Day 1: West Seattle Equals Best Seattle
And here we are, back in the Emerald City. My husband joined me for this portion of the hop trip so we opted to drive instead of fly. Approximately six hours later we made it my sister-in-law’s apartment in West Seattle, our home base for the next few days. Since it took half the day to drive from Bend and with a desire to avoid Friday evening traffic in the city, we opted to stay in West Seattle for the rest of the day. However, as we soon found out, this in no way limited our beer choices.
Our first stop was West Seattle Brewing, the Mothership location, which is located off of Fauntleroy Way (they have a second location called the Tap Shack which is on Alki Beach). The Mothership is a small, industrial space with several tables looking directly onto a section of the brewery floor (my preferred design for a tap room, always love that smell). The tap room has a decent selection of beers on tap (both core and seasonal offerings) and also serves coffee drinks and a small food menu (sandwiches, salads, and pizza). While there I sampled their Alki Lumber Lager, a clean, light lager which was perfect for a warm day in Seattle (shocking, I know) and the Smoke Haze IPA, a decent addition to the hazy IPA trend. Since the Brewers Association added Hazy IPAs as an official category can we call it a trend anymore? Anways, I digress.
After finishing up some work (it was Friday, guys) we ventured over to The Beer Junction, a combo beer bar and beer store in the middle of West Seattle. The Beer Junction came highly recommended from my coworker and fellow beer nerd Adrian so that combined with the fact that it was walking distance from where we were staying (don’t drink and drive y’all), I had a feeling it would be a winner. I was very happy to be right. Their website claims to have Seattle’s largest beer selection with over 1,300 different beers available in package and a monster tap list with around 40 taps of beer, cider, mead, and kombucha. And it was a beautiful tap list that night, and not only because they had Cascade Barrel House’s Manhattan on tap. The tap list is separated into several categories including: Hops!, Light & Medium Bodied, On the Dark Side, and Rare, Sour, or “Odd & Delicious.” While they did seem to have a love for Central Oregon beers, which I always appreciate, I went for some non-Oregon beers including a Dark Mild from Machine House Brewery (one of the most British ass beers I’ve had in awhile) and a Mahogany Kriek from Grand Teton Brewing. While sipping on these beers we also spent some time perusing their massive bottle shop selection which I believe I have only seen bested by one other place (we’ll keep that one for a future hop trip). In short, it is awesome and if money and storage were no object I would have brought a good portion of it home with me. It’s also worth noting that The Beer Junction is a block away from Ma’ono, a place which serves delicious fried chicken and Hawaiian food.
