Hefeweisen

One of my strong childhood memories is of driving in from Hughes Bay with grandpa for a glass of milk and a powdered sugar donut at the Lakeside Mercantile.  Then while he finished the paper and his cup of coffee at the counter, I would wander the aisles looking at cans of food or fishing tackle or, more often than not, reading comic books from a revolving rack by the front windows.

Nearly 35 years later the Mercantile is long gone. Now the building houses a real estate office and a maze of other offices for who knows what.

So today, instead of a trip into Lakeside for a donut, I went in with my father to see the upscale brewery and pub several hundred yards down the strip of Highway 93 that defines the town.  The Tamarack Brewing Company has been serving up beers brewed on site and pub food for several years now, but I had not managed to make it in yet.  Maybe I was still pouting about the Mercantile closing twenty-five years earlier and cutting off yet another link to my past.

The other reason for my delay is that I’m also just learning to bother with beer.  It took a passionate group of home brewers in Washington State to get me interested in allotting any of what I consider to be precious calories to anything other than food and an occasional bottle of wine.

But today milk and donuts weren’t in the cards.  Beer and fish were.

The Dock Days Hefewizen was a good call with Tamarack’s Alehouse Fish and Chips. I settled on the fish and chips because the menu announced that the kitchen used fresh line-caught Whitefish from Flathead Lake.  I know better than to think that one of the neighborhood boys caught my fish at the dock on the other side of the highway, but I was excited anyway that they featured a local fish rather than something flown or shipped or trucked from thousands of miles away.  I  support local food, and if that food is battered and deep-fried, all the better.

Throw in some house-made tartar and the fire in the fireplace next to our table and it was a lunch almost good enough to make me stop moaning about change.