A Little Brewery In Yakima.
I spent a lot of time on the telephone with brewers from around the country last week, talking about several topics for stories to be written as fast as I could turn them out and just for my own research purposes, and one of the more interesting interviews was with Jeff Winn who, with partner Chris Swedin, began selling beer from the new Yakima Craft Brewing Company in early June.
The coolness factor is three-fold. For one thing, they’ve returned brewing to a town which absolutely needs must have a brewery in the Grand Scheme of Things (heart of the Yakima Valley, center of US hops-growing, the town where Bert Grant founded the first modern day American brewpub, all that good stuff).
Second, they are working with a 3.5bbl brewhouse and are a production brewery, not a brewpub. That’s gotta earn them the title of the smallest production brewery in the nation (probably the world), I’d think.
But coolest of all: that 3.5bbl brewhouse is Bert Grant’s original one from 1982. Winn and Swedin also are using an all-copper kettle that Grant had made especially for him, the old dairy tanks and other original equipment.
Says Winn, a seven-year homebrewer from Portland who was looking to move on from his 20-year career in the high-tech industry last year:
“My wife’s family lives in Yakima and when I realized there was no brewery here, I thought what most people would think, ‘how can a place like Yakima be without a brewery?’ So we just went went with the idea, moved up here. I hooked up with Chris, who had brewed for Bert back in the golden years, because he wanted to brew again. He was instrumental in our getting the old equipment at auction.”
During the week, I also talked with a Mayor-Brewer not name John Hickenlooper and another brewer in Texas who was called before City Council to pop a beer from an East Coast brewery and tell them all about it.
But those are stories for another day.
