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SCENE & STORY

Under the watch of brewer Gabe Fletcher for twelve years, Midnight Sun emerged as Alaska’s most innovative brewery, and built a strong reputation in the Pacific Northwest for big, interesting beers. New brewer Ben Johnson has a tough act to follow, but he’s got plenty of training and a huge standing army of dedicated fans. And with a new brew house and “the Loft”—an upstairs area with some fifteen to twenty taps, sleek metal tables and chairs and polished cement floors—MSBC remains a top draw for beer travelers (and locals) every day of the week from 11 a.m. to 8 p.m. (Note: Alaska state law forbids breweries without certain licenses from staying open past 8 p.m. or serving individuals more than thirty-six ounces, but package and growler sales help take care of that wrinkle.) Call for detailed directions or a map, as the brewery can be tricky to find.

PHILOSOPHY

“We make a lot of crazy stuff,” says Midnight Sun owner Mark Staples. “We always try to avoid what everybody else is doing; we didn’t brew an amber for like ten years because Alaskan Amber dominated this market. Every brewer that works for me started on the bottling line and washing kegs. Not one of them is some fancy brewer from some school. As a result, our beers are a little bit unique. We just brew what we feel like brewing.”

KEY BEER

There are ten year-round offerings, including the flagship Sockeye Red IPA (5.7% ABV), four seasonals, five special edition beers, and several other one-offs and collaborations to try. Try the clove-y, creamy, Belgian-style dark Monk’s Mistress and Arctic Devil, a nutty, warming, complex barley wine (typically around 13% ABV) that has cleaned up in the medals department at the Great Alaskan beer festival for years.

GLACIER BREWHOUSE

737 West 5th Ave., No. 110 • Anchorage, AK 99501 (907) 274-2739 • glacierbrewhouse.com • Established: 1997

SCENE & STORY

Glacier BrewHouse enjoys a superb location downtown and seems disconcertingly like just another high-end brewpub chain at first glance. But tastes of the beers (especially stronger styles, including eisbocks and barley wines, head brewer Kevin Burton’s passion) prove you’re in a special place. There’s an expansive menu of good food here, and a huge array of beers available, from clean interpretations of classic styles like IPA and stout, to wilder, bigger beers fermented in “the wall of wood,” Burton’s basement stash of fifty wine, bourbon, and other oak casks from around the world. The yearly highlight is Burton’s Twelve Days of Barley Wine, leading right up into the Christmas holiday, with a different pair of aged barley wines on offer in the brewpub each day.

PHILOSOPHY

Ambition is its own reward. “You’re always striving for that perfect one,” says Burton, who mentioned Thomas Harvey and J. W. Lees as exemplary barley wines. He was the first to start barrel aging in Alaska.

KEY BEER

Big Woody, an annual vintage-dated barley wine release. Using pricy English floor-malted barley and aged in various oak barrels including Jim Beam and Napa Valley wine barrels for a minimum of a year, it’s intensely malty with notes of vanilla, wood, cherry, and toffee, and usually about 11% ABV.

SNOW GOOSE RESTAURANT & SLEEPING LADY BREWING CO.

717 West 3rd Ave. • Anchorage, AK 99501 • (907) 277-7727 alaskabeers.com • Established: 1996

SCENE & STORY

The Goose, as it’s known, was one of the early brewpubs to fire up the kettles in Anchorage, and sits atop a former Elks Lodge. In addition to some impressive quilt work by founder Gary Klopfer’s wife adorning the walls, it features some casual upscale tables on the lower level with a sizeable pub area upstairs furnished with booths and a central bar area. It’s up there that a huge attached deck overlooks Cook Inlet and Mount Susitna, aka the Sleeping Lady, with still one more deck one floor up, solely for the use of drinking beer, which is exactly the thing to be doing here around sunset on a clear evening.

PHILOSOPHY

Beer first, ask questions later. “When I started out, I wasn’t planning to do a restaurant; I