick off in silent. This was smart beer drinking, enjoyable beer drinking, pleasurable beer drinking, beer drinking as a joy rather than a duty (which is what I’ve always said), beers from the likes of Rodenbach (Grand Cru), 21^st Amendment, Hopworks Urban Brewery (Kronan the Bourbarian Baltic Porter) and Hair of the Dog (Session IPA), all thrusting their way forward, all vying for space in my glass.

‘Any ghosts here,’ I asked the barman. He handed me my serving of Kronan and smiled and went on to serve someone else. I relaxed and listened to the river run of voices and wondered which one was the one who wasn’t really there.

Bingo

Here at Hilliard’s Brewery in the Ballard district of Seattle the cans are being filled, four (or was it five?), at a time, the caramel coloured beer with its flecked head of foam, before a movement of the machine forward sees the foam being flicked off, smoothed, and then a top is added and pushed down. The beer is ready to be sent over to Sweden. It’s a sunny day outside and light floods the brewery; it was once a service garage for a car dealership and there are big windows and on a day like this, being in a brewery like this, there is nowhere else I would rather be. Especially when I’m handed a glass — a jam jar I laugh, a mason I then say, and after another look, it’s a glass version of the can — of their Saison. Dupont yeast, Pilsner malt and Goldings hops and we’re away in a neverneverland of spiciness, fruitiness, dryness and a beautiful mouthfeel. I can imagine myself in the tank country of Wallonia. ‘We only do cans because it’s a better way to store beer,’ says Adam Merkl, who founded the brewery with Ryan Hilliard in 2011 (they also do draft but it’s bottles that are avoided, and the sounds of the canning line are accompanied by wheezes and huffs and puffs, rather than the tinkle of laughter that a bottle line produces). ‘Enjoying this?’ says Dustin Boast, the guy that brought me to the brewery, a former accountant who started Road Dog Brewery Tours, which does what it says and takes people on tours around Seattle breweries. I am indeed and then I get a taste of a sour in progress, an ESB with Belgian yeast. Refreshing, lemony and shapes of grapefruit being thrown. Good one. I try more beers, chat with Adam and the guy on the canning line (apologies to him for not noting down his name) and generally enjoy the ambience of this brewery that I’d not heard of before. And afterwards in the mini bus Dustin takes people around in I say that what we’ve just been doing is the most important part of beer, not just drinking the stuff but talking to the people who make it, swapping stories and telling tales. Beer’s about the people as much as what is in the glass. Dustin smiles. ‘Bingo!’ he says.