New breweries are popping up in Seattle with such frequency, that I still haven’t been able to visit all of them yet.  One of the newer kids on the block I still need to get to is Optimism Brewing Company on Capitol Hill.  Founded by the husband and wife team of Troy Hakala and Gay Gilmore, Optimism wants to battle the pretension and snobbish ‘beer geek’ trends that have crept their way into some parts of the craft beer World and, as such, they don’t like to categorize their beers in to styles.

As Optimism puts it: “We do not use style names to describe our beers. Part of this is because we don’t brew beers to fit a style, we brew them to taste the way we want them to taste. Moreover, we believe that beer is “the every(wo)man’s drink”, not something that should be intimidating, pretentious or expensive. For this reason, we try to make beer approachable to everyone by describing our beers in ways that everyone can understand without beer-geek jargon. Most beer-drinkers do not even know that beer styles even exist, let alone have all 120+ memorized. We believe using flavor descriptors and a photo is the best way to encourage people to try beers that they otherwise wouldn’t have tried. Wine can be pretentious and filled with esoteric jargon to maintain an elitist status. Beer doesn’t need that.”

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