Until We Meet Again, Seattle Beer Week…

Did anyone else notice that Seattle Beer Week is like 10 days long? I can't wait until it's Seattle Beer Month! Since beer is such a big deal here, maybe it'll just be "Here's a new month, here's a special beer for it"!

I'd be into that.

Even though it's more than week, Seattle Beer Week seems to blur right past. It may be in part because the weather is sort of becoming summer. It may be because there are so many awesome events, one can't keep them straight or even attend all the events one wants to.

OK, let's face it, it's probably because you drink too much beer too late on too many consecutive  nights. And with many of them being specialty (read: STRONG) beers, that will surely put you down early for the following work day!

As I mentioned, there were a lot of cool events. There were things like Pike Brewing beer floats at Full Tilt, opening night at Naked City (complete with casks of beer to drink and pickled hop vines to eat!), Epic Ales taco Saturday, and of course Big Al was all over the place. (I tried to limit this to just those events I attended. If I made a list of events I meant to attend, that would be longer, and a list of the events I wanted to attend, that would be nearly all of them!)

However, the coolest event I attended wasn't listed. The president of Black Star Co-op's board of directors happened to be in town for a conference. We jumped at the opportunity to drink jokes and tell beer with Mark!

Black Star Co-op has been nothing but great to us. Our founder, Jeff, has been in touch with them from our very beginning. One of our B.O.D members was in Austin several weeks ago and visited Black Star and chatted with Mark and Co.

Black Star Co-op is the only fully operational cooperative brewery in the US, at the moment. Truth be told, there's been multiple occasions where we've looked to the path Black Star has traveled as a model of something that worked. Because of these reasons, they are sort of an unofficial big brother to Flying Bike.

We visited Elysian over on Capital Hill for dinner. Elysian has consistently tasty food and solid beer. I love that they have some unique beers at their locations that you can't find anywhere else. There were no specific Seattle Beer Week events there that night - we did that on purpose so we'd be able to get seats!

Mark was as gracious and personable as you'd expect from someone that leads a cooperative brewery. We bombarded him with questions about brewing and brewing co-ops and Texas and sound waves, and he answered all of our questions between mouthfuls of food and beer. He shared information and insight into their genesis and growth, and offered to lend an ear and help us out moving forward. This will continue to be a great help to us, so thanks Mark & Black Star!

We talked about doing Cooperative Brewery festivals, once there are a few more of us. How awesome would that be? A weekend-long festival dedicated to craft beer created by co-ops! I'll need to come up with some sort of toast or cheer or rallying cry for us brewing co-ops. If it weren't so late I'd have something here, but it is and I don't. Until then, keep spreading the word!