Craft & Local Spirits
The Hoodsport Corridor
There's a stretch of Highway 101 in Hoodsport where you can taste a remarkable range of locally made drinks within a few minutes' walk of each other. A craft distillery. Two breweries. Two wineries. For a small town on a rural highway, that concentration of makers is genuinely unusual, and each one is doing something distinct.
The Hardware Distillery uses grains grown in Washington state fields, fruit from Washington orchards, and honey from Washington beehives to produce an unusually wide range of spirits, vodka, whiskey, gin, mead, and perhaps what they're best known for, aquavit. The fact that we are on a fjord, which is similar to the fjords of Scandinavia, makes it seem like the right place for aquavits, co-owner Jan Morris has said. Hood Canal is the only saltwater fjord in the contiguous United States, and the Hardware Distillery embraces that identity fully, right down to the annual Fjordin Crossin event, where a barrel of aged dill aquavit is ceremonially paddled across the canal in homage to a centuries-old Scandinavian tradition. Vintage tools, photos, and an antique chandelier fill the cozy interior of the distillery, named for its location inside a former hardware store. The tasting room is open to the public and worth the stop.
Just down the road, Potlatch Brewing is a brewer-owned seven barrel operation handcrafting a wide range of styles using some of the purest water in the world and high quality, locally grown ingredients. The beers are unfiltered and unpasteurized, packaged by hand, the kind of small-batch brewery where the person who brewed your beer is likely the one pouring it.
Hoodsport Winery began in 1978 when there were only sixteen wineries in the state, a genuine pioneer of the Washington wine industry. It still produces limited bottlings of award-winning wines, including distinctive fruit wines made from local raspberries and loganberries that you won't find anywhere else. And Stottle Winery's tasting room on Highway 101 offers award-winning Bordeaux-style reds and whites, a convenient and worthwhile stop on any drive up or down the canal.
In Shelton
Downtown Shelton has its own made-here drinks story. High Steel Beer Co. pays homage to the iconic High Steel Bridge and the Skokomish Valley in everything from its name to its beers, long live-edge cedar tables and old windows repurposed from historic local buildings, and beers infused with Mason County spirit from their names to their flavors. One rotating can series highlights a different shellfish farmer from Mason County with each release. Tom and Mo meet with fellow brewers from Potlatch Brewing Co. once a year to hand-pick locally grown hops for their annual fresh hop collaboration, a detail that says something about the way the Mason County craft community operates. It's a family-friendly brewpub with rotating taps, live music, and an arcade that has become one of the genuine gathering places in downtown Shelton.
Also in Shelton, Walter Dacon Wines specializes in handcrafted Rhone and Mediterranean style blends aged in French and American oak barrels, with grapes sourced from select vineyards in the Yakima and Columbia Valleys. The tasting room near Skookum Inlet is open by appointment, a quieter, more intimate experience for serious wine drinkers.
In Belfair
Belfair sits at the southern tip of Hood Canal where the waterway narrows, and it has its own place in Washington wine history worth knowing about.
Mosquito Fleet Winery was established near the site of the old St. Charles Winery, Washington State's very first bonded winery, started just before Prohibition's end. The name comes from the Mosquito Fleet, the busy group of small family-owned steamships that buzzed up and down Puget Sound providing basic transportation before the Washington State Ferry System or good inter-city roads existed. Those boats connected the small waterfront communities of Hood Canal and South Puget Sound to each other and to the wider world, and the winery honors that legacy on every bottle, with a different historic vessel featured on each wine.
Founded by two couples from the area who spent years taking wine trips together before deciding to start their own winery, Mosquito Fleet is a small, serious operation. Starting with just 200 cases in 2009, patiently crafted and not released until 2012, they've built a reputation on Bordeaux-styled red wines aged 18–24 months in French oak, big, structured reds that punch well above their small-town geography. The 2018 Cabernet Sauvignon scored 94 points with Great Northwest Wines. The tasting room is open Thursday through Sunday.
Belfair also has its own brewery. Brothers Tim and Todd Masbruch founded Bent Bine Brew Co. with a simple goal — to recreate the Wisconsin family values of cheerful community and the family tradition they grew up with on Hood Canal. They opened their doors in May 2017 on Highway 3 and have been a neighborhood gathering place ever since. The brewery runs an 8.5 barrel custom brewhouse covering most styles of ale and lager, from hazy IPAs and porters to lagers and seasonal releases. Cans and growlers available to go. Family and dog friendly, with live music and local events on a regular calendar. As they put it: it's all about the beer.