Half of these pour the brewery’s core range of German, English, and American styles, including the aptly named Old Seattle Lager. Maritime has 14 taps, including three British beer engines.
As I do every year, I drink the Jolly Roger Christmas Ale during our wintry visit: The English Strong Ale is malty and full-bodied, with boozy sweetness and notes of raisin and spice.
In 2000, Hancock hired a chef, and they moved into their current location at Ballard’s easternmost edge. Hale’s Ales Brewery & Pub moved to Ballard from the Kirkland suburb in 1995, but the two would stand alone for more than 20 years. Redhook Brewery had opened in 1981, but relocated in 1987. “My father owned a business in Ballard, and my wife and I lived on a sailboat here,” he says, but there were no other breweries at the time. Hancock opened the brewery in 1990, in a converted transmission shop in the old industrial zone (where Peddler Brewing Company now resides). Hancock recalls when you could leisurely stroll back and forth across Leary Way, the now-congested thoroughfare where his brewery lies-back when no Ballard building was taller than three stories and “the beer scene was geeky, not trendy.” He’s right: In 2018, one in three Seattle residents were between the ages of 25 and 39, a 70,000-person increase in this demographic since Amazon’s arrival. “With that, there is a give and take, and unfortunately, old Ballard is gone.” Still, “the city is catering to the younger crowd,” says Hancock of Maritime Pacific, the District’s first brewery. Some of the construction has been reinforcing our city for The Really Big One, and the bar and restaurant boom of the 2010s supercharged the innovation and creativity of the dining and drinking scene. However, it’s easy to cast the old city in an unrealistically rosy hue, and not all of the change has been negative. But even historic Ballard Avenue is now lined with self-conscious boho-chic boutiques and suspiciously slick alt-country outfitters. I see glimpses of it at Ye Olde Curiosity Shop on the Central Waterfront, where an actual mummy terrifies children. Today, the demented, Old-Seattle sideshow whimsy of my youth has all but disappeared, banished to the dusty shelves of Pike Place Market’s lower-level shops, amidst glass-mounted tarantulas and imported Buddhas. But it has risen anew, with the same autonomous, entrepreneurial spirit that marked its founding. Today, Ballard still shows its seafaring roots and Scandinavian heritage. In my youth, it was synonymous with warehouses, Danish bakeries, old people, and traffic that backed up for miles on the two-lane Ballard Bridge. Yet Ballard the neighborhood refused to die, resisting absorption by the big city and retaining an independent streak. But by 1907, local municipal services couldn’t keep up with its growth, and Ballard was annexed by Seattle.Īt the time, Ballard City Hall sat in black crepe-draped mourning, the flag at half-mast. Fishermen and their families found a sense of familiarity in Ballard, which became its own city in 1890, shaped in the immigrant image. Today, seagulls still sail on the salty breeze that rolls off the gray water, the same way they did at the turn of the 20th century, when economic and political unrest in the Nordic countries prompted a mass exodus to the United States.
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