48 Hours Drinking and Eating in Yakima Valley

“Welcome to Yakima. The Palm Springs of Washington,” reads a black, white, and red billboard on your way into town. I’ve been to Palm Springs, and I’ll admit before traveling to the Yakima Valley, I didn’t think of the region of the country that produces seventy-five percent of all hops in the United States as a desert. But as Issaquah, WA-based Formula Brewing Head Brewer Jesse Brown reminded me, technically, the Yakima Valley is a semi-arid desert, regularly getting 300 days of sunshine yearly.

“It’s a desert, but it’s also a huge fertile valley,” explains Brown, who feels blessed to live so close to the country’s hop heaven. “I don’t take it for granted. Every year, we have fresh-hop season, and I get as excited as a little kid!”

A bucket list trip for any brewer in the industry, visiting the Yakima Valley isn’t just for those who work in beer. And it’s not all about hops, either—apparently, the region produces some of the best apples and cherries, too.

“At its heart, Yakima has a very homey feel,” Adam Stewart, the communications and travel trade manager for Yakima Valley Tourism, told us. “ Because of the agriculture, most people are farmers, which lends itself to being very chill and calm. It’s very friendly and welcoming, and people just enjoy being hospitable. Even though it’s a big city, [Yakima] has three degrees of separation.”

Local brewery owner Derrick Nordberg from Cowiche Creek Brewing Company would argue that there is actually just “one degree of separation.”

Overall, in the town of 90,000 people, we found a community that loves the outdoors and respects the land, whether that’s through cultivating hops or grapes, growing food for their own kitchens (fun fact: the Yakima Valley grows over forty different varieties of produce and is the number one exporter of Rainier cherries), or simply getting outside to enjoy the beautiful landscape of the valley from biking and hiking to fly fishing and skiing.

“Yakima is a farming community, but has so much outdoor access,” says Kelly Kulenkampff, who works at Yakima’s two-time James Beard-nominated restaurant Crafted. “I believe that everyone around here is ready to break into a hike at any time!”

For example, resident Shannon Mahre, founder of Girls with Grit, an organization encouraging women to get outside, learn a skill, and have fun in a supportive environment.

“We get hundreds of days of sun every year,” said Mahre, who had just come from a trail run before meeting us at local hangout Cot’s Peak for coffee and breakfast. “The activities include hiking, mountain biking, dirt biking, fishing, fly fishing, hunting, and trail running. It literally is never ending. It’s year round. I’m running every single day of the year. And mountain biking eleven months out of the year!”

Everyone we talked to at each place we went had similar things to say. “The people are super nice here,” said Seth Warfield, general manager at Caffe 11th Avenue, one of the top breakfast spots in the city. A transplant from Seattle, Warfield says he wasn’t used to people talking to him on the street. “It’s a small-town mentality.”

Of course, when the hop harvest happens from the end of August to the end of September, “it’s insane,” says Stewart. “Brewers from all over the world come here for hop selection.”

But even for the other eleven months of the year, Yakima Valley is a place you should consider visiting.

Where else can you drink award-winning beer with the freshest fresh hops around, eat tacos in a hop field, go fly fishing in a Blue Ribbon river, and do karaoke in a backroom bar (if you can find it)? Here’s everything we did, ate, and drank during our forty-eight hours in the Yakima Valley.

Friday: YOLO in Yakima

Let’s go hard on our first night in Yakima! Just kidding, we’re actually taking it pretty easy, but we’re doing a tour of some of downtown’s greatest hits, so if you want, you can totally YOLO in Yakima tonight.

Hotel Check-In: Hotel Maison Yakima Tapestry Collection by Hilton

321 E Yakima Ave, Yakima, WA 98901 | (509) 571-1900

Photography courtesy of Jim van Grundy

4:00 PM Check-in très bien – A historic hotel in the heart of Yakima, Hotel Maison dates back to 1911. The hotel is the perfect landing spot if you’re staying in Yakima, because you’re near so much—four blocks from The Capitol Theater, wine-tasting rooms, restaurants, and perhaps most importantly, beer spots like Single Hill, Schab’s Bier Den, and Brews & Cue’s.

Pro Tip: Don’t miss the complimentary European-style breakfast.

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Dinner: Crafted

22 N 1st St, Yakima, WA 98901 | (509) 426-2220

Photography courtesy of Stephanie Forrer

5:30 PM Fresh, local, shareable – If you can only visit one restaurant in Yakima during your entire trip, make sure it’s Crafted. Run by two-time James Beard-nominated chef Dan Koommoo and his wife Mollie, Crafted lives by simple principles: fresh, shareable, local.

On a board to the right of the bar, you’ll find the names of local partners and purveyors from whom they source meat and produce.

Bursting with the bounty of Washington State—all from within a one-hundred-mile radius of the restaurant—Crafted’s dishes include things like spiced butternut squash with carrot emulsion, pomegranate, and toasted walnuts, smoked oyster mushrooms with cornbread and crème fraîche, and highly unique sturgeon poké with sturgeon from the Yakama Nation lightly fried and coated in spicy mayo, unagi, cucumber, grilled green onion, and furikake.

Photography courtesy of Magic Muncie | Hop Culture

Whatever you do, you can’t skip dessert. S’mores are something of a staple here, but these aren’t the ones you had as a kid. Toasted graham cracker ice cream with chocolate, caramel, and toasted homemade marshmallows comes hidden inside a clear cloche with smoke. A little campy without the fire, perhaps? But not at all corny—that’s saved for the Miso Corny with sour cream mousse, corn flakes, miso corn cake, corn ice cream, and caramelized cashews that was a textural adventure I’d not had in my dessert for a while.

“This place is usually packed,” says Stewart, admitting that Crafted is at the top of his list when he goes out for a great meal. “People come here because it’s very unique to Yakima.”

When we first walked in, the place bubbled over with conversation and conviviality. A buzz drifted through the air that made you want to sit and relax in the hospitality.

Kulenkampff immediately made us feel right at home. She started working at Crafted after she kept bringing people there to eat.

“I feel proud of what we’re serving, and I know the food tastes great,” she told us. “We take care of you, which suits Yakima because the people here take care of one another.”

After a couple of hours of conversation and sensational small plates, we almost shut the place down. When you look up and realize that all the packed tables have slowly emptied without you noticing, you know you had a great time.

From the people to the plates, Crafted was one of the highlights of our trip.

Pro Tip: Don’t sleep on the cocktails or NA drinks like Chica Morada Punch that expertly balanced stewed fruits with warming spices—all without alcohol. For one meal, I didn’t even miss the booze!

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After Dinner Drinks: Schab’s Bier Den

22 N 2nd St Suite 100, Yakima, WA 98901 | (509) 902-8808

Photography courtesy of Schab’s Bier Den

7:00 PM All roads lead here – Walk a block east, and you’ll bump into Schab’s Bier Den. Most folks we talked to while in Yakima recommended stopping here at least once. I have to say, we’ve been on quite a few beer trips at this point, and no matter what city, town, or village we’re in around the world, every place…always has that place.

You know what we mean, right? It’s the one spot that you keep going back to every night. When we visited Bellevue, it was Tapster. When we went to Bruges in Belgium, it was de Garre. In Yakima, it was Schab’s Bier Den.

This is the best craft beer bar in Yakima. Period.

Owned by Zack and Trena Schab, this local watering hole carries the most carefully curated compendium of craft beers around the Yakima Valley.

On our visit, this meant an almost full tap takeover from Varietal, the phenomenal brewery everyone told us about. Still, we didn’t have time to visit because the taproom was a forty-minute drive away.

Imagine our luck that we could just pop over to Schab’s Bier Den. Walking in, we were greeted by a huge German shepherd named Bella patrolling the premises.

Highlights included Varietal’s Fresh Hop Tacos and Harvest Brain hazy IPA, which we were told were two of the most popular beers on the menu.

Although sleek and elegant, Schab’s Bier Den felt very calm. Long picnic tables with tree bark benches encourage folks to sit together. The vibe seems to be community, with craft beer as the connecting thread.

As Zack and Trena proudly say on their site, “It gives us great pleasure to contribute to the community with the best craft beer in town and a place to build relationships.”

We’d say mission accomplished! Feel free to return to Schab’s Bier Den every night you’re in town.

Or you could also walk a block further to Single Hill Brewing.

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First Brewery: Single Hill Brewing

102 N Naches Ave, Yakima, WA 98901 | (509) 367-6756

Photography courtesy of Single Hill Brewing

8:30 PM Wait, actually, all roads lead up this hill – Ask any brewer in town for the hop harvest where they end up at the end of the night, and nine times out of ten, they’ll say Single Hill.

“This time of the year is pretty special because it is the crossroads of the hop industry,” Single Hill Co-Founder, Head Brewer, and GM Zach Turner told me as I sipped on the brewery’s Fresh Hop Lateral A. “We really like to use this place as a platform for people to get together this time of year.”

I first discovered Single Hill when the brewery’s director of sales and marketing, Andrew Paytel, asked if he could send us beer. A couple of packages later, and with every beer crushing it, I knew I’d found a new gem.

For instance, Cold Throw, which made our list of the “The 20 Best Beers to Drink in Spring 2022,” or Groundswell, which just picked up a silver in the number-one most-entered category at the Great American Beer Festival Awards—“Juicy or Hazy India Pale Ale.”

Overall, Single Hill made a name for itself with IPAs, but its reputation with lagers has only grown. Enough to the point where Turner says they’re rotating six styles with a new release every month—a West Coast, a hazy, another West Coast, and then a lager.

For instance, the Czech-Style Dark Lager, one of our favorite beers from the entire trip.

Turner says one of his friends works for Anheuser Busch and has a farm in Northern Idaho where he brought back fresh dried Saaz. “We pelletized those and used them,” he says. “So it doesn’t have wet hops, but it’s all 2024 Idaho-grown Saaz.”

Super smooth and silky, this version of a Czech-style dark lager includes lovely layers of German Chocolate Cake with just a whisper of floralness to keep everything in…Czech?

Before visiting Yakima, Single Hill was one of the must-stops on my list, so imagine my delight when I learned the taproom was literally a block away from Hotel Maison.

Photography courtesy of Magic Muncie | Hop Culture

And to visit during the hop harvest? Well, I pinched myself twice.

Single Hill does hop harvest just a little differently. “Every hop that goes into a fresh hop here is a fresh hop from this harvest,” explains Turner, who has even gone so far as to cobble together his own pelletizer, which lives under a tarp just outside the brewhouse. “Every wet-hop beer involves wet hop, which is kind of the same for everybody, right? But every other hop that goes into the [fresh-hop] beers, we gather up at the farms and then pelletized in the back.”

Photography courtesy of Magic Muncie | Hop Culture

It’s a pretty unique process that draws the attention of visiting brewers and industry folk alike.

“It’s like going back to homebrewing where you’re in a kitchen, around your garage, and drinking a beer with friends,” laughs Turner.

Just the day before, Turner mentioned they’d run 300 pounds through the pelletizer with four or five brewer friends standing around drinking beers and watching them work.

Photography courtesy of Single Hill Brewing

To fully celebrate the fresh-hop season, Single Hill has also, for the last five years, hosted what it calls the “Fresh Hop Rodeo,” a collaboration project inviting nine different breweries to brew three different beers.

“Each round, the brewers come in and make one batch of wet-hops beer, where we go to the farms, pick all the hops, develop the recipe together, and then beers end up getting fermented in three separate, identical tanks,” says Turner. “It’s a very real-time collaboration.”

The beers go against each other in a March Madness-type bracket, with drinkers in the taproom voting on their favorite beer.

The winner gets a “big ol’ rodeo belt buckle,” chuckles Turner.

For Turner, it’s all about establishing and fostering connections.

Case in point: Right before we left, he showed me a text he’d just gotten from Michael Ferguson, a hop breeder at John I. Haas. Ferguson told Turner he had some extra HBC 1019, an experimental hop variety, and asked if Turner could pop it into an upcoming beer.

“That’s more 1019 than anyone has,” Turner laughed. “It’s pretty rare, so yeah, we want some!”

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Saturday: Hops – Hop On, Hop Off

From sitting in a hop field drinking beer to letting the Little Hopper take you around to all of Yakima’s best breweries, we’re getting our drink on today. Because, repeat after me…YOLO in Yakima.

Breakfast: Caffé 11th Avenue

1003 W Yakima Ave, Yakima, WA 98902 | (509) 426-2808

Photography courtesy of Debbie Holm | Caffé 11th Avenue

9:00 AM The European diner Yakima didn’t know it was missing – A family-run joint, Caffé 11th Avenue, filled a void in Yakima, according to founder Debbie Holm, who sat down with us for a little bit during breakfast.

Holm, dressed in an eggplant-colored button-up with accented glasses to match, reminded us a little of Ms. Frizzle from The Magic School Bus. For the next hour, her eyes lit up as she told us her story.

A University of Puget Sound graduate, Holm thought she’d stay in Seattle but admitted that, after graduating, she had her car packed in three months, heading back to Yakima. “The weather killed me,” she laughs. “The rain, the clouds, I couldn’t take it. I had to be honest with myself.”

Today, in sunny Yakima, Holm runs what has become a cherished institution in downtown Yakima. A former coffeehouse, Caffé 11th Avenue grew over time.

“People would come in for coffee and ask if we had a muffin or dessert,” explains Holm, who obliged. Muffins and dessert soon turned into people asking for more substantial plates. If you give a mouse a cookie, right?

“People loved to come here because of the atmosphere, but I could feel there was a need for more than just coffee,” says Holm, who installed a full kitchen during the global pandemic. “We have some massive firepower back there!”

Now, Caffé 11th Avenue is where the community congregates to chow down. All you need to do is look around to see what we mean.

At one table, a couple ordered the famous stuffed French toast. At another, an older gentleman in pajama pants sat sipping coffee with a younger man with a can of Single Hill beer. At one point, an elderly couple walked in and sat down at what could have been their regular table.

“We want people to be comfortable here,” says Holm, who describes the menu as comfort food with a European flair courtesy of Holm’s travels across the pond.

Photography courtesy of Debbie Holm | Caffé 11th Avenue

For instance, according to Holm, the Chicken Mushroom Crêpes with Brandy Cream Mushroom Sauce is one of the biggest sellers. Or the European Breakfast, which I ordered and which came on a rectangular plate heaped with different cheeses, fruit, sliced meats, a croissant, and a full waffle cut into triangles. 😱

Muncie had the biscuits and gravy, which he described as “what you need before a long day of work.” This is probably a smart play if you’re gearing up for a long day of drinking.

If you want something sweeter, General Manager Seth Warfield says they make “the best pancakes I’ve ever had.”

Also, if you go to Caffé 11th Avenue for brunch and don’t order the Monstrous Mary, you’re doing something wrong.

The “normal” bloody mary ends in the glass where a cornucopia of snacks sprouts up and over the lip; it’s like a runaway garden gone awry in the best way. When I ask Holm to describe everything in there, she pauses several times, sometimes carrying on our conversation before interjecting with another item she just remembered. Expect things like a soft pretzel, pretzel stick, sausage, salami, cheddar cheese, tomatoes, hard-boiled egg, pickle, bacon, orange slices, pickled asparagus, and more.

“This put us on the map,” says Holm. “I can’t tell you how many times we’ve been written up for this drink.”

Not one to rest on her laurels, Holm says she’s always thinking about how they can elevate and expand the menu. Warfield says the goal now is to let people know, “We’re not just a coffee shop. We’re doing really well, and now the goal is to grow.”

As we sipped the dregs of our coffee and mopped up the last bits of gravy on our plates, we noticed that every table had filled up. We’d say the word is out!

Pro Tip: Go early! We walked in at 8 a.m., and not a half hour later, almost all the tables were full. “You were smart to come early!” Holm told us, noting on the weekends, she estimates they do over 500 covers, so come even earlier because there’s often a line out the door and a bit of a wait.

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Perk Up and Pack Up

Le Mercantile: 218 W Yakima Ave, Yakima, WA 98902 | (509) 367-6099

10:30 AM Take a stroll – Explore downtown Yakima. You could probably spend a whole afternoon here. In the morning, we recommend checking out Le Mercantile for coffee and curiosities. In this Latine-owned boutique, you’ll find what they call “weird stuff and cool junk,” aka vintage goods, plants, and crazy coffee drinks.

If you’re walking around downtown later in the day, Yakima Valley Tourism has multiple suggestions for you:

👉Tieton Ciderworks – Highly recommended!
👉The Public House of Yakima – East or West
👉The Kiln – Great pizza.
👉Wandering Hop
👉The Tap – Self-pour tap house.
👉Kana Winery – Yakima Valley produces great wine, too.

Lunch: Bale Breaker Brewing Company

1801 Birchfield Rd, Yakima, WA 98901 | (509) 424-4000

Photography courtesy of Bale Breaker Brewing Company

1:00 PM Breaking bales and tacos – There’s nothing quite like drinking a beer made with hops that spent literally just four minutes from picking to pint (well, from the picking machine to the brewery, at least. Getting to the glass takes a little longer). Bale Breaker is like a carefully knitted fabric made of wire that hangs across poles in a hop yard, connecting growers, farmers, brewers, and friends.

Unlike anywhere else in the country, those wires cross at Bale Breaker, right at the heart of everything.

Because at this family-run brewery, wife-and-husband team Meghann Quinn and Kevin Quinn and Meghann’s brother (also) Kevin Quinn (known as “Smitty”) aren’t just making beer, they’re growing it, too. Well, that is one of the beer’s main ingredients.

“To our knowledge, we’re the only [brewery] on a commercial hop farm, and we’re the only one that grows all their own hops,” Kevin told me as he walked us around the 16,000-sq-ft facility in Yakima, WA. “In our year-round beers, one hundred percent of the hops in there we grow.”

At Bale Breaker, you go where the hops are born (could that be the name of a new children’s book?), and it is truly magical.

Here, we wouldn’t fault you for shedding a tear as you experience a sense of awe and honor.

And we know we’re not the only ones because, if we had to imagine (and pardon our French), this brewery and farm must be the wet-hop dream of brewers everywhere.

For the full story, check out our entire profile here.

At Bale Breaker, phrases like “farm to fridge” and “ground to glass” get tossed around like hops into a kettle.

Photography courtesy of Bale Breaker Brewing Company

These are the freshest fresh-hop beers you will ever drink (assuming you visit sometime between late August and September).

Accordingly, we grabbed a flight of the brewery’s fresh-hop beers, ordered tacos from the Buen Taco food truck, and parked ourselves at a picnic table in the gorgeous garden. Surrounded by Mosaic hops strung up on trellises, we plowed through brilliant beers from a collab with Russian River to perhaps our favorite beer of the entire trip, a beer called Long Distance Krush that Muncie described as “just straight strawberries and super crushable.”

If you’re not visiting during fresh-hop season, that’s totally cool. We recommend giving the brewery’s flagship Topcutter IPA or Field 41 pale ale a try. When Bale Breaker originally opened in 2013, these were the only two beers they had on tap, and they’re still popular today for good reasons.

Regardless of what you order, the core of each Bale Breaker beer is simple: “We want very little malt profile in our beers because we want the hops to be the showcase,” explains Kevin.

Because at Bale Breaker, a name that nods to the family’s roots, hops are everything.

“For years, hops had been leaving the farm, and other breweries had been breaking bales and using them,” says Kevin, who points out the name also refers to an actual piece of equipment used in processing hops. “Now we’re going to do that.”

“It’s almost like breaking bread,” Muncie interjects. Metaphorically, when you sit down to drink a few beers at Bale Breaker, that is pretty much what you’re doing.

Doesn’t get much better than that.

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Ride the Little Hopper

Pick-up spots vary

Photography courtesy of Little Hopper

2:30 PM All aboard the beer bus! – There is no better way to spend an afternoon in Yakima than with Wendy King of the Little Hopper. “You know, I love beer,” King told me. “I’ve always loved beer.”

In 2019, King worked as the director of development at the Sozo Sports Complex in town and had recently approached John I. Haas to sponsor a couple of the youth soccer fields that they nicknamed Little Hopper.

She had an idea. “I just always wanted to start my own thing,” she said. “I wasn’t going to start a brewery, but I wanted to be a part of that energy.”

After a research period, including a trip down to Atlanta to check out the Atlanta Beer Bus, King returned ready to take the plunge.

So she bought her first bus, working with Haas, Yakima Chief Hops, and CLS Farms to host many of the brewers who came into town, taking them through the hop fields and around town.

Six months later, she bought her second bus to take folks brewery hopping. And despite challenges through the global pandemic, she eventually got a third, reserving it for wine tours.

Today, the Little Hopper is the hottest ticket in town, often booked out for weddings, anniversaries, birthdays, and even Christmas light tours.

Photography courtesy of Little Hopper

“People look at the Little Hopper as a place to celebrate,” says King.

The places where you stop can differ. When we visited, we went to Single Hill, Valley Brewing, and Cowiche Creek Brewing. But you could easily also end up at 5th Line Brewing, Bale Breaker, Bron Yr Aur Brewing, Outskirts, Varietal, or the Wandering Hop.

No matter where you go, one thing is for sure: You will get unparalleled hospitality.

King will take you around Washington’s rich hop region in her fully stocked bus. Need a pretzel snack in between brewery stops? She’s got you covered. Grab some beers for the road at the last stop? There’s a cooler on board to store them. Looking to hydrate before the next taproom? Again, King has you covered.

More than that, King’s connections speak for themselves. In nearly every brewery we visited, King ran into people who knew and loved her, and she had personal relationships with all of the brewery owners, giving us unprecedented access.

After our final stop of the day at Cowiche Creek (see more below), King started driving us back in the bus. A truck passed us and honked its horn. “Oh, that’s just Chris from Varietal,” King told us.

We jokingly started calling King the “unofficial mayor of Yakima,” and wouldn’t you want to spend the entire day with the Queen of Quaffing?

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Dinner: Cowiche Creek Brewing Company

514 Thompson Road BLDG #2, Cowiche, WA 98923 | (509) 678-0324

Photography courtesy of Magic Muncie | Hop Culture

6:00 PM Burger, brews, and hoppy ice cream? – While we loved all the breweries we went to on the Little Hopper, Cowiche Creek stood out.

Cowiche Creek Co-Founder Derrick Nordberg always thought he’d go into farming—just like his family. But in high school, after working 120-130 hours a week, “I got burned out,” he told us. “You do the math; it was unreal.”

He pivoted, going to college and getting a management information systems degree, eventually landing a job at a high-tech company in Bellevue. But he still came back to work on the farm during the summers.

Eventually, tired of the weather, traffic, and housing costs near Seattle, Nordberg and his wife bought a farm in foreclosure and moved back to Yakima.

He actually credits his wife for getting him into craft beer. “On our first date, she ordered an IPA,” he shares. “I couldn’t get a Coors Light, so I ordered a hefeweizen!”

Homebrewing turned into an idea to build a brewhouse on the farm, a project Nordberg took on full tilt after the hospital where he worked was bought out and he lost his job.

“People say they have a shoestring budget,” he said. “There weren’t even shoes in this budget!”

The Nordbergs built everything by hand. “The only thing we didn’t do was pour the concrete and mount these doors because it voided the warranty,” he laughs. “We built the chairs, we built the tables … we built everything else here.”

Even today, he calls his team the “Band of Misfit Pirates.” If something needs fixing, Nordberg has been known to solve the problem even if it’s 2 a.m.

But it fits for one of the only one-hundred percent independently owned husband-and-wife-owned breweries in Yakima.

At Cowiche Creek, you feel like family.

“Life is short, so it’s much more important for us to be proud of what we do, put on the plate, and in the glass than it is to get a million dollars,” Nordberg says proudly. “It’s more important for me not to make a million dollars but to have this team that everyone will leave tonight with smiles on their face, and they’ll be excited to come to work tomorrow.”

And that extends to anyone who comes into Cowiche Creek.

Photography courtesy of Magic Muncie | Hop Culture

When our group of four walked in for dinner and told Nordberg that three of us were vegetarians, he disappeared for a second.

Less than ten minutes later, he came back out with a full off-the-cuff board full of pickled asparagus, beets, shishito peppers they had just picked from the garden, candied walnuts, cheese curds with a pepper relish, sliced apples, crackers, and cheese.

“My father-in-law grew those beets and the asparagus,” Nordberg gushes. “My childhood neighbor grew the Cosmic Crisp apples on this, too.”

Photography courtesy of Cowiche Creek Brewing Company

Never mind, they had an actual veggie burger on the menu, which slammed, too. (And if you’re a carnivore, the actual burgers looked super tasty.)

But that’s just the vibe and ethic at Cowiche Creek.

“We’re farmers that put a lot of work into what we do and are as authentic as possible,” said Nordberg.

Hence, the brewery’s flagship beer, Farmer Way IPA, has become a bit of a tagline.

“We say we do things the redneck way,” laughs Nordberg. “The farmer way.”

Such as building a two-head keg washer by hand for $8k instead of the $20k it would have cost to buy.

He adds, “You have to find a way.”

Regardless, Norberg says he’s grateful. “Honestly, I thought when I wrote that business plan back in 2012, there would be dollar signs at the bottom,” he shares. “When we opened, there were no dollars at the bottom, but you know what? I’m okay with that because I’m not stuck in a basement punching keyboards. We’re here serving people, putting smiles on people’s faces, and building our community.”

Photography courtesy of Cowiche Creek Brewing Company

As the sun set over the rolling hills right in Cowiche Creek’s packed backyard beer garden, we’d say Nordberg is living his best life.

Pro tip: Don’t pass up the hop ice cream. Is it different? Yes. Is it worth trying? Totally, especially since, in classic Cowiche Creek fashion, Nordberg worked very hard to refine the recipe.

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Nightcap: Brews & Cue’s

104 S 2nd St, Yakima, WA 98901 | (509) 453-9713

8:00 PM Boards & beers – We’d been on a roll all day, so why stop now? We heard the cocktails here are pretty strong, but to be honest, by this point of the trip, we just wanted to drink Rainier (my first ever!). Which pairs pretty perfectly with a good pool game. Sign your name up on the chalkboard on the wall and wait your turn. You’ll need a few quarters to play, but chances are the locals congregating around the table who actually know how to handle a pool stick will lend you a few if needed. Drink a beer. Drink a cocktail. Avoid hitting the eight ball. Have a good time.

Karaoke: Lotus Room

You gotta find it. Hint: it’s at the back of the Golden Wheel Restaurant.

?? PM Late-night singers and later-night beers – IYKYK. Yakima’s not-so-secret secret. If you like karaoke, head to the Lotus Room, which is tucked into a back alley (that you can actually see right from the street as long as you’re walking down the right one). Part of the adventure is finding this place, though, so I’ll leave the discovery up to you.

The dive bar in the back of the Golden Wheel Restaurant is a great place to squirrel away into a booth and watch people perform. Or, if you’re up for it, grab the mic yourself.

Sunday: Hiking, History, and More Hops

We haven’t even scratched the surface of Yakima Valley’s outdoor activities. You can fly fish, horseback ride, hike, ski, mountain bike, rock climb, trail run, stand-up paddle board, and more. We didn’t have a ton of time to explore all of the great outdoors, but we did get a little taste.

And the best part? After a long day of sweating, a cold beer sounded pretty nice.

Breakfast: Cot’s Peak Coffee

22 E Second St, Naches, WA 98937 | (509) 955-3676

9:00 AM Peak coffee before hitting the peak – More than a coffee shop, Cot’s Peak is where the locals go to fuel up for the day. Grab a cup of locally roasted coffee and a homemade bagel sandwich (we loved the Clemans with ham, egg, swiss cheese, and honey Sriracha cream cheese) for the perfect start.

There are also donuts. 🫠

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Hiking, Mountain Biking, Horseback Riding, Fly Fishing…You Choose

https://www.girlswithgrit.fit/

Photography courtesy of Mahre Media

10:30 AM Head outdoors – If you have the time, we highly recommend booking a class with Girls with Grit Founder Shannon Mahre, who, even after only spending a couple of hours with her, inspired us to get outside more.

Mahre, dressed in a Stio flannel, blue hiking pants, a black cap, and feather earrings she makes herself, seems to be peak Yakima.

An evangelist for empowering women in sports, Mahre’s story runs deep.

A former professional soccer player in Europe, Mahre told us that when she stopped playing, “I didn’t know how to live.” After struggling with anorexia and bulimia while minoring in ballet in New York, she needed to find a way to get healthy again. “I started focusing on wellness,” she tells us. “My dad said something I’ll never forget. You’re always going to be an athlete. Just because soccer is over doesn’t mean it’s done.”

So, the nineteen-year-old started running, mountain biking, and skiing. A week before graduating college, Mahre was diagnosed with cervical cancer. “I know in my soul that it probably had something to do with that year I was really unhealthy,” she says. After a successful surgery, Mahre says her life changed. “Whatever I do in life, I want to help people,” she says. “I want to focus on wellness and helping people achieve their goals.”

After burning out at Microsoft, Mahre spent a year building houses with her dad. In her free time, the writer and adventure photographer started a media company and began coaching a girls’ middle school soccer team.

“Coaching gave me something that nothing else did,” says Mahre. “When I get home from teaching, I have this energy, joy, and inspiration.”

Today, the multi-adventure sports athlete, who has been known to run a sixty-mile ultra marathon, teaches mostly women how to do everything from fly fishing to trap shooting. In the winter, she focuses on skiing.

Photography courtesy of Magic Muncie | Hop Culture

While we didn’t have time to take one of her classes, Mahre did take us on a short hike on the Tieton River Nature Trail. With an elevation gain of only 300 feet, the trail is perfect for beginners. In the fall, Mahre tells us that the trees explode in color. In fact, it’s how her husband got her to move to Yakima.

“Our first date was a mountain bike ride on this trail at the peak of color,” she said. “I brought my camera with me. I had to stop every five minutes!”

The river that runs next to the trail, Mahre says, is great for paddleboarding in the summer but dries out in the fall, when she and her family can ride dirt bikes in the riverbed.

That’s what Mahre means when she tells us Yakima has endless opportunities for outdoor adventures. After we said goodbye to Mahre in the dirt parking lot after our jaunt, she rushed off to teach a women’s class how to fly fish.

Next time we’re in Yakima, we’re signing up.

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Visit The American Hop Museum

22 S B St, Toppenish, WA 98948 | (509) 865-4677

Photography courtesy of Magic Muncie | Hop Culture

12:30 PM Head indoors – Located in the city of Toppenish, which has seventy painted outdoor and historic murals, the American Hop Museum is the only one of its kind in the entire country. With unique exhibitions and displays, the American Hop Museum walks you through the history of growing hops in one of the most prolific regions in the States.

Pro Tip: Don’t forget to stop by the gift store, where you can find some pretty unique items to pick up for the folks back home…or yourself.

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Lunch: JJ’s Birrieria and Antojitos

Various Locations

2:00 PM When I dip, you dip – With a robust Hispanic population, the Yakima Valley has become known for its incredible Hispanic food. With a few locations throughout the valley, JJ’s Birrieria specializes in birria, a slow-cooked Mexican stew typically made with goat and served with a cup of consommé. But you can also find carne asada and adobada here.

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5th Line Brewing

1015 E Lincoln Ave Ste 106, Yakima, WA 98901 | (509) 367-6300

Photography courtesy of Magic Muncie

3:30 PM Go for the goal – Amazingly, we haven’t even had a beer yet today. Let’s start drinking at 5th Line Brewing. You’ll first notice the huge wall of hockey jerseys when you walk into the sports-themed brewery. Each tells a story.

Like the number 8 jersey encased in glass that is a tribute to 5th Line Brewing Co-Founder Chris Sutherland’s good friend Randy Smith, who passed away a few years ago. “We called him Hammer,” says Sutherland. “Great guy. Salt of the Earth. You couldn’t have asked for a better fellow.”

Or the Breakers, an old WHL team from the ‘70s and early ‘80s.

While forty percent of the jerseys come from Sutherland and his co-founders’ collections, he says sixty percent are actually donated by the community, like a UNH jersey from a local family whose son plays for the Wildcats’ college hockey team.

And the Minnesota Wild jersey? A guy from the State of Hockey came in over Labor Day and sent Sutherland a little package after visiting.

“The guy wrote me a nice little letter and said, ‘I’m really impressed with your beer,’” tells Sutherland, “‘but I couldn’t help but notice you didn’t have any representation for the State of Hockey!’”

There are local youth jerseys and old sweaters from people’s former hockey teams.

Like a patchwork quilt, the jerseys hanging on the wall at 5th Line mean something.

An Edmonton, Canada, native, Sutherland, who learned to skate at age three or four and has played hockey all his life, tells us, “My vision for the brewery was to be a rink away from home,” he says as we work our way through a flight. “I’d be an absolute basketcase if I didn’t still play hockey.”

Sutherland moved to Yakima in 2005, meeting his co-founder Nate Coppock around five years later at a hockey buddy’s wedding. Coppock had made a couple of beers for the occasion, and Sutherland wanted to learn how to homebrew.

“We had the same dream that every other knucklehead home brewer does. Wouldn’t it be wonderful to do this professionally?” he tells us. “One night, one of the brewers from Bale Breaker, who also plays hockey with us and is another Canadian, commented in the locker room that our homebrew might be the best he’s ever had.”

A bit of an inside joke, 5th Line refers to a phantom shift. “Even if you didn’t get a shift that night, at least you can go get a beer with the boys,” explains Sutherland. Folks around town often equate the Fifth Line with the 12th Man, the Seattle Seahawks’ term for the collective fans whose support acts like an additional team member.

That mentality runs through the entire brewery, where the mission is simply to “have a good beer,” says Sutherland. We live in the hop capital of the nation, but that doesn’t mean that every beer has to be an IPA or a pale.”

Photography courtesy of 5th Line Brewing Co.

Accordingly, of the sixteen taps at 5th Line, we enjoyed the 77 coffee oatmeal milk stout the most.

Named after Paul Coffey, a former professional Canadian hockey player who wore number 77, the oatmeal milk stout features…wait for it, coffee!

Originally one of Sutherland’s homebrew recipes he wrote eleven years ago, 77 doesn’t even crack 5% ABV, which for an oatmeal coffee milk stout keeps what could be thick and syrupy light and creamy.

“That was my gateway beer. … It’s always my go-to,” says 5th Line Co-Founder Jessa Sutherland, who pointed out one of her other favorites—the fresh-hop lager.

Unexpected Offersheet, a fresh-hop lager with forty pounds of wet cones in the dry hop of a lesser-known hop called Belma, impressed us, too.

Although Sutherland says that 5th Line doesn’t technically have a flagship, you’ll always find the Ten Ply cream ale on tap.

“I wouldn’t call it a flagship beer. It just happens to be our best-selling beer,” says Sutherland. “It’s light, nondescript, and anybody can drink that beer.”

Just like anyone can walk into 5th Line and become a part of their little rink, sink back a few beers, and enjoy it.

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Dinner: The Outskirts Brewing Co.

707 Test Drive Lane, Selah, WA 98942 | (509) 698-2275

Photography courtesy of Magic Muncie | Hop Culture

5:30 PM First-class beer for the working class hero – Located in Selah, WA, on the ”outskirts” of Yakima, Outskirts Brewing lives by the motto “First class for the working class.”

“It’s right there in the title,” says Outskirts Head Brewer JT Wattenberg. “Yakima was built on farming and agriculture. In the last fifteen years, beer has exploded, so we want to preserve the history as much as possible.”

Rustic yet refined Outskirts Brewing is just a good time. Want to sit down in their full restaurant for some grub in a century-old barn? Great. Outskirts Brewer and Sales Rep Brian Paxton recommends the bison burger. Just want to crush a flight while you watch the Seattle Mariners games? Amazing because you can get the brewery’s American IPA My Oh My for just $5 a pint.

“Replays don’t count,” laughs Paxton. “But when the [games are live], you can drink my IPAs for five dollars a pint until your lips are blue.”

Interested in catching a show on the patio outside? You’re in luck.

Outskirts is just a fun place to hang out.

Which we did a lot of with Paxton and Wattenberg in the tiny production area you can see from the taproom.

Wattenberg describes Outskirts’ style as a lot of European (courtesy of his time learning how to brew in England), “but at the same time, we’re in the land of the hop, so IPAs are where it’s going to be,” Wattenberg says with what we’ve come to learn is a trademark goofy grin.

Photography courtesy of Magic Muncie | Hop Culture

Overall, though, clean beer is Wattenberg’s big thing.

“I may be biased, but we do beer right because of our procedures—that’s the truth,” says Paxton, emphasizing that the duo does everything by hand. “It’s artisan-style brewing. We don’t have augers. We hand mill.”

Wattenberg jumps in, “It’s a labor of love.”

The two bounce off each other like Calvin and Hobbes. “It’s just JT and me,” shares Paxton, who cooked and ran kitchens for fifteen years and traveled as a drummer before getting into beer. “It’s very small, hands-on.”

At the end of the day, Wattenberg and Paxton just want crushable beers you can enjoy a few of while watching the Mariners game or chilling in their outdoor space.

Like Canyon Crusher, a flagship American pale ale with Citra, Simcoe, and Idaho 7.

Or Brush Popper Light, a 4.7% ABV American light pilsner.

“We genuinely had dinner one night and asked each other what beer do you like? What’s the first thing you order when you go somewhere?” says Paxton. “We’re both like, one, two, three…pilsner!”

And although the brewery has only been open for a year, Wattenberg and Paxton are hitting their stride. This year, USA Today 10Best named them the fourth-best new brewery in the country.

But it’s not the medals that excite Wattenberg the most.

“I just love that people are drinking our beer. I love that we can share this,” he gushes. “It’s a thing that you can be anywhere in the world. You can share a beer with people. You can make friends, right? When you meet people, we’re perfect friends at this point.”

Which we kind of felt like when we left Paxton and Wattenberg, who invited us to stay in his house, located in the parking lot mere steps from the brewery, the next time we were in town.

“Here’s to nerds who like beer,” Paxton says as we got in a final cheers.

Couldn’t agree more.

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Late Night: Purrr

306 E Yakima Ave, Yakima, WA 98901 | (509) 367-6680

7:30 PM Cozy cocktails – If you have one more drink in you, we recommend Purrr for a crrrafty cocktail. Like the ultra-secret Charlotte’s Web, for which the staff won’t divulge the recipe but will assure you is sweet at the start, tart at the end, purple throughout, and dangerously delicious. Or the Cantarito, a drink you commonly find in bars and cafes in Jalisco, Mexico. With freshly squeezed orange, grapefruit, and lime juice, slightly salty tequila, and sparkling grapefruit soda, the Cantarito is thirst-quenchingly refreshing. And by this time of the weekend, you should probably start hydrating, right?

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