Rejoice, fans of tart beer. Dirty Couch Brewing opens their brewery and taproom in Magnolia today at 3 pm. This long-awaited sour brewery is hitting the ground running with ten taps of barrel-aged and sour beers in their new taproom.
Dirty Couch’s new space is situated in a remodeled two-story building on the industrial side of Magnolia near Salmon Bay (across the railroad tracks from where all the richy rich folks live). Their modest taproom features a few long communal tables, fresh paint on the walls, and a weirdly cool bathroom faucet (more on that below) with glass doors that look into the attached brewing space, with its massive wood foeders (pronounced FOOD-er—which are the massive wood barrels that are used for long term beer aging). That space is a high-ceilinged concrete cavern of a room and encompasses a total of four foeders.
I am always skeptical of a new sour brewery. These are time-intensive beers that take months or even years to produce, so a great new sour brewery can take a long time to come to fruition. But Dirty Couch Brewing isn’t a new brewery; Frank Swiderski, Rob Nelson and Jon Cargille opened Dirty Couch more than two years ago and head brewer Sean Lindorfer has been quietly making impressive sour beers out of their tiny space in Ballard. DCB, as people refer to this brewery when they don’t want to utter the oddly off-putting official name, is already developing a house style with an emphasis on assertively sour beers, frequently mixing in darker malts to produce sour porters and sour dark ales, and using spirit barrels, like used cognac and gin barrels. DCB's beer is often aggressive while usually maintaining a sense of balance.
Lindorfer (formerly at Urban Family) has already made a name for Dirty Couch’s beer. So the really great news here isn’t that Seattle has a new sour brewery—it’s that it has finally become convenient to enjoy some of Seattle’s best sour beers. Before the taproom's opening, you had to either get lucky and find DCB beer on tap at a local bar, or text Sean like you were making a sketchy drug deal and arrange a time for him to roll up the doors on his tiny Ballard brewing space and hook you up with a bottle. It was weird. This new taproom is better.
I’ll write more in depth about DCB’s beer in the future, but some of my early favorites include: Plausibility, a sour porter aged in whiskey barrels and marrying sweet fruit notes with the dark chocolate notes of whiskey; Donut Return, an oak-aged sour that was fermented with Saturn peaches, and tastes like an effervescent peach candy; and Caerus, a saison aged in OOLA Distillery gin barrels and full of botanical flavors like dried orange and lemon, with a slight pepperiness. Caerus is a delight to drink.
Keep an eye out for DCB and visit them in Magnolia, as it is certainly one of Seattle’s most promising breweries.
