By Dick Cantwell

Malty Smell of Success

If there are two kinds of people—and I’ve always resisted this particular inclination to truism—it may be those who love and those who hate the smells of brewing beer. We spend our lives of course among those bewitched by the fundamental mystery of malt and hops, people for whom the errant whiff of brewery activity can blocks away bring a smile. But every now and then someone will poke their head into our breweries and say something like “eew---how can you stand to even be in there—that stinks!” Worse than this, sometimes these unenlightened have the power to alter what we do, insisting that any indication of what is going on inside a brewery is something that should not be allowed to impinge on their otherwise placid and perfectly concentrated minds and senses.

I once worked in a money-losing sort of museum of brewing located on the fringes of a quaint mercantile area of Seattle offering tourists and actually living customers a window on how it all was done in some indeterminate bygone age—you know, when people the world over sealed any seafood transaction by throwing it to one another. Because the brewhouse was so small, we brewed continually—not around the clock, but a couple of times a day. The building, which may or may not at one time have housed a particularly notorious brothel, was home to low-income residents, some of whom were disabled and many of whom were at home all day. One of them was often to be seen out working on his motorcycle. His disability, as I came to understand it, centered on virulent allergies to yeast, malt, hops and water (or perhaps, cynics might assert, claiming so cemented the continuance of his disability checks). In an effort to appease him and some other neighbors, the brewery installed steam condensers and a kettle vent stack which rose thirteen stories to above the top of the building. It was the job of whichever brewer closed up for the night to take the elevator up to the roof to turn off the fan, often guarded by extremely territorial nesting seagulls—the really big ones.

When that brewery moved several years later to larger and plusher digs not far away the problem only got worse. This time the neighbors had more money, had in fact purchased their centrally-located condominiums and apartments for a great deal of money, in most cases well before the news broke that a brewery was to occupy space nearby. The relocated and enlarged brewery tried to keep up the twice-daily schedule, but was tripped up by the complaints of its neighbors, some of which were aired, so to speak, in the media. One article quoted a man comparing the smells coming from the brewery to what he might scrape off his shoes after a careless walk in the park. We all laughed about that, but the brewery was forced to spend tens of thousands of dollars on air-purifying equipment.

To some extent I don’t blame these people. Most of us, no matter how much we love the smells, enjoy being able to get home and away from the brewery, to take off the clothes redolent of malt, essentially to be able to take our olfactory pleasure on our own terms. None of those people had figured on living all day, nearly every day amid the aromas of the brew. Perhaps more of a consideration should have been made concerning putting a fair-sized production brewery in the middle of a fairly toney and pretty thickly settled urban area. And speaking of due diligence, a law firm recently moved into offices in the building occupied primarily by Elysian. The space was nice, the location good, and the price right, I suppose, for them to agree to terms with the landlord, but they apparently never dropped by while either the brewery was operating or the pub was open and busy. The first indication of trouble was when an emissary dropped by one Monday morning, wondering what all that clanking was coming from beneath their conference room. Well, Mondays are often bottling days. Some days later, with a brew in progress, the same emissary was dispatched with a can of spray foam in hand to plug any tiny holes which might be allowing brew smells to make their way into their offices. We laughed about that, too.

I’m lucky; in a way I was born to all this. Though I was born on an army base, I was born in Germany, and I know there were breweries in the cities in which I lived for the next few years with my parents. Then we moved to Wisconsin, and later, in the town in Minnesota where I mostly grew up there was a Malt-O-Meal factory, right in the middle of town next to the river. When they were making Malt-O-Meal you could smell it all over town. The chocolate was the best. Seattle has one of the best self-guided tours of brewery smells to be had anywhere outside of Bamberg, I think. A few years ago it was especially rich. If you got on your bike on the Burke-Gilman Trail in Ballard, you would pick up, in fairly quick succession, the smells of brewing coming from first Maritime Pacific, then Hale’s Ales and then Redhook’s Fremont plant. A few miles farther down the road you might, if the wind were right, catch the whiff of the boil at Big Time in the University District, and if you pressed on, perhaps determined to get a little exercise, you would be able, twenty or so miles up the same trail, to finish up with the larger-scale exhalations from Redhook’s Woodinville facility and the now-defunct Aviator Ales. My biases are clear, of course, but I consider this a benefit of cultural significance. It’s certainly a sight better than the bike rides I would take outside of the town of Malt-O-Meal, turning back when the smells coming from the turkey farms got to be too much for me. A farmer, however, might take issue with me.

We’ve run the gamut, at Elysian, of neighborly reaction to our various facilities. Our original spot elicited nothing at all negative where the brewing was concerned—all thumbs-up through the window and people traipsing in literally having followed their noses to find where we were. When we operated a little token of a brewery in the bowels of a glitzy, Hollywood-style video arcade with pretensions to cultural and commercial icon-status, we were just a little too ragged in general for the beautiful people bussing tables and calling out the races on the Indy 500 game. The directive obviously came from on high that we and our smells were only barely to be borne; fingers clamped to noses were de rigeur when passing by the offending facility. I once postponed a brew in order not to wrinkle noses at a private party connected with the release of some lifestyle-type fragrance, scratch-and-sniff cards of which were no doubt soon to be offending the readers of various national magazines. It’s perhaps appropriate to mention at this point that objections to smell often seem to take on a political dimension. It’s an issue that inspires not merely aversion, but indignation and outrage. How could you---?!?, etc. By the time our relations with the by-then somewhat shamefaced Hollywood arcade empire ended, the issue had faded in significance. By then it was obvious that their collective corporate woes had little to do with the occasional smell of malt and hops, and not only did staff members no longer feel compelled to hold their noses when passing the brewery, a few of them even felt so bold as to like the smell.

A little over a year ago we opened another place, smaller but in a decidedly residential neighborhood of decidedly new money. These people, we feared, might object to the occasional—once a week, tops—occurrence of malt smell in their eight hundred thousand dollar airspace, and so we posted a letter in the window, comparing the intrusion to come to no more than that posed by a devoted homebrew hobbyist. I only started brewing there a few weeks ago, and so far reactions have been mainly positive. Enough anticipation had been engendered, I think, by the time we actually got it together to functionally outfit the brewery that most were principally eager to taste the beers brewed in what by then was their neighborhood watering hole. Of course I did get four complaints after the first brew, two of them from tenants in the building. I hasten to say that these were justified, as the gas burner on the kettle was turned up so high it was necessary to keep the lid open throughout the runoff and boil, and especially as one came from the design offices directly above the brewery. For the moment I am brewing only at night and on weekends when the offices are vacant. The other two complaints came from neighbors who merely could smell that something was going on to which they were unaccustomed. The coffee roaster and the organic doughnut shop, the sausage stand and the Japanese restaurant are institutions of long enough standing, apparently, as not to arouse a sense of olfactory wrongness. A cranked-back burner and properly functioning stack condenser will, with time, I believe, mollify the Kravitz contingent.

I like to think that like good walls, the reasonably moderated smells of brewing make good neighbors, that the vibrancy of hand-crafted industry enriches a neighborhood by offering ownership to any within range. There are certainly places—Tacoma and Appleton, Wisconsin come immediately to mind—that could only benefit from the addition of such smells, and I know there are breweries in both those places. In my mind it’s the barber pole or the cigar store Indian of our industry, an alternatively presented signpost of where to come for a beer.