A Season of Fresh Flavors and Tiki Concoctions at Brimmer & Heeltap

If April brought us rain showers (and Seattleites can all attest that it did), here’s to hoping the rest of May brings all kinds of colorful flora, sunshine, and patio season vibes. We’re all restless for nights spent out in the garden and around the fire pit; we look forward to sharing many of these with you in the coming months. Read on for a little peek at how we’ve been gearing up for the wondrous spring and summer months ahead.

At B&H, there’s a level of playfulness in everything we do. We have a lot of fun concocting new drinks and testing ingredients for new dishes that our guests get to experience, after all. Our talented bar team is definitely embracing a lighthearted approach to building drinks right now; Kate and Brian have been hard at work concocting tiki-inspired cocktails for our brunch guests.

B&H Bar Manager Brian Hibbard predicts that 2017 will be a year where we see more tropical drinks in general, predicting that “more rum, more tiki, more pineapple, and more drinks that make you start empathizing with those who wear Tommy Bahama” will be on trend in the coming months. Bartender Kate Mcmahon happily agrees, explaining that she was first drawn to tropical flavors as a way to escape Seattle’s drizzly winter vibes. “I think it was me trying to escape winter somehow and imagining myself on a tropical beach somewhere, anywhere, sipping island booze and feeling so relaxed – and wanting others to feel that way,” she says.

The next time you come in for brunch be sure to try Ape of My Eye, a riff on a tiki classic made with rum, banana liqueur, cinnamon, and fire.

In the kitchen, spring flavors have taken hold and many dishes boast beautiful, delicious ingredients native to the Pacific Northwest. Our spring salad changes nearly every week depending on what foraged goodies Foraged and Found brings to us. Nettles, maple blossoms, miners lettuce, peas, opal basil, fiddlehead ferns, and other wild greens are making Chef’s seasonally-inspired dishes sing right now.

Chef’s spicy beef rib features a fantastic homemade bbq sauce, falling-off-the-bone-tender meat, and a bright and satisfying accompaniment of kale slaw with pickled cipollini onions. The culinary team brines these beautiful Painted Hills beef ribs for twelve hours, slow cooks them lovingly for about 8 more hours, before finishing this beautiful piece of meat on the grill. You have to be willing to get just a little bit messy when sharing this dish with friends and family. It’s bbq done the B&H way, with tons of flavor and care.

Although our food offerings change constantly, Chef Mike vowed long ago to keep his beloved steak tartare on as a menu mainstay. We’re happy to share that this already delicious snack has been elevated further with help from some seriously creative culinary efforts. The steak tartare you know and love is now topped with grated egg yolk that has been soy-cured and dehydrated, adding layers of umami flavor to this excellent dish.

Freshness is paramount during springtime in Seattle kitchens, and ours has so many gorgeous seasonal offerings for you to delight in. Tapioca puff chips dusted with a blend of dehydrated nettles, poblano peppers, carrot tops and garlic bring a zesty, crave-worthy edge to our snack list. Asian pear, beets, marinated root vegetables, and huckleberries are incorporated lovingly into many a dish. Come in soon to taste something new and unexpected!

It’s our sincere pleasure to serve you no matter what the season, but we can all agree that B&H feels extra magical this time of year. We look so forward to your next visit.

Author: Caitlyn Edson

Images: Will Foster

Brimmer & Heeltap Q & A with Bar Manager Brian Hibbard

Brian Hibbard is Brimmer & Heeltap’s beloved Bar Manager. Funny, sweet, and ever-considerate, Brian brings a level of sincerity and warmth to our team that keeps regulars coming back time and again to sit at his bar. A Pacific Northwest native, he loves all things outdoors, making music, and is our resident Twin Peaks aficionado. Read on to learn more about his thoughts about bar industry trends, run-ins with local celebrities, and what inspired recent additions to our craft cocktail list.

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What spirits and ingredients have you been most drawn to when crafting special cocktails lately?

BH: I love amaro; it was the category of booze that attached me to mixology. When a new (or new to me) amaro presents itself, I often use it in all experimentation to figure out how to use it best. Sfumato Rabarbaro, a smoky rhubarb amaro from the Italian Cappelletti family, is a perfect example. It was released in the US last year and, to no surprise, gained popularity quick and you can now find it almost everywhere. It’s smoky, earthy, with some notes of bitter berries and a lingering note of gentian on the finish. It’s a great sipper for the brave, or an essential amaro for the bitter cocktail explorer.

As far as ingredients go, I’m playing around with fresh juices, beet and carrot specifically, to add a fresh and somewhat healthy approach to drinking. I’m working with Chef Mike and our excellent sauté cook Ike on some delicious sodas for the Summer.

What is your go-to cocktail to make when you’re trying to impress someone?

BH: Some sort of riff on a Trinidad Sour, the genius who came up with using an unhealthy amount of Angostura bitters has changed every bartender's life. Seattleites seem to love it when you bust out some seasonal herbs, bonus points if you have them growing in the garden outside. Also fire.

What do you like to drink when you’re not working?

BH: A Negroni made with Punt e Mes is my number one dinner companion, lower ABV sour beer like a Berliner Weisse or Gose during the Summertime, or a Rainier tallboy with a mid-shelf rye whiskey for all occasions. And at home I drink Pamplemousse La Croix like every good hipster should.

What’s been one of your proudest moments as a bartender?

BH: Serving Ben Gibbard on many occasions in multiple restaurants without losing my cool and shouting that he’s my musical icon while pointing out that our last names are almost the same.

What's your favorite cocktail on our list currently? How did you come up with the concept for it?

BH: The Red Lodge is brand new to our list. It’s a mixture of Overproof Rye Whiskey, Campari, Amaro Meletti, Dry Vermouth, Peychaud’s Bitters, and Absinthe. It’s perfect, I think, for springtime. It’s a great sipper that calms more as it dilutes and still has some beautiful bitter qualities. We had a similar cocktail on the menu called Our New Pal, which was a play on a New Pal, which is a play on an Old Pal, so I thought I’d get out of the Pal naming and add my own twist.

As for the name origin, I’m a Twin Peaks believer and this is our nod to its greatness and forthcoming sequel season.

As someone who works closely with food/drinks/people what are you most inspired by?

BH: The kindness of strangers/acquaintances/friends. There’s a lot of shit going on in our world right now, and while it’s perfectly understandable to walk around with a cloud over our heads or to have little amounts of good to say, or to be skeptical of the future, those who trade all of that for public kindness, warmth and approachability, thank you. This is who I strive to be and why I do what I do. This attitude plays into every aspect of bartending, including celebrating with guests about the weekend, coming up with custom cocktails on the fly for the enthusiastic patron, or trying to think of a witty cocktail name to make someone chuckle and get beer to come out of their nose.

What cocktail or beer trends do you think we’ll be seeing more of in the coming months?

BH: More Rum, more tiki, more pineapple, more drinks that make you start empathizing with those who wear Tommy Bahama.

Embracing the Seasonal Shift: Fall Cocktail Edition

Brimmer & Heeltap Bar Manager Brian Hibbard muses on Autumn, nostalgia, and his brand new cocktail list. 

You know those times you feel memories being formed in an exact moment? Driving down the coast with your windows down, salty air blowing your hair around while you listen to dream-pop music (okay maybe that’s just one of my recurring fondest) becomes an imprint in your mind, and you feel it. Or the time you experience a newness in life: maybe a newborn, a new job, a new love, or a move that allows new breath and feelings you haven’t felt in the longest time prevail throughout your body. Or maybe it’s smaller: an inspiring conversation, a plate of food that you can’t stop thinking about, a reunion where your nearest and dearest are all in the same room with you.

Seasonal change offers these natural twists and turns; we can feel the vibrational shift and choose to embrace it. Sometimes it hurts, sometimes it’s magic, sometimes it's energy that allows for us to create new ritual and new experiences. Fall is an important time for me. I was born and raised here in the Pacific Northwest, and Fall meant rain finally, post-season baseball, wearing layers, last minute camping trips, and foolish road trips to god knows where because hell we’re young and why not?

I recently put out a new cocktail menu to represent and embrace this seasonal shift. Part of the beauty is the we-ness of it all. We all have different tastes, interests, triggers of happiness, and the question remains: how can we create this tangibly in our food and drinks? A few weeks ago we sat around the bar and tasted through these new cocktails. Listening and observing my lovely crew’s reactions and feedback to these drinks is one of the many reasons why Brimmer & Heeltap is a special place. We all have a certain piece, an insight, a suggestion, a thought that makes up these recipes.

Cardamom, rosemary, lavender, sage, allspice, nutmeg, apple…these are all elements of the new menu. While not all of these are specifically Fall flavors and aromatics, for myself and the B&H team, these represent something that we love about the fall and carry a sort of nostalgia. It represents staying cozy, drinking boozy cider with friends, leaves changing color and falling, seasonal beer and planning Halloween costumes. Incorporating these flavors and smells, for example, means more to us than presenting something that is simply delicious. It’s presenting the opportunity for reflecting on good memories and creating new ones.

My mom has a quince tree in her yard, so I’ve been experiencing the delicious, unique flavor and recipes of quince for quite some time. Lucky me, Brimmer & Heeltap has two quince trees right out front that were full of this thick and intense fruit. You’ll find the Lucky Quince-idence on the menu featuring a homemade quince shrub from those trees along with some rye whiskey, white rum, elderflower, and bitters. Another one of my personal favorites is the Market Drop Kick. Combining Brandy, Ramazzotti, Campari and Curacao, this is a big drink - hence Drop Kick - that lingers in a way that will bring up several different flavors while you enjoy it. Allspice hits your nose right from the get go, and serving the cocktail over a large ice cube allows the flavors to meld and come through more and more as the ice slowly melts.

There are many more fantastic new cocktails to try, so come hangout! Ask your kind and knowledgeable server or bartender to share their excitement about the menu with you and let’s choose to drink well and be cozy together. 

Blog Author: Brian Hibbard