Country Life B8 • lyndentribune.com • Wednesday, February 14, 2018
Farm-to-bottle
Blaine’s Atwood Ales produces beer using local ingredients, recently took home national award By Brent Lindquist brent@lyndentribune.com
BLAINE — Josh Smith doesn’t need to go far to find the ingredients he uses to brew beer. Smith owns and operates Atwood Ales with his wife, Monica, and his parents, Stephen and Leslee. They take their identity as a farm brewery and apply it to just about every facet of the brewing process. Many of the ingredients used in the beers he produces are grown just a few hundred feet away from the brewhouse. Atwood Ales recently received national recognition at the eighth annual Good Food Awards in San Francisco. The brewery earned a Good Food Award for its rhubarb sour ale, called Rhuty.
Josh Smith finishes up brew day last week in the brewhouse at Atwood Ales. The brewery’s name comes from a family middle name shared by Josh, his father and his grandfather. (Brent Lindquist/Lynden Tribune)
Monica Smith walks the Atwood Ales farmland. Many of the brewery’s ingredients are harvested on-site. (Brent Lindquist/Lynden Tribune)
The brewery “The overarching theme is Belgian and French farmhouse,” Josh said. “Inside of that, the philosophical approach is using local stuff and using what’s in season. Those are the driving factors for our choices. What’s growing, what’s ripe, what’s fresh, and also just what’s interesting.” Josh grew up on the Blaine farm on which the brewery is now located. When he headed off to the University of Idaho to study landscape architecture, his parents sold off their cattle, making room for what would later become their farm brewery.
Josh ended up back in Whatcom County around when the economy crashed in 2008 after working for a year as a landscape architect. “Things just weren’t being developed or built,” he said. He worked seasonally as a landscape architect in Bellingham while also bartending, home-brewing and working as a barista. He worked part-time as an assistant brewer and bartender at Frankenstein in Ferndale. After about a year and a half doing that, he met Jim Parker, a longtime stalwart of the Whatcom County craft brewery scene. They worked to-
gether on the Bellingham Beer Lab, a communitysupported project that never quite got off the ground. However, Josh learned a lot through his experience as a bartender and brewer, and in January 2015 Atwood Ales was incorporated, with Josh, Stephen and Leslee as the coowners. “Josh wanted to open his brewery, and he asked his dad, ‘What do you think about me turning the barn into a brewery?’” Monica said. “His dad said, ‘I’ve been waiting five years for you to ask me that.’” See Atwood on B9
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