Occasionally people come in ask "Do you have Pliny?" and if we don't, they walk out!
For everybody who comes in and says," when will you get Pliny?" I have to say "read the damn newsletter, join the facebook page, or become a regular." We get more Pliny than almost anybody in the state (3/20 kegs that came into the state last year), and yet even though it's the most expensive beer I serve, I make the least markup on it. Too boot, to carry it at all, I have to carry Damnation, a much superior but less popular beer that languishes on our line up.  I have to ask the folks down there at Russian River, if you have this beer that is so popular you can't even keep it in stock, and this other beer that is so unpopular you have to force people to take it, why don't you make more of the former and less of the latter? This is what I'm proposing: When I get Pliny I put it under the counter. Then I'll put the Damnation on tap. Only the people who get our emails or use our Facebook page will we have the Pliny on tap. Come in, order a Damnation, and when you are done say "Please, may I have another?" and we'll get  you a Pliny. That makes as much sense as their distribution scheme doesn't it? Because until I get rid of the Damnation, I can't order another keg of Pliny.
AND, I don't even like Pliny! We have beers on that are so much better, but people are completely brainwashed by the unobtanium syndrome. In fact, during IPA Madness this week,many  people who  were were drooling in their Plinys didn't even realize that the latest keg is an inferior batch. I would say that this batch of Pliny is to the last batch as Dogfish 60 min is to Dogfish 90, it's definitely less hoppy, less malty, well, just less.
 Interestingly enough, for all the rage over it, I note that we actually sold our first keg of Balefire Beta faster than our last keg of Pliny Maybe that's because I started calling it "the Pliny of alts." And we sold our first keg of Balefire IPA last year in one night (and that was a night whpuen we also had Pliny on), so the people who are vocal about the fringe beers are not actually the people who drink the most beer. We noticed the same thing when we first opened: the people who were begging for Belgians did not actually come in to drink them.

For a long time, since before opening actually, we’ve struggled with the food issue. In the first place, we wanted to open a bar, not a restaurant. This was a conscious decision based on the fact that these are separate businesses, and if you want to have a restaurant with a bar, that is completely different than having just a bar. It’s the same reason I didn’t open a brew pub, two great businesses that go great together, but neither of which I knew anything about.Along the Prost! model we always hoped to start with a minimum amount of food and then increase that in our next space. In fact, in my opinion, the three best beer bars in Seattle (in no particular order: Uber, Stumbling Monk, Beveridge Place) don’t have food. The fact that the space we eventually ended up with doesn’t have a kitchen seemed to decide the issue for us. Except…

While beer drinkers seem content to drink and eat independently, it goes against the grain, against my grain anyway, to drink wine without food. I have always imagined the perfect bar, the bar we set out to build, as having a tapas style menu. Unfortunately, in the time crunch of opening it was very hard to find a vendor who could make food for us offsite that was delicious, that we could store without degrading the quality, that was wine friendly, that we could plate and serve in kitchen, and that was affordable. Basically, we had to take what we could get. And although we have never stopped tinkering with the menu, it never was what I envisioned, we couldn’t engender a passion among the staff to sell it, and eventually our sales dwindled off to the point where it really didn’t make sense to carry on with our menu.

In a way food has always been our bane. I keep emphasizing that we are a bar with food and not a restaurant, but the fact that we serve it on fine china, with linen napkins and gorgeous flatware does seem to confuse people. It certainly confused the only food critic who has reviewed us who wrote us up like a restaurant and apparently didn’t even notice the cruvinet. Of course, we also had to explain to her that the silver was inside the napkin…

As Daron and I debated food/no food I was arguing against all logic that we really needed to not only do food, but more and better food. This is because as we looked at our business model it just seemed to me that while the beer drinkers seem to get us the wine drinkers do not, and this is the biggest possible area of immediate growth for us. If you work at Microsoft, you might call that “low-hanging fruit.” So we are essentially relaunching the bar. The whole concept of Balefire has always been that if people will pay too much for mediocre wine treated badly, then they should happily pay great prices for good wine treated perfectly. If we haven’t succeeded in getting that word out, then we really haven’t succeeded in our business plan. And to do that, we needed a fresher, more wine-centric menu.

Enter Chef Clara from Kafe Neo and our first wine dinner. As any of you know who came to it, our first wine dinner was a runaway success, and that was entirely due to the genius of Clara. When we really started confronting the failure of our existing menu, I turned to her for some help. The short story is that in a very short time she proposed several dozen items that we could afford, that kept well, that plated beautifully, and that go well with wine. I mean she came in and hit every criteria we need to have a successful menu. We worked with her last night to learn how to prepare the food, and not only am I excited, but the staff is also really happy. Finally, we have food that fits our model and is exciting to serve. And we have enough of these items to rotate them out and keep the menu fresh for a long time. In the future, I hope to raise many glasses of wine to this woman who really helped us implement this crucial part of our dream.

After preparing the food, we put the plates on the bar and proceeded to sample the various creations with the different wines in the cruvinet. Now, while I honestly believe wine needs food to make that synergistic leap to the sublime, I’m not one of those people who believes in “the perfect match.” For me, it’s more about the acids in the wine combining with the fats and flavors in the food, the volatiles exploding the flavors over the entire palate, than it is in wondering if I’ve chosen just the right vintage of Chablis to go with Quilcene oysters. Perhaps it is because I lack subtlety, but I do find that I appreciate a wide variety of food and wine matches.

Well, with Clara’s menu, food and wine matching became impossible.

Not because the food was too spicy, or fought with the wine, or the wine wasn’t good enough, but because each small plate carried such a riot of flavors that in some places I couldn’t even pick red or white. My whole food-wine paradigm was just wrong.

Maybe as time goes on and I get more experience with the food, this will become clearer to me. While the previous menu was specifically designed to have a pairing for each category, I’ve never felt Balefire was about dictating experience, but rather about enabling it. So for now, pairings on the menu are dead. Instead, I’m going to run specials for a menu item and a flight. Today, it’s gazpacho and rose. Come in, try the new menu, tell me if I’m wrong.

When we first started, we were growing too fast. (I wish I had that problem now! )I was getting complaints almost every night either through email or on the phone from my friends who were patronizing the bar, but wanted me to know we could do better.  Unfortunately, this was also the only time the local paper came to visit.  I've been in facets of the restaurant business since I was 15, so this was really confusing to me.Then I realized that I was hoping my employees would learn from my example, but there really was too much to "service" to do that. So we basically closed the bar, hired new people, and implemented a completely new traiing program, including a 5pp manual that covers just the customer interaction, from the moment we hear the chimes when you walk in the door until you leave. During training, I tell the staff: "We don't sell wine; we don't sell beer; we don't sell food. We sell service. It's not enought to be the best bar in Everett, we have to be the best bar we can be." Seriously, we do role-playing and everthing.
Well, I just want to commend my staff on really taking this to heart. Sure, there are the occaisional blurps, which we try really hard  to fix, but our Yelp ratings speak for the sucess of this training program. In fact, one of the 5 steps to our "5 step program" is to ask people how they heard about us, so that we know how to focus our marketing campaigns. 99% of the time in our first 6 months the answer I got was "Google." People had input Everett + Beer and/or Wine and gotten Balefire. (Just recently I've noticed that 99% of the newcomers are telling us that they heard about us from friends, so I can't thank you enough for this.)
I had a recent experience really drive home the importance of service and what a good job we've done. Last weekend, a friend of mine, an ex-employee from my contracting days (another company we based solely on quality), called me. He flies all over the country taking aerial photographs, and every town he goes to, he uses Google and Yelp to find a good place to have a beer. He was searching the Everett area and came across Balefire. He said he didn't even know I owned the place until he went to the site and saw my picture! He also said of all the places he's researched country-wide, that he has never read such positive reviews as we've had. Again, sure we had a few people whom we wish has a better time, and I always personally email them to invite them back, but I do think we've really turned the place around and I just want to commend my staff on this, because like so many quality issues until you get it right it's hard; but when you get it right everything gets so much easier. 
Now are we going to rest on our laurels? As I told Lanie McMullin, the mayor's economic advisor, when she asked me at the grand opening "So, I know you delayed this to get service up to where you thought it should be. Are you satisfied that it is good enough?" and I told her "I don't know if I'll never be satisifed, you can never think it's 'good enough' or you will start backsliding."
The best customers are those that honestly tell us how we could be better, and come back to give us another chance. So I want to thank both the staff and clientele who gave and continue to give us feedback for making this possible.

As anybody who has heard my 30 second elevator pitch knows, the fundamental principle behind Balefire is craft beer and wine on equal footing.  While you could probably spend an evening arguing over whether Seattle or Portland is the best town in the world to drink beer, suffice it to say that Seattle understands beer. The brewers make good beer, the distributors acquire the best beers from all around the world, the bars know how to serve it, and the customers have a pretty good appreciation for it. Even a local "yellow beer" bar is probably going to carry one of the ubiquitous "micros" like Red Hook, Mannys, or even Guinness. And the taps probably aren't even infected. This is a long way from when Coopers made Time magazine for having 24 tap handles, and certainly we all applaud this.
But it seems strange to me that you have to go to one place to get beer and another to get wine. And the places that do serve wine are often serving up tank farm beverages that are, at best, vacuum pumped at the end of the night (after having an evening's worth of aeration mixed into the wine). To my tastes, the wine is over-priced,  highly variable in quality, and treated poorly. By extension, I believe this means the customer is treated poorly. I'm sure you've heard me say that this is the equivalent to serving beer in a bucket, yet it is the status quo for "wine bars" (one reason I eschewed calling Balefire this for too long). No beer drinker would put up with this, but despite it wine bars are actually on the rise and doing fairly well.
So along we come and build a cruvinet (a device which serves wine on draft under inert gas to keep it pristine from beginning to end) that provides one bottle of wine for every two seats in the house. On top of that, we sell bottles to go at grocery store prices, sell them in house for only $5 more, our glass prices are marked up far below industry average,  were having weekly wine tastings with the best local winemakers and distributors at dirt cheap prices, and smashing wine dinners. WE HAVE THE FREAKING COOLEST NON-SUBTERRANEAN PLACE TO DRINK WINE in the state, if not farther. I've been to the "wine bars" in Seattle, Napa, San Francisco. I think we really have a great thing going on. If I thought anybody else was doing it this well, I wouldn't have had to build Balefire!  Actually, by comparison, our beer selection doesn't come close to measuring up to our wine, and yet the beer crowd "gets" us, but the wine crowd just has not beat a path to our door.
When we first started, our Monday tastings were as busy as our Friday nights with music. But if you graphed attendance, you could draw an almost linear line through to last week when attendance dropped too low to ask the winemakers to bother coming out. This is even after moving it to Ladies' Night on Tuesday.
Obviously, we feel that wine is crucial to the success of Balefire, or we would rip it out and put on another 12 taps. But we just aren't getting the market penetration we need. Last week I was fortunate enough to be invited to an Arts Council tasting at the Monte Cristo Hotel ( the most beautiful venue in Everett), and the room was full of affluent wine drinkers on a Thursday night, while the bar was not. Likewise, Kevin at Wicked Cellars does a good business, and his tastings are well-attended. As he said to me "it's a stream, we should all be able to fish from it."
So, good people and friends, I'm asking you: What can we do to make Balefire not only the pre-emminent place to drink wine in Seattle, but get people to know about it and attend our events?
Some things we are working on are:

• More wine dinners
• Finding a night/time that will work for you for wine tastings
• Using Balefire as a weekend co-op tasting room for local producers who do not have tasting rooms. Combined with Wicked's Saturday tastings, we hope this would give people a reason to see Everett as a "wine destination."
• Capital events for local groups.
• Rare wine nights. If it interested the clientele I would love to bring in rare/expensive wines to give you a chance to try wines you may otherwise never get.

The reason I'm posting this here is that I was hoping we could use the comments section of the blog to capture a dialog between us and our customers, although you are free to email me privately at jontobey@yahoo.com.

Years ago, it seems now, when Justin Blasko took me into this old cow shed behind his house and told me he was going to start a brewery, I looked at the decades of dried dung and spiderwebs and quipped, "Better do Belgians." To be fair, I always support my friends on their dreams - Balefire wouldn't exist if my friends didn't support mine. But, it did seem like he was biting off a big project, all while going for a Phd. He was just a homebrewer with a dream, but the dream never died. He and his brother-in-law, Jim Pettyjohn, bought Boxing Cat, and they had a very simple business plan of supplying their friends with kegs.
Despite the many set backs of a small business (not the least of which is the fumbling bureaucracy Snohomish County operates under, but that is another blog), including Jim being stationed in Afghanistan, they plugged along. Over the course of time, they brought beer to the Homebrew Fair, and I even helped them paint the brewery. While we really wanted to open Balefire with out own beer, but we decided to stick with Headknocker until they could be our contract brewer. Three weeks ago we served the first keg they ever produced and blew through it in 90 minutes.
Then, they graciously let Bernard and I come into the brewery to brew one of our recipes. Considering it was only the 3rd time the system got used, we did pretty well, hitting both our volume (100g) and our gravity to three decimal places! And, it wasn't too different from homebrewing, including a stuck mass when our huge grain bill and their new pump combined to crush their false bottom, and a continous plumbing operatio going in tandem with the brewing.
So, we'll soon have a house beer, the Quaffable Kopper on tap, hopefully in time for our anniversary party coming up on 7/1. This means we can have one beer on special all the time and include growler and keg sales.

Honestly, beer and food pairings always seemed a bit of a stretch to me, trying to force something when there was already a perfectly good solution - wine. (Despite the fact that cuisine a la bierre is much older than French cuisine.) That was until I read Garrett Oliver's book on the subject. He convinced me that there were good food and beer pairings, especially in areas where it is difficult to pair wine. Further, and this took convincing, cheese was one thing that was particularly difficult to pair with wine. I thought about this for a bit. My friends own Cadence winery, a very well-respected boutique winery in Seattle. Yet, when I go to their release parties, I'm always struck by how these delicious, exotic cheeses they pick just destroy the wines. In fact, the disillusionment is so complete, yet so paradoxical to how we think about food, I never really contemplated it. My mind couldn't reconcile my experience with my expectations. After reading Oliver's book, I realized that his thoughts on this were indeed correct, and that beer was the better beverage choice. Don't believe me? Well, Daron is putting together quite the tasting with cheeses from our charcuterie vendor. We will schedule this as soon as we can, probably early July at this point.

Well, we had the man, the myth, the legend,  Beaux  Bowman and crew up from Black Raven this week. I'm always honored when I can show the hopsitality to my friends that I've been enjoying in their establishments for years. This was our 6th brewers' night, and like many of our promotions, the attendence has been all over the map, starting strong and tending downhill. We really want to host these events to bring beer to beer lovers in Everett that they either might not otherwise get (North Fork, Alder Grove, Skookum), or to meet brewers, often homebrewers like themselves (Big Al, Steffan, Ron, Eric). I was wondering if attendance was down this week because it was on a Wed to accomodate the Thurs GEBL meeting? The good news is we got way more GEBL folk than normal (go GEBL!), the bad news is we didn't draw very deeply from our mailing list. Help us figure out when the best time is to hold events you can (and want to) attend. Comments?

So Balefire now has a blog (with RSS), a website, and a Facebook page.
Do we really need all of that? What is the best way for us to keep in touch with you?
Please let us know.