Clean Slate for Wednesdays
Slate Creek is the latest local brewery to launch a Wednesday beer release series.
A new offering will be tapped each week in Coeur d’Alene as part of Slate@8, starting today with No-Winers Weiss, a wheat beer brewed with grapes.
The outdoors-themed brewery has been involved in community mountain bike rides each Wednesday, with pint discounts afterward for participants.
“Wednesday has been one of our busiest nights,” says co-owner Jason Wing. Now, with the weather changing, he says, “We’re trying to keep that momentum going.”
Iron Goat has been releasing small-batch beers on Wednesdays since January through its Year of the Goat series. Daft Badger, just two blocks from Slate Creek, started a similar program in May.
Some of Slate Creek’s releases will be small batches – like No-Winers, and an upcoming robust English brown ale and an ESB – while others will feature the return of regular rotators, such as the Fly’n Kilt Scotch ale next week and Double Diamond Black IPA the week after.
The beers will begin pouring when the taproom opens at 5, with discounted $3 prices on all pints from 8 p.m. on, plus live music and pizza slices starting next week.
While Slate@8 is new, the idea for a wine-beer hybrid has been kicking around for a while, Wing says.
“My brother (and business partner, Ryan) has a huge Champagne grapevine in his yard,” he says. “We’ve thought for years that we need to do something with that.”
They ended up adding crushed grapes to the base beer at the end of the boil, to sterilize any wild yeasts. It’s hopped with Pacifica, a New Zealand-bred relative of Hallertau, which Wing says provides an orange marmalade aroma.
“It’s not like pow-in-the-face wine, but there’s definitely a unique taste and smell to it,” he says.
The Wings have added some extra firepower to the brewhouse by bringing on Matt Spann, formerly of Idaho Brewing Company in Idaho Falls, as head brewer.
During his four years there, that brewery racked up close to 20 medals in the annual North American Beer Awards at the Mountain Brewers Beer Fest in Idaho Falls. Some of those award-winning recipes will be showing up at Slate Creek, including a black lager and a dunkelweizen.
There also will be a barrel-aging program, beginning with the Fly’n Kilt. (Spann’s oaked Scotch ale won a bronze medal at NABA in 2013.)
“It frees me up to do more of the actual running of the business,” says Wing. “We’re bringing in somebody with more production experience than we have who can be in (the brewery) all day, every day.”
Slate Creek has broadened its distribution throughout North Idaho since upgrading to a 15-barrel system at the end of last year, and recently shipped its first kegs to Boise. Spokane could be next, Wing says, if production allows.
MORE WEDNESDAY RELEASES: New small-batch offerings elsewhere today include Saazquatch Ale (8.8 percent alcohol by volume), brewed with butternut squash, spices and Saaz hops, at Daft Badger; and a Blood Orange Sour (6.5) at Iron Goat.