Father's Day spent tossing back a few kegs

Twenty years ago — when the Washington brewing industry was just getting its start — local brewers promoted their industry with a Father's Day weekend brew festival.

Saturday and Sunday, some 10,000 beer drinkers lifted a cold one at the Washington Brewers Festival at St. Edward State Park in Kenmore. It was a crowd reflective of the recent 35 percent growth in the state's microbrew industry, said Arlen Harris, executive director of the Washington Brewers Guild.

The guild, which sponsored the festival and hopes to raise at least $50,000 from it to use promoting the industry, says the increase results from consumers' interest in local products.

"We love our coffee. We love our seafood," he said. "We invest in our neighborhoods" and neighborhood businesses — especially when the product uses Yakima-grown hops and Palouse malted barley, and has been refined over years.

Nationwide the microbrew industry has grown 17 percent in the same time period — 2005 through 2006, Harris said.

For many of the beer drinkers, the festival was just an annual Father's Day outing and a chance to wander from booth to booth, sipping Diamond Knot lager from Mukilteo, Fish Tale Ale from Olympia or Hop Bomb pale ale from Rock Bottom Brewery in Bellevue and the many other brews, while the kids sipped Big E crème soda at their own soda garden.

Sporting a T-shirt advertising "Polygamy Porter, because one isn't enough," Tom Sullivan of Covington and his family have been making the festival an annual event for years.

Their favorite: Water Street Brewing's Big Phatty Imperial Red.

The microbrew industry started in the early 1980s in Washington with the opening of Grants Brewing in Yakima, Harris said. Today there are more than 90 brew pubs in the state, an offshoot of the home-brewing movement.

Harris said most of those in the industry began as home brewers.

Among them is Big E Ales in Lynnwood, which sent Kyle Swafford into the ring Sunday in the keg-toss competition.

Swafford, who does a variety of tasks at the brewery, including lifting a lot of kegs, stood with his back to two small water-filled pools and time after time chucked the empty keg into the pool some 40 feet away. Each time, he paused to air-punch as the crowd cheered.

For the past 20 years there has been some kind of beer festival in the Seattle area, Harris said. Over the years, the sponsors have changed, but for the past two years the brewers guild has sponsored it.

Nancy Bartley: 206-464-8522 or nbartley@seattletimes.com