Bellingham, Washington is the place where everything changes, and everything stays the same. The sleepy city by the bay is where my education began. It’s where I met the person who most changed my life, a love long gone but not lost. Apparitions of who we were haunt every corner. Each moment here contains a quantum echo, the forking paths of the past.
One path has led up to my latest visit. Along with a motley crew of fellow beer folk, I’ve come to town to attend a brew day at Bellingham’s Aslan Brewing Company. In collaboration with two Seattle bottle shops, Bottleworks and Full Throttle Bottles, the brewery is making an approachable, canned American Saison, says JD Ryan, Aslan’s brand manager, to be released April 29. It will be lower-ABV than is typical for the style, and slightly hoppier, made with additions of Nelson Sauvin and Ekuanot. The team is calling the collaboration “Past Meets Presence,” named after my love letter to the Ballard Brewery District, because the beer is where tradition meets modernity.
From hop selection to the wood-grain-approximating label art, the process of making the beer is also being shared online, and my friends at Seattle Beer School, Shawna Cormier and Jess Keller Poole, are leading sensory education classes along the way. The brew day brings the gang I toured Ballard with back together, as GBH contributor Dave Riddile and I road-trip an hour and a half north to meet old friends and new while documenting the occasion.
I hadn’t known what to expect going in, but the day ends up being less about the beer and more about simply sharing an experience. In safe, masked, outdoor space, we enjoy the company of others, engaging in rousing (and sometimes-contentious) conversation while Ryan generously summons bottle after bottle from the cellar. We remain on the spacious patio into the early evening, and for multiple rounds of Underberg. It is the most social interaction I’ve had since before the pandemic, almost sensory overload, yet so desperately needed. I was more starved for connection than I knew, and it warms me like the sun warms the late-winter day. This, I think, is why we make, drink, teach, and write about beer: for the celebration, for the shared moments when time loses its tyrannical grip.
One of my oldest friends still lives in town, and we meet up later. It’s the first time I’ve seen her in over a year; her kids are already so much bigger, talking so much more. We walk the same streets we did in our college days, and everything is different, yet we are exactly the same.
Bellingham is different, too, and yet it’s not, that rare city that can grow without gentrifying. New things spring forth amidst the old in endless interplay, like blades of grass pushing through cracked asphalt. The exterior shifts, but the core is timeless—just like us.
Words by Holly ReganPhoto by Dave Riddile