RedHook Brewery

Odd but this post is about a brewery I had never heard of before this week, one I have never seen a bottle from, let alone tasted one of their beers, and I’m unlikely to any time soon I guess. (Cue Wayne’s World flashback music....)

The town I live in has one charity shop, or as they like to call it a 'community shop' probably because the stuff you give away to them you'll see in your best friends neighbours house 3 months later. I was killing time on Tuesday, looking past the piles of tatty McDonald’s meal toys for dinosaurs for my son to add to his collection, and I noticed on the glassware shelves a pint glass with a design I hadn't seen there before. "RedHook Seattle Portsmouth" it said.

It peaked my interest firstly with its Star Wars styled lettering, and that I thought Seattle was in Washington State not Portsmouth (New Hampshire), but mostly I wondered how it had come to be here in a little community shop in south Wales?

I already have enough pint glasses, I’m afraid I have liberated a few in my time, but bought it anyway out of curiosity. 

RedHook Brewery

It was also not so much how it came to be there but what it had had in it on the way. Obviously I will never know but I romanticised anyway, has this glass seen the greats of the US craft scene inside its scratched being? The Goose Islands, Brooklyn beers, the heavily hopped IPA's, any number of pints from the 130+ styles the US craft scene has categorized beers into. Of course it may have been given away unloved and used for years for gallons of cheap lout necked on someone’s sofa, (I must confess to several years of lovely lout consumption in my past too)

Redhook brewery was founded in 1981 in Seattle, their first beer was styled after Belgian ales, but it was their Ballard Bitter which took off and pushed their brewery to capacity and then expansion. Today they have three breweries (the third being in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, hence the glass lettering); on both coasts of America and their flagship beer is the Redhook ESB. Highly regarded also, according to ratebeer anyway, is their Treblehook barleywine, American-Style Strong Brown Ale' 8-4-1 Expedition Ale', and the 7% Double Black Stout.

Anyway, a silly post whilst stuck working nights, looking forward to the weekend and some good beer.

Not Redhook beer, unless by some miracle they see this and send me some, well you can always

dream!