One of the mundane tasks required of full-time RV travel is shopping in strange communities. While Peggy loves all aspects of shopping except check-out, I loathe all forms of shopping and consider it just above root canal work and proctometer probes on my list of least favorite things to do. Today was a shopping day.
We drove about 30 miles into Wenatchee to start our fun. Our first stop was at Les Schwab Tires to check prices on replacement tires for our daughter’s Subaru Outback. The best they could do for four steel-belted radials of the appropriate size was $620. We continued on to Costco where we found they had Bridgestones on sale for around $450. We went into the main Costco store to shop and cogitate on the tire cost. After less than $200 (a record), we stopped by the store food facility and decided to purchase the Costco tires while eating our Polish dogs.
It looks like Dana will soon be sporting new radials on her Subaru as soon as Costco has the tires in stock. From Costco we went to a Jiffy Lube to get Charlotte’s oil changed. I normally have this work done on Charlotte’s diesel engine by Ford but the tiny Wenatchee dealership, Town Ford, indicated they will not be able to schedule our oil change until after we have left town. I am at a loss to figure out how a Ford dealership in a small town could be so busy that customers need to wait two weeks for an oil change, a process easily accomplished in 20 minutes. The guys at Jiffy Lube hopped right on our vehicle and about 15 minutes after driving in we were driving out with new filters and four gallons of new oil in the crankcase. It was also about $50 cheaper than having Ford make us wait before changing our oil.
Now we were perplexed since we had little other stuff we needed to do so we unanimously chose to go to the nearby Badger Mountain Brewing, our daughter’s place of work and all-around great air-conditioned venue. Dana happened to be there and introduced us to her co-workers and John, the brewmaster. After a few really tasty porters, John generously offered us an opportunity to take a tour of the brewery which is behind the tap room.
John must have a penchant for gorgeous stainless steel hardware because the brewing gear is just magnificent but quite complex. Shiny tanks joined with sparkling piping and coupling hardware are truly impressive. The best part of this, from my standpoint at least, is this beautiful hardware makes for very tasty porter. They have several fermenting tanks here and they are putting them to good use.
Badger Mountain is a relatively new operation and John, being one talented with the processes of making plain old sugar into great, tasty alcohol, has acquired the most impressive still I have ever seen. Not only is the engineering elegant, the combination of stainless steel and bright copper components is spectacular. His gear looks like something I would love to have in my garage not necessarily to use it but to instead just to have my buddies come by and admire the setup.
I don’t believe Badger Mountain has a distillery license due to the bizarre and arcane Washington state regulations regarding alcohol manufacture but I can state that they do have the correct gear for the work. They cannot sell commercial booze products yet but the regulations do not forbid a little non-sales fooling around with grain alcohol and John seems to know how the gear works. Guys like this make life interesting. While almost anybody can make bread from grain, only the truly sharp can use grain to make tasty beverages and John seems to be one of those blessed with this talent.
You can see a picture of the still and the operator if you click here