Don Wyatt former owner/brewer at Hood Canal Brewery — or Mr. Wyatt as he’s known from his years as a teacher in the North Kitsap School District — is sitting on the other side of the bar today.
He’s enjoying an early afternoon pint on a recent weekday. It’s a few days before the one year anniversary of him selling the brewery. I ask how it feels to be on this side after building, owning and operating one of Kitsap’s longest-running breweries for more than two decades.
“Great,” he replies simply, with a smile and glance toward his protege who is standing near the register in front of the taps. “I worked my ass off,” he adds. “I was a one man band for the first six years.”
He goes on to remember aloud details from the early days of the brewery. Like when the taproom had all white walls because they had run out of paint. The $5 resin chairs that he got from Rite Aid before the taproom had bar stools. The day he and a customer installed the door that leads from the taproom to the brewery after years of Wyatt walking the long way around.
“When I first opened this place, on any given night, we could’ve built a house,” he says. “I had an architect that came in every night. I had framers that came in every night. We had developers. We had a plumber. We had electricians. I think there was only one trade that we didn’t have… concrete. We didn’t always have concrete. But we did have groups that would come through on concrete jobs.”
He smiles as the memory wanders.
“My brother-in-law used to come here and just sit and hang out,” the brewery’s new owner Caitlyn Hatchel chimes in. “Because every time he’d come here, he’d get a job. He was a roofer. Well, a general contactor, he did a lot of things, but roofing was his main thing.”
Growing up, Caitlyn said she never really knew what her thing was. She definitely never imagined she’d be kegging, delivering and selling craft beers all around Puget Sound, running a small business before age 30. She grew up — and still lives — in Indianola. She got her first job at the Indianola General Store at 16, worked there and then for a few years at a Thai restaurant on Bainbrige before moving on to tending bar at the brewery, where she has been for the past nine years.
At one point, about five years in at Hood Canal, she’d texted Don, telling him she was thinking about moving on to go to school or do something else unless there was room for her to grow at the brewery. She didn’t want to leave, she said, but she had to do something. Don replied right away and told her he didn’t want her to leave. In fact, he wanted her to take over the brewery.
And it clicked.
That was her thing.
“I remember my first interview here,” Caitlyn said. “I was terrified. I’d never bartended before. I was freshly 21. I didn’t know anything about beer. They all pretty much laughed at me. But I learned about the process and worked the taproom and worked the beer festivals and met all the people from other local breweries… and I just fell in love with it, the whole industry.”
As of December, she has now officially owned and run the 26-year-old Kingston brewery for one year, after just turning 30 years old herself.
As news got around that she was buying the brewery, many of those other local breweries and the long-running customers at Hood Canal Brewery offered to help with anything she needed or any questions she had. She remembers one afternoon where she had been racking beer in to kegs in the brewery while tending bar in the taproom at the same time when the brewery’s water pump went out. That was a vital piece of equipment, and she didn’t know what to do. One of her customers that day, a tugboat captain named Steve, asked if he could check it out.
“After looking at it, he says, ‘I have this same pump in my garage, let me run and get it real quick,’” Caitlyn remembers. “He came back with it and I said, great, how much do you want for it? And he said, ‘It’s yours.’ He hooked it up, and, within 30 minutes, we had a new water pump.”
“It’s always been that way,” Don adds. “Our customers have been our best friends.” // BILLMAN
More at 26499 Bond Road in Kingston and at hoodcanalbrewery.com.
