SHOWING OFF We're here to help you show off the Seattle area to your summertime visitors — and teach even you locals a few things. Other ways to show off: The lake is their front yard The action above the field More ...

By John Wolfson
Seattle Times staff reporter

And you thought this was a coffee town.

"More craft beer is produced in Seattle than anywhere else in the country," says Paul Gatza, director of the Institute for Brewing Studies in Colorado. Craft beer is what most of us call micro-brew, also known more informally as "the good stuff." Rather than blander ingredients such as rice and corn added by mass-market breweries, craft beer is typically made with 100 percent malted barley.

73,750,560 bottles of beer on the wall: Leading the way for Seattle-area craft brewers are Red Hook, which produces 223,000 31-gallon barrels per year, and Pyramid, which brews 105,000 barrels a year. That sounds impressive, until you consider that Anheuser-Busch makes more than 100 million barrels per year.

The refined palate: In Washington (and Oregon and Colorado, too), Gatza says, craft beer accounts for 8 to 10 percent of the brew consumed each year, compared with about 3 percent nationally.

In all things balance: According to the Hop Growers of America, the Yakima Valley produces a third of the world's hops, which preserve beer and imbue it with a bitterness that balances the sweetness of malt. Sixty percent of the harvest, which is considered among the planet's finest, is exported.