Friends of North Creek Forest and Cairn Celebrate OktoberForest

Get to Know Our Trivia Hosts!

Get to know our Awesome Team! These are the folks behind the bar or behind the scenes, pouring pints, brewing beer, and keeping Cairn up and running! 

Donations for Samples at Cairn Brewing

Cairn Brewing is proud to sponsor the 7th Annual Kenmore Heritage Society's Fun Photo Contest ! The contest runs from September 12-20th, photographers of all ages can enter their shots of our beautiful Northshore home. From the KMH website: You will have 9 days to create photographic entries based on the subject categories. The contest is all about creative interpretation for each category. Prizes will be awarded for the most original, appealing, and creative entry in each of 7 mystery categories. The categories will be revealed at the VIRTUAL kick-off on Sunday, Sept 12th and will also be available on the Kenmore Heritage Society website and Facebook page. Winners will be announced at an awards event at on Sunday, October 17th at 2:00pm. Location to be determined. Prizes are awarded in each category, with a special Kenmore Camera “Best of Show” award which is chosen from all of the first-place winners from each category.

We are pleased to announce that we will be reintroducing a few “before times” elements back to the Taproom at Cairn Brewing: Glassware is back! We are still trying to get a feel for the flow of busing stations in the brewery. Please help us out by clearing your own table to the appropriate receptacle (trash, recycle, bus tub) We will resume filling outside growlers. This includes stainless steel growlers as well. We will only fill cleaned and rinsed growlers as normal. You may now open a tab at the bar! We will require a credit card on file to hold the tab , so cardless payments will continue to be pay-as-you-go. Our Beer To-Go fridge is now self service. Grab the cans you would like and bring them up to the register where a beertender will snap them into a can holder for you. This is a step to normal, but still not “all the way” normal. These things will not change : Face masks are still required to be worn when not seated at your table. We are still following WA State guidelines for reopening. Party size at a table can’t be more than 10. For our taproom, we ask that only groups of 6+ move no more than two tables together. Please ask a beertender for help. We will still not be taking cash at this time. Beverages and food need to be consumed at your table. No drinking at the bar, or wandering around the taproom and beer garden while drinking. Things are looking up! A journalist I admire recently wrote in an op-ed that it feels like this point in our “Pandemic Life” is the five minutes before the dismissal bell. We all just need to hold it together for five more metaphorical minutes, and then we'll all enjoy summer break together. Now that’s a reason to Cheers!

Change is in the Air! It’s here. The days are getting longer, the temperatures are climbing, and nature is starting to bloom again. It felt like an endless winter, but folks: we made it! Happy Spring! On the horizon at Cairn Brewing is a return, maybe not to “normal” but at least to a few familiar things. We want to share with you all some of the steps we will be taking in the near future as we continue to open up. First and foremost, the health and safety of our team and customers is our top priority. We will continue to uphold the current regulations and guidelines outlined by Healthy Washington’s reopening plan. We’re all feeling the Covid-fatigue more than ever, but we hope you’ll continue to enjoy your pints at Cairn responsibly and safely. A nd please, just remember your mask. As a team, we have agreed upon a few things that we are going to phase back in around the taproom. Before any of these changes take place, we want our full team to be vaccinated if they choose to do so. When our team is comfortable , here are a few things that will be returning to the Cairn taproom: Glassware - Goodbye plastic! We will be returning to glass pints and mugs! We are also planning to set up self bussing stations for glassware in the taproom and beer garden. Growler fills - Dust off your stainless growlers! We will soon be accepting outside growlers for refill. Thank you for being flexible with our current exchange system. Tabs - You can still choose to be contactless, but we will resume holding open tabs at the bar. Just don’t forget to close out! We are excited to take these steps back towards normal. Thank you always for your continued support and patience. We are a small team and many of the changes we have made over the past year were for our safety as much as yours. Unfortunately, if we’ve learned anything over the past year, it’s that the steps toward reopening make an irregular staircase. Sometimes it’s a bit further between strides forward.

One of the most important things for our brewery--maybe surpassed only by making great beer--is to support our community. We continue to be incredibly lucky with our extended Cairn family. Even through the utter stress-storm of 2020, you continued to show up for our beer, and to share a bit of your lives with us. In the first few years of Cairn Brewing, we were quick to say “Yes!” hosting community pints nights for a wide range of causes. Through these Pint Nights, we got to know our neighborhood better, but felt like we could do more. In addition to Pint Nights, we decided to expand our outreach for three main causes. We chose to actively support local nonprofits with a priority to human and animal quality of life as well as outdoor recreation and the environment.

Looking over our blog posts from this past year, I was surprised to see how very few mention beer. Shocking, considering this is a brewery blog! Let’s kick-off our second year of Cairn blogs with a post dedicated to some of our newer beers on tap (and in cans) this month.