PIKE BREWING KILT LIFTER

Like I said last week, I had one good chance to grab some great beer in Seattle when I visited a little over a week ago, & that was at this specialty store in Pike Place Market. I was too sick with a rotten cold to truly contemplate heading to a bar, wife and toddler notwithstanding. Coincidentally, right down the block from the store was the PIKE PUB AND BREWERY, one of Seattle's many microbreweries, albeit one that I considered a "lesser" alehouse during the time I lived in said town. I only actually quaffed beers in their environs once, but I bought a 6-pack every now & then of their stuff and I honestly can't remember what I thought about it - probably a sign of mediocrity if anything is. So there!

Before my sojourn this time I checked the Beer Advocate's "Beerfly" section around beer travel, and someone was yammering in the Seattle section about the Pike Brewery and specifically about their KILT LIFTER SCOTCH-STYLE ALE. Now I don't know much about how the Scots do it, but I do know that I used to buy a beer from a brewery called BERT GRANT'S called Bert Grant's Scottish Ale, and I loved it. Those guys are (were?) from Yakima, WA, and unfortunately that beer's been "retired". So I gave Pike Brewing's version of Scottish Ale a whirl. It poured a nice orange/copper, and gave off a real malt-like smell that didn't really get me excited. Drinking it was a bit better. It tasted relatively light in alcohol, a little bit fruity I reckon, and with perhaps a bit too much malt for my liking. It still went down easy, and though it wasn't quite the treat that Bert Grant's stuff was back in the 1990s, I figured this was something I could probably have the barhand pour for me in another time, another place. I gave it a 6.5/10 and then laid down, wondering why in Allah's name I was drinking in the middle of the afternoon with a knock-you-flat cold like mine. Then I remembered - I was doing it for you.