Reply #6: "The Flame Tavern" [View All]

[chknltl]

I am not fond of beer from a tap either. I noticed long ago that there was a subtle yucky flavor in some of the tap beer that I sometimes got. This would come and go, vary in strength or disappear altogether. It would be more pronounced especially in some of the dingier haunts which I have been known to frequent. I was President of a fairly large Pool League for 4 years so I got around to LOTS of bars. (Each and every one of them in Whatcom County). One day I asked a bartender friend of mine what was up with this odd subtle flaver. He took me behind the bar and showed me the plastic lines which run from the beer to the tap.....

Now understand first that this bar WAS one of the seediest places I ever had to venture into. I am speaking the absolute unexaggerated truth when I tell you this place had for a form of entertainment a betting game where you put one of the easily found cockroaches under an overturned ashtray and then took bets on which hole the cockroach would venture out of. (They had a special black plastic ashtray for this with the holes numbered), This tavern was known as the best place in Bellingham Washington to go get beat-up on if you were into that sort of thing...especially if you were NOT a Lummi Indian. (They were not being racist...they just loved gettin a bit rowdy at this place and anyone walkin through the door was fair game, this was THEIR bar so THEY made up the rules!) The bathroom was a nightmare that even the eloquent Alfred Hitchcock would have been hard pressed to describe! The bar smelled worse than the bathroom! OSHA denied the place even existied...The Health Department followed OSHA's lead. This then was the infamous Flame Tavern!

.....ok back to those plastic lines which ran from the kegs of beer to the taps. At first I did not understand the significance of the dark green almost black plastic lines through which all the beer at that dive flowed, then I looked closer and discovered to my horror that the green color was due to the algae that was growing IN them. My friend told me that normally bars purge and clean their feed lines on some kind of a regular basis but some places do this more often than others... My friend was campaigning the owner of the Flame Tavern to let him clean those lines some day.... and some day it was hoped that owner would get back to him on that request. This he said, was where that funny taste I noticed was coming from.

The Flame Tavern is now history, it was shut down decades ago...the cockroaches eventually were evicted...the building condemned and torn down but my memory of where the beer at the Flame Tavern flowed prior to being imbibed has never faded. No I am not a beer snob and perhaps it is due to shell shock but given my druthers I'll take my brew out of a bottle please.
c