Salt & Hops aims to accumulate tough-to-discover beers and other beverages in a person area.
(Rick Egan | The Salt Lake Tribune) Mary Rydman and Greg Evans at Salt & Hops, the new Beer Boutique on 27th St. in Ogden, on Monday, Might 2, 2022.
Through lockdown, bored with doing the job at home, Mary Rydman and Greg Evans met up for online games of lunchtime pingpong.
Sometimes they talked about beer.
“We both of those love beer, but we locate it challenging to get constantly excellent beer in Ogden,” Evans stated.
The discussions turned severe on the highway back again from Las Vegas past slide. “We talked about a business enterprise approach, got to operate, used for our company license, applied for our liquor license, begun ordering coolers and producing interactions with distributors and vendors… and in this article we are,” Evans claimed.
The consequence is Salt & Hops, a 500-square-foot “beer boutique,” at 443 27th St. in Ogden’s historic district. The small business opened in February, advertising a lot more than 150 varieties of craft brews — lots of of them really hard to come across — together with mixers, cocktail substances, chocolate and salty treats.
The pair’s goal is to aid these kinds of Ogden breweries as Rooster’s Brewing, Cerveza Zólupez Beer Firm, UTOG, Talisman, and Ogden River. They also have solid associations with Salt Lake City breweries, like Kiito’s, Epic, Stage Crossing, Shades and Fisher.
(Rick Egan | The Salt Lake Tribune) Salt & Hops, the new Beer Boutique on 27th St. in Ogden, on Monday, May perhaps 2, 2022.
“There’s actually nobody out there seeking to set jointly all the wonderful craft brews that are remaining manufactured in Ogden and Salt Lake,” Rydman claimed. “It’s hit and miss out on unless you go to the brewery by itself, and which is difficult to do all the time. So we imagined, well, for some of these beers that are tricky to discover that we like, and these excellent models that are out right here locally, there’s a authentic area of interest right here.”
Evans and Rydman also want to help Ogden’s innovative local community. The shop is the distinctive stocker of the Ogden-based queer artwork zine The LQ, and generally collaborates with Lavender Vinyl history store. Very last month, when Degree Crossing brewed a sour named after Frank Zappa, Salt & Hops invited Lavender to arrive in and offer its inventory of Mothers of Creation documents.
One particular of the initial merchandise they stocked was gluten-free of charge beer — mainly because Rydman’s wife, who has celiac ailment, experienced a hard time discovering it. The enterprise serves Kiito’s gluten-free of charge golden ale, as perfectly as really hard kombuchas, tricky seltzers and some reduced-alcohol ciders. (Almost everything in Salt & Hops’ stock has 5% alcohol by volume or significantly less ciders have a tendency to have better ABVs.)
The “hops” part of the title is obvious, but the “salt” part, amazingly, isn’t a reference to Utah’s Good Salt Lake.
“Mary and I would consume beer on Fridays just after operate, and we kind of normally experienced this identical joke that we essential salty snacks to go with beer,” Evans reported. “We just type of grew from there.”
Just like the beer, the snacks are a much cry from the usual fuel station fare — such as spicy habanero-dusted potato chips, spicy toasted corn, fruit snacks designed from rescued “ugly make,” a vegan model of Cheetos, organic chocolate bars, and very hot sauces and mixers from this sort of local organizations as Bitters Lab and Z’s Primary Bloody Mary Mix.
(Rick Egan | The Salt Lake Tribune) Things from neighborhood merchants, at Salt & Hops, the new Beer Boutique on 27th St. in Ogden, on Monday, May well 2, 2022.
The shop also accommodates men and women who really do not consume. “We have a pretty superior assortment of nonalcoholic beers, whiskey and gin,” Evans claimed. “If you add up all the nonalcoholic revenue, it’s possibly equivalent to our ideal-providing beer.”
That beer is a seasonal 1: Kiito’s environmentally friendly glitter beer, brewed for St. Patrick’s Day. Evans reported they be expecting Ogden River’s Becker’s Best pilsner to overtake it soon as the most well-liked beer, at the very least till people get their arms on Kiito’s Large Homosexual Ale, brewed for Pride Thirty day period in June it options pink and silver glitter.
But Evans and Rydman do not just adhere with the bestsellers. They bring in at the very least a person new beer each 7 days, and frequently 5 or 6.
Rydman mentioned the ideal way to uncover out what is in the coolers is to check out the shop’s Instagram mid-week, when they announce new arrivals. Often that is also in which they submit about cheeky, limited-phrase collaborations, like pairing Mountain Donuts’ lemon bismarks with Epic’s Lemon Bomb.
Consuming fantastic beer is significant, but so is owning exciting, Rydman claimed.
“We’re normally participating in really excellent music in the entrance,” Rydman mentioned. “We just want people today to assume it’s a definitely great room and to want to come in. You can carry your pet dog in if you want. It is just a entertaining area to occur. That is what we preferred it to be about from the beginning.”
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(Rick Egan | The Salt Lake Tribune) Salt & Hops, the new Beer Boutique on 27th St. in Ogden, on Monday, Could 2, 2022.