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Kolsch Night at Chuckanut Brewery

Wednesday, August 26th, 2009 | Beer | No Comments

Every Tuesday is Kolsh Night at Chuckanut Brewery in Bellingham, where eight ounce traditional glasses of Kolsch go for $1.50.  Considering that Erik and I live in the boonies not too far from the border, what choice did we have but to head down and drink delicious Kolsch?  It only took us forty minutes to get to Chuckanut Brewery, including border lineup, which is the same amount of time it takes us to get to Vancouver, provided we don’t get distracted by all of the big city bright lights.

I was pretty interested to give Chuckanut a try after reading about them in the latest issue of Northwest Brewing News.  They are one of the few Northwest breweries to predominantly brew German style lagers (and no IPA!).  Plus they have a rad name that makes me giggle.  Come on now, don’t pretend that Chuckanut doesn’t roll off the tongue.  Seriously though, with styles like Dortmunder, Dunkel, Kolsch, Marzen, and Helles on the menu, it was well worth a trip.

As one must do when first visiting a brewery, I ordered the beer sampler.  I really enjoyed tasting three and a half lager styles side by side to really taste the difference (Kolsch is a ale/lager hybrid of sorts).  I’ve visited breweries where I found many of the beers to be rather similar, but Chuckanut did well to distinguish their brews.  Of the golden tinged beers, I found the Dortmunder to be on the hoppy side, the Helles sweeter and more malty, and the Kolsch to be fruity.  The Organic Amber and Pale Ales were also enjoyable.  I really liked that they listed brewing information, style descriptions, and food pairing suggestions on the menu for each beer.  For dinner, we enjoyed some fresh mussels steamed in beer, tasty wood stone oven pizzas, and some desserts drizzled in an amazing blackberry sauce.

We attempted to find a liquor store on the way home so that we could bring back some craft brew at affordable prices, but were too late in the day for our quest.  We settled on Walmart instead, where I found Deschutes Black Butte Porter for $6.97, less that half of what I paid in Canada last week.  Interestingly, this delicious craft beer was situated just above BLL on the shelf and selling for the same price, which would you choose?

It was a successful sojourn across the line for some tasty German beers and well worth the trip.  We’ll surely be back again.

Cheers,

Chris

Tags: beer steamed mussels, bellingham, chuckanut brewery, deschutes black butte porter, dortmunder, dunkel, german lager, helles, Kolsch, marzen, Northwest Brewing News