Westland Distillery officially opens October 27, where they will debut their flagship label Westland American Single Malt Whiskey. Photos via Curtis Simpson IV.
Photos via Curtis Simpson IV.
Photos via Curtis Simpson IV.
Westland's Steve Hawley standing in what is now the largest distillery west of the Mississippi. Photos via Curtis Simpson IV.
Deacon Seat: The single malt whiskey that started it all for Westland, and the label being tasted through October. Photos via Curtis Simpson IV.
Photos via Curtis Simpson IV.
The lobby at Westland Distillery. Photos via Curtis Simpson IV.
The tasting wheel. Photos via Curtis Simpson IV.
Co-founder and head distiller Matt Hofmann. Photos via Curtis Simpson IV.
10,000 liter silos fermenting the wash. Photos via Curtis Simpson IV.
Where grain coverts into sugars, clarifying the liquid to extract flavor. Photos via Curtis Simpson IV.
Into the belly of the yeast. Photos via Curtis Simpson IV.
Photos via Curtis Simpson IV.
Photos via Curtis Simpson IV.
Co-founder Emerson Lamb explains the process in the still room. Photos via Curtis Simpson IV.
Pot stills hail from the last manufacturer of large copper pot stills, Vendome Copper and Brass Works Inc. from Louisville, KY. Photos via Curtis Simpson IV.
Baby Blue, The Spirit Sage, and Big Red. Somewhere Willy Wonka is drooling. Photos via Curtis Simpson IV.
Most of Westland's casks are from the home of Buffalo Trace Bourbon, but also used are Spanish cherry casks, of which 100-150 are imported per year. "We know where our casks come from." Photos via Curtis Simpson IV.
The still room where tastes are tempered via The Spirit Sage and pot stills. Photos via Curtis Simpson IV.
When you think single malt whiskey, you might first think of something to the tune of tartan kilts, or whiskey the way the Scots make it. But give Seattle native Westland Distillery‘s aged and local whiskey a few swills, allow it the space to round out its appreciating flavors, and pretty soon you’ll be singing the praises of American single malt. Westland has been operating for the past three years in South Park, but their new location in SoDo — complete with a sleek, wood-paneled tasting room that officially opens in three weeks — is not only ostensibly the largest distillery west of the Mississippi, it also makes sipping that whiskey absolutely bitching.
With drinks in tow and catering by City Catering Company, the owners of Westland took The SunBreak through the 13,000 square foot SoDo location and the entire distillation process Tuesday night. Brace yourselves, whiskey lovers, Westland knows brown liquor.
Unlike in Scotland, in America there aren’t specific laws that dictate the regulations of distilling single malt whiskey. (Scottish regulations mean that it must be 100 percent malted barley, distilled in a pot still, and aged 3 years in oaken casks.) However, Westland appears to be adhering exactly to those Scottish regulations of traditional distilling, while giving it a modern American twist by aging in new oak casks — which is how bourbon is aged. From a maturation standpoint, it not only develops differently, it’s totally new world, according to co-founder Emerson Lamb.
Like bourbon, this whiskey has a big, big personality. It’s has all the traditionality of a complex and developing scotch where you get spice and yeast on the first nose; it goes down smooth, but then burns with flavor and lingers on your hard palate as it continues to speak. But the new oak casks make it fully American, and cause you to take a second sniff because what is that? vanilla? orange marmalade?
Head distiller and co-founder Matt Hofmann says that the Brewer’s yeast (fruit-ifying) and the five different types of malted barley they use (Munich, extra special, brown, pale chocolate, and Washington select) bring out the complexity, but the maturation brings out the sweetness. In fact, he says that after about 15 minutes, the notes of waffle cone start to come out.
Flavors are tweaked and raised in a hot, sticky room that could only be described as a Willy Wonka drunken miracle. Two enormous and very pear-shaped copper pots — named Big Red and Baby Blue — sit on either side of a machine called The Spirit Sage, an op board where the distiller gets a chance to practice his “science and art,” according to Lamb. It’s here that they sequester the bad scents (which are then sold as cleaning agents) through the pots that come from the last manufacturers of large copper pot stills in the world, Vendome Copper and Brass Works Inc., from Louisville, KY.
Right now, Westland is serving and selling Deacon Seat, their 3-year-old American single malt whiskey made from 100% malted barley, which they will continue to sell alone until they release their flagship label: Westland American Single Malt Whiskey. And, with 90% of their barley hailing from Washington, it’s local too. “We wanted to do this in a place that was 55 degrees and raining,” Lamb says.
Westland is giving out tours and tastes until Oct 27 by reservation, and everything else you need to know can be found on their website.
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On September 24, 2012, the Seattle City Council voted 6-2 to authorize Mayor McGinn to “execute a Memorandum of Understanding” with King County and ArenaCo, the last being the entity that, led by Chris Hansen, hopes to build a basketball arena in SoDo.
The Council’s Tom Rasmussen managed to miss out on this hotly debated vote. Richard Conlin and Nick Licata supplied the No votes. Both have now written explanations of their reasoning, with Licata seemingly of two minds about the deal. Concluding his analysis, Licata sounds more like a Yes: “In summary, I believe this proposal is a good one; it meets a high bar for public accountability. It is a rather solid tree in a forest of not such sturdy timber.”
But judging the proposal not simply on its merits, but on the other priorities of the city, Licata ultimately decides a new basketball arena is not Job #1. (He does not, however, suggest any alternative use of municipal bonding authority that the arena’s construction would forestall.) But fair enough.
This formulation, in contrast, is something of a drive-by: “They see someone purchase private land and in a couple of years get the city to buy it from him for double the price he purchased it for.” Since the purchase price has yet to be negotiated, it is premature to use the cap on the purchase price as the purchase price itself.
Conlin’s argument is pricklier from the outset. He says that though the revised agreement may do more to shield the city from downsides, it’s by no means clear that “we will wind up benefiting from it, or that it is a good use of the City’s time, resources, or financial capacity.” (In both Licata and Conlin’s arguments there is a tendency to elide the fact that basketball fans are also citizens.)
Conlin, who studied history as an undergraduate, sounds like a history major still when he argues that, “Only since World War II has it become customary for local governments to be primary funders–and the current trend may be away from public finance.” For one, that “only” refers to about 70 years. And his trend furnishes one example: the Golden State Warriors.
Licata and Conlin are, essentially, dismayed by a public-private partnership that they see as making off, somehow, with city monies. They sound particularly aggrieved by the new arena’s “self-funding” mechanism, where taxes paid by arena-goers would be directed to paying its debt. As politicians, both demonstrate the ability to annex notional revenues, and to cry out in pain at the thought of their hypothetical loss.
Speaking of notional revenues, both refer to “income” from Key Arena, which they half-rightly see as a white elephant. (“Half-” because it is a 50-year-old white elephant regardless of what happens with a new arena, though the two insist there’s a causal link. The more hard-headed wonks at Seattle Transit Blog are ready to knock it down, which is probably the best thing.)
Conlin claims the Key “made $310,000 on $6.6 million in revenues” in 2011. This is very similar to the “profit” the city looted from the Monorail for years, while foregoing essential maintenance and improvements; Key Arena’s infrastructure is in no better shape. Properly speaking, the Key’s depreciation wipes out any consideration of profit from operating expenses. Licata meanwhile mourns the $100 million in taxpayer money already spent: He could take comfort in realizing that works out to, over the Key’s lifetime, just $2 million per year.
Cage The Elephant performing at the Showbox SoDo on 6/9/2011.
Last night, Cage The Elephant and Manchester Orchestra performed at the Showbox SoDo for the last of their co-headline tour dates together. The night started out with Sleeper Agent, from Kentucky.
Manchester Orchestra took the middle spot for the Seattle date, and they didn’t disappoint. The Atlanta five-piece knows how to rock, but were outperformed when it came to the energy level of Cage The Elephant. So I’m glad Cage went last, because the excitement buildup of the show would have fallen flat on its ass if it was the other way around. It would be hard for anyone to match Cage’s energetic performance.
Frontman Matt Shultz was pretty much a tornado on the stage from start to finish. They played nothing but the hits all night long, all the while peppering the crowd with praise for being so awesome. Matt also dove off the stage no less than four times in their seventy-minute set, with the final time ending up standing upright on top of the crowd for the last song. All in all, a great night of music.
“Most very large rock drills like that are designed to go through rock,” said University of Washington professor David Montgomery, explaining why he personally “wouldn’t bet his house” on Seattle’s deep-bore tunnel coming in on-time and on-budget:
Drilling through unconsolidated debris is what got them in trouble with the Brightwater plant. They’ve had great results tunneling through things like the Swiss Alps—it’s really hard rock, they go deep, and a rock drill going through that stuff, it’s just a matter of time before it gets to the other side.
A big drill like that is not designed to deal with the stray boulder, loose debris, that kind of stuff. What are they going to be drilling through? Essentially glacial sediments.
The big question in my mind is how much it’ll cost to do it. You can engineer your way out of anything. It’s a question of time and money for the most part. There’s a potential for a big surprise.
Montgomery’s area of focus is geomorphology, and he defers to the scientists who have studied the soils of the Alaskan Way Viaduct replacement project more thoroughly. But then, his concerns don’t stop with the tunnel’s construction.
I was talking with Montgomery thanks to a suggestion from his UW colleague Peter Ward, whose dire warnings about the cumulative effects of climate change should give pause to anyone planning a 100-year transportation project. Climate change deniers aside, we have reached the moment when policy decisions we make today must–if we are prudent–take into account the real-world, local effects of global warming.
Ward estimates a sea level rise of between three and five feet by 2100, and his prediction is supported by this recent Scientific American report on a positive feedback effect on sea level rise: “Seas Could Rise Up to 1.6 Meters by 2100.”
Waterfront and tideflats from Beacon Hill, Seattle, ca. 1898; PEMCO Webster & Stevens Collection, Museum of History & Industry, Seattle; All Rights Reserved; Image #1983.10.6049.4 (Photographer: Wilse, Anders Beer, 1865-1949)
That leads us back to geomorphology, because as Montgomery observed, the south end of the tunnel sits near sea level currently. It’s essential that the Puget Sound be unable to reach the tunnel entrance, or it will fill like the U-joint beneath your kitchen sink. Publicola’s “How High Does the Seawall Need to Be?” notes that as of 2008, the seawall was being designed to handle an 11-inch sea level rise.
(Arne Christensen just unearthed that back-to-the-future glimpse of what the SoDo area could look like when the Puget Sound overtops the seawall, all the more disturbing because of course SoDo used to be tidal flats not that long ago.)
Montgomery used the recent earthquake and tsunami that ravaged Japan’s coast to illustrate the dangers of thinking that we’ve accounted for either the worst-case scenario or haven’t made what in retrospect will seem an obvious, colossal strategic error.
“Look at Japan,” Montgomery said:
They had a really great model for tsunami defense, in terms of building up the seawall 30 feet or so, but they failed to take into account that during the earthquake, the coast dropped three or four feet. It’s a good example of the part that was left out of the design coming back to bite you in the place you don’t like to be bit.
What might that look like for a waterfront tunnel in Seattle? What is the likely pattern of subsidence in and around Seattle during a Seattle Fault earthquake, or a great subduction earthquake. We might have a good idea of what it would be, but the one thing we can be assured of is that we’re not going to get it exactly right. Any prediction we make is an educated guess.
With Seattle anticipating both a major subduction zone quake and unable to predict the frequency of a Seattle Fault quake (the last, some 1,100 years ago produced uplift of 15 to 21 feet), the question of the double whammy of subsidence and tsunami is a distinctly live one.
Right away, we confront the problem of hypothesizing about worst-case scenarios–the obvious one that we can identify is so worst-case that preparing for it is off the table. Seattle planners are having enough trouble wrapping their heads around one to three meters, let alone a potential ten-meter differential. And a Seattle Fault quake that shifted the floor of the Puget Sound substantially could result in a tsunami that arrives on the heels of the quake itself, in minutes.
Could pumps keep the tunnel from filling with water? Possibly–if they’re working. Montgomery points to the failure of engineers to imagine the effects of an earthquake and tsunami on nuclear power plants. Just because something is called an emergency back-up is no guarantee that it will work in an emergency.
“I’m not trying to argue a pointed technical critique…but how do you frame it?” asked Montgomery.
What’s the worst case you want them to actually worry about? The big worst-case scenario in my mind, thinking about the stability of the shoreline there, is what happens to even the non-fill part of the shoreline, the glacial debris, during an earthquake. There’s an awful lot of really big landslides along much of the coast of Puget Sound, that reflect probably big failures during earthquakes.
It’s one thing to reinforce a seawall, but if the entire shoreline is at risk from a major quake, you haven’t accomplished all that much. The true worst-case scenario may be to imagine writing off a good chunk of Seattle’s waterfront because there’s nothing that can be done to save it.
“Where is the last place that I would want to be, during a big Seattle Fault earthquake or a subduction zone quake if there was a reasonable-sized tsunami in Puget Sound?” Montgomery added, finishing his thought. “The last place I’d want to be is in a big hole under the waterfront.”
However compelling he is in laying all this out, short-term catastrophes are not what Montgomery spends most of his time thinking about. His last book, Dirt: The Erosion of Civilizations, is required reading for anyone who’s read Jared Diamond’s Collapse. It’s a retelling of the story of human civilization following agriculture, globe-trotting from Babylonian to Mayan empires, and inspecting the way that soil exhaustion (through nutrient extraction, salinization, and erosion) becomes a chronic stressor for any habitation of significant size.
Photo courtesy of NASA’s Earth Observatory
Erosion is “just slow enough that it’s never the crisis du jour,” he said, adding with a verbal shrug: “Dealing with slow-fuse crises is really hard for humans.” Yet in Montgomery’s view, the questions of why we fight, why we colonize, have a lot to do with the ground beneath our feet, whether we know it or not.
Soil, he explained, isn’t just brown “stuff,” it’s the interface between geology and biology. Life gains a purchase on weathered rock, breaking it down even more, and laboriously creating a fragile skin that’s hospitable to plant life. (His book details Darwin’s less-popular but no-less-groundbreaking studies of worm castings.) “It takes nature centuries to make an inch of soil,” he said, but “around the world we’ve lost about one-third of our cropland in the last 50 years, I think, to erosional degradation.” Each year, Eastern Washington watches its topsoil just blow away.
Here he and Ward are on the same page about the possibility of global famine, though they arrive there separately. Ward has been watching the sea level rise at a speed that will threaten the world’s deltas; Montgomery has been watching us starve the deltas of sediment:
There’s enough uncertainty to make you wonder how prudent it is to do things that we’re sure will continue to raise sea level, while at the same time we turn down the amount of sediment reaching the coast.
Perversely, we’ve turned up erosion on the farm fields up on the headwaters in most parts of the world by a factor of ten or twenty. We’re just parking all that sediment on flood plains and in reservoirs, and places where it’s not actually making it to the deltas to fertilize the coast.
You look at the sediment yield to coastal environments today and it’s been cut in half relative to what it was prehistorically. We may be raising sea level, and you might expect the deltas to keep up and move inland, but that presupposes that enough dirt is making it down the river systems to actually build it up.
So there we are. There’s a poetry to this image that captures not just our ambivalency regarding climate change, but the way we double-down on exhausting resources even faster at the same time as we learn our current usage is unsustainable. Perhaps not paradoxically, the prospect of shortage results in a kind of gluttony. (Not always–in Dirt, Montgomery furnishes examples of people who have farmed the same land for millennia without exhausting it, some even adding to its health.)
Jared Diamond mentions that every single class he teaches asks what the person who cut down the last tree on Easter Island was thinking. But that is to mistake the lesson. It’s what people were thinking, because it is our decisions en masse that come to define our crises (peak oil, water, dirt). On Seattle’s Easter Island, we are thinking about how quickly we can drive past Seattle. We are thinking about gridlock downtown. We are not thinking of Eastern Washington agriculture, usually. We are thinking that someday–not now–things will get bad, and we’ll deal with them then.
On May 16, after a weekend closure of the Alaskan Way Viaduct, SR 99 will narrow from three lanes to two each way, northbound and southbound, between the West Seattle Bridge and the stadium district. For about a third of the distance northbound, from the bridge to where South Lander would be, there will also be a bus-only lane.
West Seattle Blog commenters smell impending disaster, but since the lane closure is supposed to last until 2013 (“and possibly longer,” adds WSDOT), there will be plenty of time for drivers to explore alternatives. The new speed limit for the section will be 35 mph, instead of 50.
Mike Lindblom reports in the Seattle Times on Metro’s gearing-up for construction-fed ridership, though rush-hour buses have already been filling up in advance of the lane closures:
Last year, King County Metro Transit added 31 trips to its 21 Express, 56 Express and 121 routes serving southwest neighborhoods via the viaduct, and ridership is up 11 percent, said spokeswoman Linda Thielke.
Metro is studying plans for more trips on the 54 and 120 routes this fall, she said. Quicker RapidRide service to West Seattle, Aurora Avenue North and Ballard remains a year or more away.
For its part, WSDOT notes that “$125 million in alternative routes, transit service and traveler information” has been invested to help mitigate the impact of the lane closures. This construction on the southern end of the Viaduct replacement project is not supposed to be contingent upon construction of the central part, which has yet to reach the final stage in the environmental review process.
Waterfront and tideflats from Beacon Hill, Seattle, ca. 1898; PEMCO Webster & Stevens Collection, Museum of History & Industry, Seattle; All Rights Reserved; Image #1983.10.6049.4 (Photographer: Wilse, Anders Beer, 1865-1949)
Special to The SunBreak by Arne Christensen
I recently looked at Seattle Chronicle, a DVD reprint of local historian Paul Dorpat’s 1992 VHS “2-hour tour through Seatle’s first ninety years, 1851 to 1941,” to quote the front copy.
It’s him narrating a roughly chronological slideshow, for the most part, of pictures of the city as it was a long time ago–some early ’90s video footage of the same neighborhoods contrasted with photographs of them in, say, 1872, to illuminate how much things have changed. Dorpat’s narration is smooth and accomplished: he knows what he’s talking about, and he knows how to talk about it.
The video is, inevitably, a little slow despite the background music: Still, if you’re interested in the way Seattle (especially downtown) used to be, or if your job requires you to know how the city used to be, watching Dorpat’s video is a very good and pretty fast way to get acquainted with old Seattle without looking through old newspapers, city archives, or a stack of books on Seattle history.
Dorpat doesn’t mention earthquakes once, but in several pictures I noticed how watery the SoDo area was well into the 20th century. It’s already been emphasized how much of the waterfront along the Viaduct is fill that used to be tidal flats, and Seattle Chronicle clearly shows that. (Along with watching Dorpat’s video, you can read about the history of SoDo by buying the book on SoDo brought out just last year by Dan Raley, formerly of the Seattle P-I.)
The pictures of SoDo show that the area beneath Beacon Hill also used to be tideflats. It was filled in somewhat by the 1930s, but in that decade the Port of Seattle held it as vacant land, which is why it became the site of Seattle’s Hooverville village of over 500 down-and-outers who built little wood shacks right around where the two stadiums are today.
Now, think to yourself: If this had been firm, stable, readily buildable land, located very close to downtown, why had no one settled on it? Why was it an open space for hundreds of homeless people to live in their makeshift dwellings?
This is something worth noting if you live or work in SoDo: obviously, if your building rests on fill laid down over sand and muck and tidal flows, it’s not going to remain that stable in any kind of substantial earthquake.
