FRIDAY, MARCH 24 2017: South Sound events + craft beer …
Bleak Outlook + Peaks and Pints = not so bleak
O’Malley’s + Pacific Brewing & Malting Co. = party
IT’S ELECTRIFYING
Bleak Outlook is a weekend-long Tacoma music festival, curated by Brian Skiffington, that’s now entering its fifth year. The outlook isn’t bleak if you dig is aggressive, heavy, no-nonsense rock, metal, and punk. The venues showcasing these bands are as diverse as the bands themselves, with usual suspects like The Valley and The New Frontier Lounge mixing with the all-ages Real Art and house venues like the Fifth Dimension and newcomers like the Mule and the Airport Tavern. A full list of events can be found at facebook.com/bleakoutlooktacoma.
PREFUNK: Founded in the early summer of 2013, Modern Times Beer is a San Diego-based brewery that focuses mainly on session-style IPAs, but also includes an array of hybrid styles from the brewers’ experiments with mixing and matching hops, fruits, yeasts, and barrels, including an innovative line of sours, the result of pilot batches. Unique to Modern Times are their Point Loma “Lomaland Fermatorium” and North Park “Flavordome” tasting rooms. Because Peaks and Pints couldn’t get off work for a trip south, we decided to tap Modern Times Beer’s happy, hoppy wheat beer Fortunate Islands. We get tons of grapefruit, apricot and orange hop flavors and complexity in a relatively mild 4.8% ABV.
GYPSY SOUL
There’s a bus stop right out front of O’Malley’s, perhaps Sixth Avenue’s downest and dirtiest of hip hangouts. After spending any amount of time at all at O’Malley’s, sucking down stiff pours and smoking cigarettes out back, one is likely to need a ride home that doesn’t involve driving — and for this the bus stop is very handy. It’s also handy as a transport to O’Malley’s after a couple pints of Pacific Brewing & Malting Co. craft beers to catch kick-ass music, as in tonight’s 9 p.m. show. Leify Green, a rambling man with a gypsy soul, isn’t green but rather a seasoned musician at a young age. Organic simplicity of acoustic guitar, vocal harmony and hand percussion is his hallmark sound. Also on the O’Malley’s bill is Champagne Sunday, wife and husband Jessi and Jared Fredeen’s raucous gypsy-rock roller coaster good time.
PREFUNK: We have no idea what a Post Polar Party is, but it has the word “Party” in its title, so EXCITING! Pacific Brewing & Malting Company, co-hosted by Tacoma Water, presents said party at 4:30 p.m. where a dollar from every pint will be donated back to Special Olympics Washington, and a raffle full of awesome prizes will be available, which is cool. What we do know is the Tacoma brewery brews delicious beers, including a bunch of small batches such as a Deutschland German IPA and Master Blaster Imperial Red IPA.
