Region & History

Anyone wanting to know how Seattle got its beer should head to Georgetown, south of downtown. Brewing has taken place on this site since 1878, and in 1884 Edward Sweeney founded the Claussen-Sweeney Brewing Company, which would become the Rainier brand. The name honors Mount Rainier, the volcano that looms over the city on clear days.

As early as 1916, the state of Washington banned alcohol, four years before nationwide Prohibition. The Rainier brand went to a company in San Francisco. After Prohibition ended, brothers Fritz and Emil Sick, originally from Alberta, bought a brewery in the Bay View neighborhood and brought the brand back; Rainier was brewed again starting in 1935. In 1954, the large neon R lit up above the Georgetown plant, long defining the city skyline.

The brewery changed hands several times after that. In 1999, Stroh sold the brand to Pabst, and the Georgetown plant closed. Seattle no longer had a major city brewery, and it was precisely this gap that the next generation of brewers filled.

It all began in 1981 with Paul Shipman and Gordon Bowker, who had previously co-founded Starbucks. Their Redhook Ale Brewery moved into a former transmission shop in Ballard, and the first beer was poured at Jake O'Shaughnessy's restaurant on August 11, 1982. The brewmaster was Charlie McElevey, who had previously worked at Rainier. In 1987, the Trolleyman pub followed in Fremont, housed in an old streetcar barn.

Today, much of this legacy belongs to a corporation. Anheuser-Busch bought Elysian, along with its brewery and four brewpubs, in 2015, and in 2020 AB InBev acquired the Craft Brew Alliance, which included Redhook. In 2025, the last Redhook taproom in Seattle closed. Pyramid, which had moved from Kalama to Seattle in 1996, shut down in 2020. Even so, the Washington Brewers Guild counted 426 breweries in the state in 2023. No beer from Seattle holds EU protected-origin status.