StoryMap: The tap trail
A collection of local breweries
StoryMap by Finlay Morrison
With nearly 20 breweries within the city limits and more to come later this year, it’s clear craft beer has found a home in Bellingham. These breweries as well as plenty of other craft cider makers, meaderies and tap houses scattered around town make Bellingham a paradise for those looking for a good beer. In 2015, Brian Seales, a local beer lover, saw the growing beer industry in Bellingham as an opportunity.
“We had just started to build up a good collection of local breweries, with more on the horizon,” Seales said in an email. “We followed the lead of other beer-forward cities to create this interactive map program to help promote the local beer culture.”
On a brisk Friday afternoon in February, my fellow beer-loving roommate Cameron Houghton and I set out on bikes to see if we could make it to nine carefully selected locations on the Tap Trail. This is only a fraction of the map’s 37 locations serving local beer, cider and mead, but still more than enough for one day of drinking. Neither Cameron nor I particularly enjoy the thick sweetness of mead or the hangover that follows. We have had a good taste for local beer since our former roommate became a bartender at Bellingham’s own Aslan Brewery in 2021. He would bring home pallets of beer after work and encourage us to come down to get a drink when the bar was slow. Now, going to new breweries is an exciting pastime for us. When selecting the nine locations for our trip, we tried to find places we had never been before, while also sprinkling in a few familiar favorites of the Bellingham beer scene.
