Wednesday, January 14, 2009

Elysian Brewing: Tangletown

My Colorado roots has led me to choose Elysian Brewing's Tangletown Pub as the first victim of my beer adventures in Seattle.

Elysian has recently signed up with Colorado's own New Belgium Brewing (the maker of Fat Tire) in a loose partnership to share brewing facilities.  The belief is that New Belgium can use Elysian's smaller brewing facility to experiment with new flavors and Elysian can use New Belgium's large brewing facility to produce more beer.  Basically everyone wins, especially us, I mean, come on, greater availability of Elysian across the region and new scrump-a-delicous Beers from New Belgium?  Thank the Beer Gods!

So I figured with this new brewing partnership between my old home and my new I should go check out what Elysian has going on.

One of the things that has always attracted me to Elysian (besides the Beer of course) is their ancient Greece theme and as a nerdy history major I imagined Elysian's Tangletown to resemble something out of Troy with manly men drinking out of gigantic jugs and chasing...how do you say this...'promiscuous young ladies' around the bar.

Well unfortunately for me the place looked like...well...a nice Beer-pub.  

Luckily the food and the Beer more than made up for the lack of sultry ladies.

They had everything from your standard pale ale to belgian sours to  irish stouts, pretty impressive.  Their immortal IPA and Perseus Porter were the definite stand outs of the group.  The IPA was very hoppy at first yet the hops disappeared quickly enough to make you crave another sip before you even heard the glass hit the polished steel bar top.  The Porter was also very impressive with a roasted barley (think coffee) taste that made me feel like I actually was sucked back into ancient Greece and pounding liters of the stuff with Odysseus.

With over 10 rotating beers and 2 cask condition ales on tap the Beer was definitely flowing at Tangletown and I can see why this is one of the most popular spots in the Greenlake neighborhood.

The food was also quite impressive and I would highly recommend their Dragontooth pulled pork BBQ sandwich.   Marinated in their Dragontooth stout, (hence the name) it was quite a sandwich and gave me that 'Me, Man, Me Have Meat' satisfied feeling.

The Seattle ale house culture definitely came through the pub as well, with everyone from Microsoft techies on laptops, to families, to hip urbanites enjoying a frosty brew.  Beer culture in Seattle differs from many other places in the simple fact that people here treat Beer-pubs like the gang treated the coffee shop on Friends, as place to talk and hang out.  While in Colorado people did talk to one another, most people go to Beer-pubs for the Beer and not the social aspect.  It's kind of nice actually, now I can tell my friends and family that I am not going to the local pub to drink but instead to 'socialize'.  Making my doings a little easier on dear ole Mum.

So here is what you have been waiting for, my Do's and Don'ts at Tangletown:

Do: Drink a new style of great Beer.
Don't: Drink their Belgian Sours, they are in no way sour which kinda defeats the purpose.
Do: Order food.
Don't: Run around in a toga with a bronze age sword screaming I am SPARTACUS!!! while drinking out of a pitcher and spilling half of it on your shirt.  After all it is an ancient Greece theme and not ancient Rome.  Dummy.

And now the Beer recommendations:

For Brad Pitt in Troy- 
Perseus Porter.  It will even put some hair on Brad's chest.

For your buddy's artsy girlfriend who just talks about Salvador Dali all day- 
Pandemonium Belgian Sour.  Yeah I said it wasn't any good but who's kidding she isn't going to know the difference.

For a Beer God-
 Immortal IPA.  The Beer is immortal by definition so it must be made for a Beer God.

For the Microsoft techie- 
The Wise ESB.  Well balanced and easier to operate then Windows Vista.

Well go forth ye and enjoy a good Elysian Beer.

Cheers!

note:
SCRUMP-A-DELICOUS (adj.) 1. Something that is better than scrumptious and delicious, combined.  2. Something that is equivalent to a real life Never-ending Gob-stopper. Usage- The ice cream was scrump-a-delicious.  

Yeah. I made up a new word.




1 comment:

  1. I believe there are two Roman Beer gods. The brash god known as Barley, born of Potash and Yeast, who insisted he pee in every brewing tub and, of course, Hops, who never got much attention unless he over stayed his welcome.

    ReplyDelete