Two Beers Trailhead ISA

Two Beers Brewing Co., Trailhead ISA
India Style Session Ale
Seattle, WA
4.8% Alcohol
Rating: 4/5

This beer is exactly what you'd expect based on the name. It's hoppy like an IPA, but it's an easy-drinking beer.

Dick's Brewing Company, Bavarian Style Hefeweizen
Centralia, WA
4% Alcohol
Rating: 4/5

This beer is notable for being American and tasting like a German wheat beer. It's not as good as the best of those, but it's not bad.

Odin Freya's Gold

Odin Brewing Company, Freya's Gold
Kolsch Style Ale
Seattle, WA
4.5% Alcohol
Rating: 4/5

An excellent summer beer. Every light beer aspires to this. It's sweet and a little bit wheaty.

Dick's Danger Ale

Dick's Brewing Company, Danger Ale
Centralia, WA
4.5% Alcohol
Rating: 3/5

This is an extraordinarily unobjectionable beer. It's on the sweet side for a beer; in fact, it's one of the least bitter beers I can remember drinking. Its flavor doesn't stay in your mouth very long, but while it's there it's pleasant.

Lately the sky has been pretty as the sun sets. I've been enjoying it.

In front of Padelford Hall.

Dick's Cream Stout

Dick's Brewing Company, Cream Stout
Centralia, WA
5.5% Alcohol
Rating: 4/5

It's an excellent stout with a rich flavor that could even be described, dare I say it, as creamy.

Iron Horse Cozy Sweater

Iron Horse Brewery, Cozy Sweater
Vanilla Milk Stout
Ellensburg, WA
4.5% Alcohol
Rating: 3/5

This is the kind of beer that I wouldn't buy if I didn't trust Iron Horse. I really didn't like it at first: the vanilla flavor was jarring, and it all seemed too sweet. By the end I appreciated the rich malty flavor and found it more tolerable, if not my favorite.

Three Skulls Pilsner

Three Skulls Ales, Yellow Beard Pilsner
Seattle, WA
~5% Alcohol (just a guess)
Rating: 2/5

It tastes like grape soda. It is possibly the first domestic beer I've had that tastes like this. Is beer supposed to taste this way? I don't like it.

Some internet investigating has taught me that Three Skulls Ales is basically just Baron Brewery.

Iron Horse Hop Hub Pale Ale

Iron Horse Brewery, Hop Hub Pale Ale
Ellensburg, WA
6.0% Alcohol
Rating: 4/5

It's a nice beer with a tiny bit of sour, citrusy flavor.

Harmon Porter

Harmon Brewing Co., Puget Sound Porter
Tacoma, WA
5.4% Alcohol
Rating: 4/5

A malty, slightly sweet beer; clean tasting and pleasant.

Sierra Nevada Harvest Ale

Sierra Nevada Northern Hemisphere Harvest Ale
Fresh Hop Ale
Chico, CA
6.7% Alcohol
Rating: 5/5

This beer reminded me of Pliny the Elder. It's powerful and direct, but there are a lot of flavors to it, and none of them are off in any way. I expected something more delicate, but I'm really happy with what I got.

Vancouver, Day 4, 9/18/2010

Our day began with delicious croissants at Coco et Olive, with crunchy outsides and perfectly flaky insides. Eventually we made it to the University of British Columbia campus to go to the Museum of Anthropology, but by this time we were hungry and needed lunch. We weren't in a very good area for this, but we eventually found the Boulevard Coffee Roasting Co., which had some decent-looking sandwiches in the display case. I got one with scrambled egg, sun-dried tomatoes, some sort of cheese, and some sort of red pepper spread. Lindsay got one with brie and pear and walnuts. They heated the sandwiches up a bit so the cheese got a bit melty.

At the UBC Museum of Anthropology we met Sasha, who just got his PhD and a job at UBC, and his girlfriend Sheila. We apologized for how late we were and a had a good time chatting. Then we toured the museum, which had a huge collection of native art and artifacts.

After this we went to Yaletown, the trendiest part of downtown Vancouver, sort of Soho-esque in feel. Most of the streets are laid out with one side of the sidewalk about five steps up from the street. This elevated strip is filled with outdoor restaurant seating. We wandered around looking for a sushi place called Honjin our hosts had recommended. After we methodically walked back and forth down trying to cover every block in turn (which is actually fun!), we found a large map with a list of restaurants and went straight there. We had tiny dishes of spinach with with a sesame sauce, squid with a sweet soy sauce, and pickles. The spinach was good though I found the sauce a bit too peanut buttery. I liked the squid a lot: it turned out to be raw, and after a bit of chewing it would give in and feel rich and tender. The pickles were great. We also had sockeye salmon sashimi, two pieces of mackerel sushi, and a roll with some pickles vegetable inside. We had a hard time ordering because we barely know anything about Japanese food and most of the sushi was listed only with Japanese names. So, we didn't get much food at all. Also, none of the beer looked exciting, and we wanted to go somewhere else and get some, maybe with french fries. And that's what we did, at the Yaletown Brewing Co., which according to an article I read in one of those free city papers was a craft-brewing pioneer in Vancouver. The brewpub had a corporate, touristy feel, but the fries and beer were excellent. I had an IPA, and Lindsay had the seasonal Belgian Wit, and I couldn't say which was better. (Lindsay says hers!) We had a beautiful walk back over the Cambie St. bridge to get back.

Vancouver, Day 2, 9/16/2010

We're staying in a house south of downtown. The owners are a couple who sometimes rent out their extra bedroom on airbnb.com. They're wonderful people, and they picked us up from the train station when we arrived yesterday. Their house is full of art and books and two cats who we tried and failed to photograph. One of them hides, and the other never stops moving.

The house we stayed at.

In the morning we walked over a bridge to get downtown. Along the way we saw a lot of bike infrastructure.

Bikes going the wrong way, legally.

We walked around the center of downtown, which like most downtowns is full of skyscrapers and expensive shopping. Unlike downtown Seattle, it's also full of people.

By lunchtime we had made it to the outskirts of Gastown and Chinatown. We had lunch at a place called Medina, where we ate delicious open face sandwiches. Mine were two variations of smoked salmon with herbed cream cheese: the first was topped with lightly dressed arugula and sweet cherry tomatoes, and the second with slices of avocado and a fried egg, sunny side up. Lindsay's dish was four (four!) different little open faced sandwiches: Moroccan carrots with raisins, grilled haloumi cheese (some sort of soft cheese that can be cooked without melting completely), tabouleh, and beets.

In the afternoon we took a terrible route over a long and ugly bridge to Granville Island to go the farmers market and the public market, a Pike Place Market-esque collection of food vendors. I made a mental note to return for smoked fish. We sat around reading and watching seagulls make funny noises before taking an exhausting walk back to the house.

After some rest, we went to a nearby restaurant called the Cascade Room. From the extraordinarily dim lighting we could tell it was a hip spot. I had a Main St. Pilsner that was great; very clean and toasty. I also had duck breast with shiitake mushrooms and gai lan, which is the same as Chinese broccoli. I mostly had pieces of stem, which were like massive asparagus stalks with leaves. Duck breast as usual was great. Lindsay had wonderful mushroom and paneer strudel on a pile of curried lentils. For dessert we shared cinnamon and chile crème brûlée. Then we went back to the house and ate a tiny melon we had bought at the farmers market earlier that day.

Iron Horse 509

Iron Horse Brewery, 509 Style
Session Ale
Ellensburg, WA
5.0% Alcohol
Rating: 4/5

A beer with a really simple taste: the best description I could come up with was "citrusy", but that's an exaggeration. It has barely any aftertaste. All this makes it sound bad, but I really liked it. Being refreshing and having no flaws is enough.

Pike Dry Wit

Pike Brewing Co., Dry Wit
White ale brewed with spices
Seattle, WA
5.0% Alcohol
Rating: 5/5

A fizzy, tart beer. It's not very bitter or hoppy. If Seattle manages a hot day anytime soon, it would be lovely to sit outside and drink it.

Epic Ales Simply Summer Ale

Epic Ales, Simply Summer Ale
Seattle, WA
4.9% Alcohol
Rating: 3/5

It's a plain beer with a sort of soapy aftertaste (it just tastes weird, not contaminated).

Dogfish Head Festina Pêche

Dogfish Head, Festina Pêche
Neo-Berliner Weisse brewed with peaches
Milton, DE
4.5% Alcohol
Rating: 4/5

This has a good, dry, peachy flavor (and I usually hate fruit beers). It's got a sharp, acidic tang to it.

Alaskan Raspberry Wheat

Alaskan Brewing Co., Raspberry Wheat
Juneau, AK
6.5% Alcohol
Rating: 2/5

Yick. The raspberry flavor is powerful and not good.

Epic Ales Terrasaurus

Epic Ales, Terrasaurus
Ale brewed with shiitake mushrooms
Seattle, WA
4.5% Alcohol
Rating: 5/5

This is such a weird, delicious beer. The mushrooms give it a rich flavor, sort of like coffee. For its depth it's incredibly light and it never tires you out.

Iron Horse Ginger Hefeweizen

Iron Horse Brewery, High Five Hefe
Hefeweizen brewed with ginger
Ellensburg, WA
6% Alcohol
Rating: 4/5

I went to the Iron Horse Brewery tasting a few couple weeks ago at Bottleworks. It was Saturday and the store was packed. A guy was there from Iron Horse to pour the samples, and he really liked talking about the beer. This meant that the only way to avoid a painfully long wait was to go immediately back to the end of the line after you get your beer. So, I spent my afternoon drinking beer while walking in a large circle.

The hefeweizen was their lightest beer. It has a real ginger flavor without being sweet, and it's a fun, simple beer.

Deschutes Red Chair Pale Ale

Deschutes Brewery Red Chair Northwest Pale Ale
Bend, OR
6.4% Alcohol
Rating: 3/5

Recently it has come to my attention that I rate every beer four. This is a natural thing: the beers I buy are all pretty good, but they're rarely perfect. It definitely makes for a stupid system, though. I thought about rating the beers on a scale of 3.0-4.0--this would satisfy my desire to give everything a decent rating and would match up with the grades for graduate math classes at the University of Washington--but here's what I've settled on: five for perfect, four for excitingly good, three for boringly good, two for PBR, and one if it gives me food poisoning.

This pale ale was good, but I probably wouldn't get it again. It's not at all bland, especially for a pale ale, but I found it a little bit too piney. In any event I think they finished brewing it in April, when I bought six that I still haven't finished.