Slowly, gingerly, Coast Central Credit Union may be moving toward putting the “you” into its planning and policymaking, rather than just using it as an advertising slogan. Buying a home? Expanding a business? With close to 80,000 member-owners, Coast Central influences where our money goes on the North Coast. Whether you’re a member or not, […]
Carrie Peyton Dahlberg
Carrie Peyton Dahlberg was editor of the North Coast Journal from June 2011 to November 2013.
Posted inLetters + Opinion
Let’s Bring Coast Central Out of the Shadows
If, as the Washington Post suggests, democracy dies in darkness, then democracy can waste away in the shadows. Coast Central Credit Union members — who are also its owners — deserve a full, healthy dose of sunlight. Members deserve election rules that don’t discourage campaigning for a seat on the board of directors. Members deserve […]
Posted inEat + Drink
Humboldt on Tap
In a far corner of Redwood Curtain Brewing Co., four women face four canvases. In front of them are dollops of paint on paper-plate palettes. Beside them are Redwood Curtain sour beers. This is Happy Trees Sip and Paint, a two-hour painting class enlivened with good beer. It is run by Emily Michaels, who provides […]
Posted inEat + Drink
Humboldt on Tap
Humans have no monopoly on loving beer. From its warm, grain-rich beginnings to the last bit of water syphoned away during brewing, beer is a feast for species great and small. Cattle munch on the grain left over after brewing. New crops of barley thrive under a mulch of spent grain. Microbes multiply in the […]
Posted inEat + Drink
Humboldt on Tap
The first time someone offered me a shandy — and explained the ingredients — I thought it sounded disgusting. I ordered one anyway, because what’s the point of walking into a pub in London if you aren’t at least a little curious about what the locals are drinking? The combination, described to me as beer […]
Posted inEat + Drink
Humboldt on Tap
We’re stronger together. Families know it, unions know it and, in Crescent City, the brewers swear by it. After swiftly raising their local brewery count from zero to two, Crescent City’s fledgling breweries sometimes turn to each other to borrow ingredients. “We’re totally cooperative,” says Ryan Wakefield, co-owner of SeaQuake Brewing. “Together we’re stronger than […]
Posted inEat + Drink
Humboldt on Tap
Adam Satrom reaches a gloved hand toward the ranks of empty beer cans waiting beside him. Checking for tiny defects that could spoil a good seal, he sets four, six, eight cans on his mobile canning machine. They jostle into a row down the conveyor belt as he tosses away the rare discard. Satrom is […]
Posted inEat + Drink
Humboldt on Tap
Next time you’re wandering Eureka’s waterfront, take a moment to look west and remember: All that lies between you and South Korea is a boat ride. “A very short boat ride,” Sunghoo Yang assures me. Yang, slender and understated, manages to look urbane even in jeans and a hoodie bearing his brewery’s name: The Booth […]
Posted inEat + Drink
Humboldt on Tap
From the roof of the Eureka Theater, sweeping views clash with a rickety reality. Cracks zigzag through stucco. Failing metal ties are streaked with cobwebs and bird droppings. The decorative whorls that once topped the “E” in “Eureka” lie jagged and rusting, like a giant, broken snail shell. It’s easy to imagine a day, nearly […]
Posted inEat + Drink
Humboldt on Tap
Bent over his field, scythe in hand, Jacob Pressey moves across the barley like a farmer from some lost impressionist painting. Sunlight burnishes the dry stalks. A haze of golden fluff rises with each stroke. Behind him, a friend rakes mounds of felled barely. It is harvest day at Humboldt County’s only beer farm, two […]
Posted inEat + Drink
Humboldt on Tap
Just when I’m purring along in no-place-could-be-better-than-Humboldt-mode, some other locale saunters by, its gaze smoldering over a frothy beer glass, and my heart wobbles. This time it’s Oregon. Sweet, seductive Oregon, which made Saccharomyces cerevisiae the official state microbe. To even have a state microbe is geekily wonderful. To choose yeast, the microbe that makes […]
Posted inEat + Drink
Humboldt on Tap
This is a story about marketing, glassware and how your brain loves you and wants you to be happy. Let’s start in 2001, when a French study used food coloring to dye white wine red. People who should know a little something about wine (in this case, enology undergrads in France) described its flavor notes […]