New Breweries in Bellingham

A couple weeks ago we took a family vacation to Lake Whatcom outside of Bellingham, Washington.  Beautiful quiet setting, clean water, and easy access to a cute little burg that the Urban Beer Hiker refers to as "Little Portland".  (Click that link, by the way, it will do you good.)

I've always liked Bellingham, and Boundary Bay Brewery has always been there as a reliable place for a good beer.  My lifestyle has become so sedentary that I hadn't visited the town since before the widely-acclaimed lager-centric Chuckanut Brewery opened there 6 years ago.  So I knew I'd get some beer tourism done during our week at the lake.

What I didn't expect was to find that the two established breweries have recently been joined by some very talented upstarts.  In fact, the beer was much more exciting at the new places than the old ones.  Once-beloved Boundary Bay now seems overcrowded and overpriced, with indifferent beers -- I had a cask Pale Ale that was so tired it made everyone at the table yawn.  A quick stop at Chuckanut found them with only 3 of their beers on tap: German Pils, Czech Pils, and IPA.  They were decent enough, but as a tourist I was hoping for some special hometown magic.  Maybe it's one of the hazards of focusing on long-gestation lagers.

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Enough grousing, let's talk about what was exciting in Bellingham.  Top pick:  Kulshan Brewing, which opened in 2012.  Very solid lineup, and they do an especially nice job with lower-alcohol ales:  Full 90 Session Ale and Dude Man Wheat had tons of flavor and clocked in below 5%.  Good Ol' Boy Pale and Transporter were good choices below 5.5%.  If you want something stronger, their flagship Bastard Kat IPA is right on the money for a West Coast IPA.  The one blemish on our visit was the Double IPA (forgot the name), which tasted too solventy to me, though my wife didn't mind it.

Kulshan doesn't serve food, but they have a very spacious tasting room and patio, with a food cart parked out front, or you can bring your own food (the barbecue cart was pretty lame, in our opinion, and we were really hungry that day).  Minors are allowed (in fact, they're allowed at all the pubs and tasting rooms in this post).

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Another surprising find was Wander Brewing, whose decor and repertoire reminded me a lot of Portland's Base Camp (a place I like more and more with each visit, by the way).  Heck, even their chalkboard reminded me of Base Camp.  I really enjoyed a couple of their rye beers -- a roggenbier and a rye IPA.  And when the vacation ended and it was time to select a souvenir beer to fill my growler with, I didn't hesitate to fill up with Wander's Coffee Baltic Porter.  Definitely a nice touch of java in there, but it's the thick, rich, stouty goodness that keeps you sipping on it.

Wander just opened this year, and they're located in what looks like an old shipbuilding warehouse with really high ceilings.  The tasting room blends right into the brewery, with lots of hip reclaimed wood used in the furnishings.  The tables have some weird sloping surfaces, so careful where you set that glass.  There's a food cart outside one of the garage doors -- a different cart every day (cool idea).

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Another Bellingham brewery that just opened in 2014 is Aslan Brewing.  Hold onto your hats, this one is an actual brewpub serving food from their own kitchen, including a passable waffle-fry poutine.  The beer was all right here -- not as inspiring as Kulshan or Wander, but I would rate Aslan's beer, food, and atomsphere higher than Boundary Bay's based on our single visit to each this summer.  One very cool offering:  DNA -- Don's Non-Alcoholic Beer.  I have always hoped to see some microbrewers to try their hands at N/A beers, so big ups to Aslan for actually taking the plunge.  It was a dark, rich brew -- you can see it in the tall schooner behind the taster tray in the top photo -- that had that malt-o-meal flavor you get from Malta drinks, but not as intense.  It wasn't so wonderful that I would drink it every day, but I might have one occasionally.

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Finally, there is a fairly new brewery (2013? 2012?) called Menace Brewing, just outside of Bellingham in Ferndale.  We didn't make it out there, but they have a pub in Bellingham called The Local which serves a few Menace brews and others from around the area.  We popped in to The Local (love the name) on a Saturday afternoon, and got some of the weirdest service ever.  I hope it was just a bad day, but the icing on the cake was when we were leaving, trying to say a goodbye to our waitress, who steadfastly refused to look up from some small task like napkin sorting to meet our eyes.  After standing there awkwardly for a few seconds, a grumpy bartender nearby finally gave a wordless wave and a grunt -- but it was kind of a back of the hand wave, more like "shoo" than "see ya".

Anyway, let's hope that was a fluke. The couple Menace beers we tried -- a stout and an IPA -- were all right, nothing wrong with them.  The food at The Local had highs and lows -- we had a wonderful mixed-green salad, and the grown-up mac-and-cheese was decadent and fantastic.  But the breakfast dishes were very lame -- flat bland waffles, flavorless home-fries, and something else I can't even remember.

De Bier Tempel and More Brugge Beer

Last week I told you about the fabulous Bierbrasserie Cambrinus in Brugge, Belgium.  There are a number of good beer places in Brugge -- it is located in the beer-obsessed region of Flanders, after all -- so this time I'll expound on a few of them we visited during our short stay there.

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De Bier Tempel

First I want to relate to you a story about the miraculous power of beer, and the shrine to fermented grain known as De Bier Tempel (no translation needed).  How's your attention span?  Got room for more than 140 characters?  Here goes...

Driving into Brugge from Amsterdam, of course we took a wrong turn just as we got into town.  Actually, we do this everywhere we go: it's my superpower.  In the small French town of Bléré we were lucky enough to spot a roadside tourist map that set us straight.  Driving into Paris, our wrong turn led us into a nerve-wracking ninety-minute waking-life stress dream meandering through the suburbs before we got back on track.  Amsterdam was a cinch: we went the wrong way on the ring road around the city, but since it's so compact, we just completed the circle and it only took us about 20 minutes longer to get where we were going.

We didn't have a map of Brugge, but I thought the town was small enough that eventually we would run into a street that looked familiar from the driving directions I printed out. We never did. When Carla accidentally drove right out onto the no-cars-allowed main square, she carefully backed out of it and informed me in no uncertain terms that we were going to take the desperate measure of asking a fellow human being for help.  "I'm parking this [inaudible] car right here, and you're asking directions from the first person who looks nice."  Yes, dear.

There happened to be a man standing in the doorway of the shop we had just parked in front of.  I smiled at him and nodded good day through the car window, and he nodded back before going inside.  That must be the nice person Carla was talking about, I thought to myself.  When I got out of the car, I looked up at the sign above the shop: De Bier Tempel.

My jaw dropped, because before we left on our trip, Pub Night buddy and soon-to-be contributor msubulldog put me in email contact with his friend Regnier who does Belgian beer tours and who also works in a Brugges beer shop -- none other than the aforementioned Bier Tempel.  I dashed into the store.  "Are you Regnier?!?" "No, I'm Serge, but Regnier is in the back." Long story short, we accidentally landed on the doorstep of the one person we had a connection with in town, it was five minutes to quitting time, and he was kind enough to squeeze into the car with us and navigate us to our hotel.  That is the power of beer.

De Bier Tempel is a nice little bottleshop.  A great selection of bottled beer is on the shelves, and they sell glassware from nearly any Belgian brewery you can think of.  You can drink a bottle in the store, though I was kind of surprised that we weren't offered a glass.  I suppose they would have to insist on it being exactly the right glass, and a small shop can't keep one from every brewery in circulation.  That, or they don't like doing dishes.  So we swigged right out of our bottles as we browsed the store.  There are a few kept cool in a refrigerator, but the shelves full of unknown-to-us beers were what drew us in.

De Bier Tempel also stocks various beer-related souvenirs and snacks.  We were tempted by the autobiography of Pierre Celis, but found that the English title "My Life" belied the fact that the book was written in Flemish, so instead I walked out with a cheesy deck of playing cards, each with a different Belgian beer on it.  Check out De Bier Tempel for some of your Brugge beer shopping, though I can't guarantee that they'll escort you to your hotel.

Staminee de Garre

The historic main square in Brugge is lined with brasseries, but none of them looked appealing enough for us to get over our resistance to their high prices.  Instead we sought out the tavern called Staminee de Garre, which is located down an alley whose entrance looks like a doorway into an adjacent building.  I looked for De Garre all day on our first day in town, and finally found the place on the second day.  Beer Nerds has some good pictures of both the entrance to the alleyway and the inside of the tavern towards the bottom of this post.

It's a cool looking old tavern, and pretty small.  When my daughter and I popped our heads in, the barman shooed us out sternly.  "No.  No.  We're full."  This is not unusual for customer service in Brugge.  Don't take it personally, the place is overrun with tourists from around the world, and I'm sure they -- we -- become a nuisance after a while.  The two of us went and brought Carla and our other daughter over, just to show them the cool hidden alleyway.  About that time a party of five or six walked out of the Staminee, so when Carla peeked inside the barman gloomily indicated to her a table where we could sit.

De Garre has four or five nice things on tap -- including the "house" tripel brewed by Van Steenberge served in a satisfyingly hefty snifter -- and a nice bottle selection.  We were amused at the little dish of cheese cubes with toothpicks that arrived with the beers.  A certain amount of food was available, though it seemed to be more of a drinking bar than a restaurant.  They also have a large rack of ceramic bottles of aged genever on the wall which we weren't brave enough to dabble in.  Great atmosphere; it's a nice place to have a beer or two.

't Brugs Beertje

I've been a little critical of customer service when talking about De Garre and Cambrinus, but I don't mean to single them out.  In Brugge you're just as likely to be brought to tears by the waffle lady or the clerk in the chocolate shop as by your waitress or bartender.  For example, as we tugged for a few minutes at the locked door of one shop -- well within the posted opening hours -- a worker inches away behind the glass grimly continued her shelf tidying task while studiously avoiding any acknowledgment of our presence.

Of course, every stereotype has exceptions, and I found a notable one in this case during my all-too-brief visit to the classic beer bar 't Brugs Beertje.  The folks behind the bar at the "Little Brugge Bear" were smiling, patient, and joking around with the patrons. I was only able to stay for a quick Straffe Hendrik tripel before my hungry and cranky womenfolk came to fetch me off to dinner, but I can see why this place is on everyone's list of must-visit bars in Brugge. The friendly staff and cozy, pubby atmosphere make it a place where you could stay for hours.

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We were only in Brugge for less than 48 hours, and not specifically on a beer mission. Even so, I enjoyed what I saw of the beer there, and wouldn't mind spending more time exploring it.