The 11th Annual HopScotch Festival brings together diverse drinkers in the NW.
Over the weekend, greater Seattle plus visitors from around the region reveled in the two days of festivities that marked the 11th annual HopScotch Beer & Scotch Festival in the quirky Fremont neighborhood north of downtown Sea-town.
The fest, a signature function put on by Bold Hat Productions, is one of three annual major beverage-focused events held locally by that production company. Fremont Oktoberfest, also held in and around the spacious Fremont Studios that housed HopScotch, draws a full flannel-clad array of bearded and bespectacled beer-happy Fremonters, while Kirkland Uncorked, an outdoor wine tasting across Lake Washington in that comfortably affluent sleeper city, draws a relatively swankier suburban crowd.
HopScotch is the only one of the three that sets out to fully incorporate two quite disparate beverage communities – whiskey enthusiasts and beer lovers. It didn’t begin that way – at its inception, as Hops on Equinox at Seattle Center, Hopscotch’s predecessor was solely a craft brewfest until being reimagined, renamed and rebranded seven years ago.
Although there is unquestionably overlap, stereotypes would paint beer and Scotch drinkers differently. Your average Scotch drinker is generally perceived as a little older, a little more sophisticated, and a little more mature. And while the distinction is far from black and white, as the second day of the HopScotch festival kicked off early on Saturday afternoon there was a line drawn, even if it was blurred. The beer drinkers milled about in loose groups on the venue’s main floor, stepping in and out of line before volunteer-poured kegs and bantering over the reverberations of deejayed pop music. Meanwhile, the ticketed, seated Scotch workshop took place onstage behind a heavy red curtain. Here, the booming music was muffled and Master of Whiskey Peter Karras, fresh off a plane from New York, expounded on the virtues (and they were copious) of blended and single-malt Scotches, some older than the youngest festival-goers beyond the red curtain.
But as the afternoon progressed and the Scotch workshop finished, the curtain was pulled back to combine both groups. As space filled from some hundreds to over a thousand attendees and the effects of both varieties of alcohol set in, the beer and whiskey mixed and soon became indistinguishable. Sons and father-and-laws discussed hundred-year-old whiskies over botanical-aged ciders and cappuccino stouts, and gaggles of early twenty-something girls waited in line for vertical flights of variously aged Scotch, or comparative tastings of Northwest whiskies. And by midnight on Saturday, when the festival closed until next year, you couldn’t have drawn a line between the different camps of drinkers at all.
