Two steps back, three breweries ahead
August, 1999by Dawnell Smith
Beer lovers in Alaska's big city, Los Anchorage, saw the sad demise of Bird Creek and Railway Breweries last year. Some people viewed the shuttered windows and empty tanks as the beginning of a beer apocalypse. Others held fast to the belief that it's better to relax and have a homebrew than cry over drained beer lines.
As fate has it, the Alaskan beer industry just needed some breathing room. Within the year, the state embraced three new beer makers, spanning the state from Wasilla to Ketchikan. For those without a sense of the size of Alaska, that's a distance of roughly four jet hours.
Down in the wet southeast, the Haines and Ketchikan brewing companies serve small sea towns with quaint populations that boom when thousands of summer cruise ship visitors hit port. Far away in Wasilla, an hour north of Anchorage, The Great Bear Pub and Brewing Company caters to a different crowd--Anchorage's bedroom community and any traveler heading north.
Admittedly, it seems like beer gets awfully spread out in the Far North, but that has more to do with the sparseness of the population than the lack of interest. Most Alaskans call Anchorage, Fairbanks and Juneau home, which means that many towns have as little as a few hundred residents. To make matters worse, these cities only get a limited selection of good beer, usually at a premium price. One good brewer can change all that by making fabulous, fresh brew that wins the hearts and bellies of the entire town.
That's how the Haines Brewing Company intends to make inroads. Principal owner and brewer Paul Wheeler supplies the town's restaurants and bars with kegs of beer, then sells growlers from the brewery. He'll never get filthy rich making beer with a 3.5 barrel brewhouse, but he sure gets to work in cool digs at an old movie set for the film White Fang.
Fittingly for a brewer in a town of only a few thousand, Wheeler has verbal agreements with most folks in the food and beverage business. "Nothing's in writing, but every bar has expressed interest," he said. Once out and about, no doubt, locals will make a stop at the brewery a part of their routine. Eventually, though, Wheeler hopes to branch out to other southeast markets with his English style stout, India pale ale, porter and specialty beers.
Like Wheeler, Ketchikan brewer Kevin Cannon wants to refresh the taste buds of his neighbors. Already he has an advantage, since Ketchikan has a larger population than Haines, but he also plans to send beer to Sitka, Wrangell, Petersburg and so on. With Inside Passage Ale, Deer Mountain Amber and Black Bear Porter as his flagship brews, he definitely has an eye for the image-conscious consumer. Someday, he said, he may even get shelf space in Juneau, home of Alaskan Brewing Company, the state's largest brewery.
Unlike these two small micros, The Great Bear is a brewpub that fills the shoes of the Matanuska Valley Brewing Company, a wannabe craft-brewery and pub that never made it to the show. One of Great Bear's owners, Laurence Livingston, earned a reputation as a high-gravity brewer at Cusack's Brewpub in Anchorage. Aside from churning out pale ale, amber ale, dry stout, blackberry ale, a märzen/Vienna-style lager and a bock of some sort, he'll also make doppels, tripels, barley wines and incredulously-hopped IPAs.
Livingston said the food will include a splash or more of Great Bear beer, including the bread, soup, salad dressings and sauces. He calls it "high-latitude cuisine" and describes entrees as large portions for a middle-range price. Unlike the other two newcomers, the Great Bear has the advantage (and the burden) of trying to win customers with food and service as well as beer. To get an edge, they spent considerable time and effort resurrecting the site, using fire-burned spruce for stools, beetle-kill spruce to accent the floor, and Valley birch for the bar.
As long as the menu lives up to Livingston's fine beers, The Great Bear should turn into a thriving hotbed of activity. Wasilla residents will flock to the Bear's bar stools for brew and relaxation, and any fisher, skier, hiker or musher worth his or her weight in wool will need to make a pit stop to break up a long, weary day of travel.
After all, Alaskans can go thousands of miles without seeing a decent beer. When they finally spy a delicious pint off the side of the road, they sure as heck won't let it get away. And neither should you. If you visit Alaska, add these three watering holes to your list of brewery stops:
The Haines Brewing Company
108 White Fang Way
Haines, AK 99827
(907) 766-3823
The Ketchikan Brewing Company
607 Mission Street
Ketchikan, AK 99901
(907) 247-5221
The Great Bear Pub and Brewery
238 N. Boundary Street
Wasilla, AK 99654
(907) 373-4782
