Optimism Brewing Company

About Us:

Optimism is a brewery founded by husband and wife Troy Hakala and Gay Gilmore in 2013. It took more than a year to get a location for the brewery and it is under construction now in the Capitol Hill neighborhood of Seattle. It's located at the corner of Broadway and E Union Street (Map). The brewery opened and we served our first beers on December 5, 2015 (the anniversary of the Repeal of Prohibition).

Optimism is a brewery, not a brewpub, focused solely on making beer. We do not have a kitchen or serve food. Instead, we created space for an ever-changing group of 2-3 food trucks to drive into our loading dock area and serve food. In addition, beer-lovers are free to bring take-out food from local restaurants or have food delivered to the brewery. Kids and dogs are welcome as well!

If you visit, you'll notice that the place is large and this is surprising to people who are new to breweries or to people who expect breweries to be very small. Breweries have historically been large because breweries require a lot of space. The equipment is large, the ingredients and kegged beer take up a lot of space and we wanted room to grow without redesigning the space. And we wanted to create a large community space to enjoy beer and your friends. Beer is big, beer is important, beer deserves a large space.

You will also notice that we do not use style names to describe our beers. Part of this is because we don't brew beers to fit a style, we brew them to taste the way we want them to taste. Moreover, we believe that beer is "the every(wo)man's drink", not something that should be intimidating, pretentious or expensive. For this reason, we try to make beer approachable to everyone by describing our beers in ways that everyone can understand without beer-geek jargon. Most beer-drinkers do not even know that beer styles even exist, let alone have all 120+ memorized. We believe using flavor descriptors and a photo is the best way to encourage people to try beers that they otherwise wouldn't have tried. Wine can be pretentious and filled with esoteric jargon to maintain an elitist status. Beer doesn't need that.