Washington State musings

First up, and the good news, Vancouver, Wa has a new Irish pub. It is called the Irish Town Bar. I visited it and was impressed. The atmosphere is nice, they have pools tables and darts and host live music. They also plan on showing soccer games in the bar during the season.

The beer selection isn't extensive, but it IS a nice blend of mainstream beers and harder to find offerings. It is the only place locally I have the Irish Red Smithwick's on tap. So far, definately worth checking out.

On the side of not so good news the Issaquah Brewhouse near Seattle has been responsible for my only real disappointment with the Rogue chain.

I was there yesterday and noticed a heather ale (the Kilted Frog) on the menu. I was eager to try it since I liked the only other heather ale I have had. My expectation was for an light, shading to sweet ale with interesting herbal character.

Unfortunaly, I can't really tell you if that is what I got. The Brewhouse served the Kilted Frog far too cold so no flavor at all came through, I might as well have been drinking water. Sadly, this isn't where my disappointment with them ends.

I asked the waitress about the temperature of the beer, her reply was "We only have the one cooler for the kegs and we try to balence the temperture between main stream drinkers and beer geek temperature"

Now, at first this sounds almost reasonable to me, until I thought a bit and realized the Kilted Frog was brewed ON SITE. So the brewer intentionally created a beer that COULDN'T BE SERVED AT THE PROPER TEMPERATURE. Wow, need I say more?

Well, acutally, yes, I do. In the last ditch effort to try to find out if the Kilted Frog had the complexity I hoped for I attempted to order some to go. Which I couldn't do, because they were out of caps for their to go containers....