Ask a longtime Sunnyland resident where to grab a pint on Carolina Street and you might still hear "Twin Sisters." Walk over expecting that sign and you'll find something else waiting behind the same doors, the same beer garden, the same 0.8-acre lot that's anchored that corner of the neighborhood for years.
The building didn't move. The name did. And if you've been telling out-of-town friends that Sunnyland has six breweries within stumbling distance of each other, it's worth checking that number before you say it again this month.
The count that didn't change, until you looked closer
Twin Sisters Brewing Company's Sunnyland facility at 500 Carolina St had been on the market since at least August 2023, first listed at $3.7 million before dropping to $3.3 million by September 2024, a price that covered the property itself along with the restaurant and brewery equipment inside it, according to Cascadia Daily News. On December 31, 2024, Stemma Brewing announced it had bought the place outright, planning to fold it into its operation as a second location.
Stemma owner Jason Harper told Cascadia Daily News the family hoped to have part of the space open within a couple of months and the rest reopened by early summer 2025. That's what happened. The building reopened as Stemma West, its old "beer garden" signage gone, its interior remodeled to match Stemma's cleaner look. The original Stemma location on Moore Street kept running the whole time.
So the physical count of breweries in Sunnyland hasn't shrunk. But the number of families running them has. One operator now holds the keys to two of the neighborhood's taproom buildings, and the name that used to belong to an independent brewery now belongs to a satellite location.
The festival lineup shows the swap in real time
You don't have to take my word for the timeline. Sunnyland Fest, the neighborhood's annual brewery pub crawl, put it in print.
| September 2024 (5th Annual) | September 2025 |
|---|---|
| El Sueñito Brewing | El Sueñito Brewing |
| Kulshan Brewing (both taprooms) | Kulshan Sunnyland |
| Otherlands Beer | Otherlands Beer |
| Stemma Brewing | Stemma West |
| Twin Sisters Brewing | — |
| Wander Brewing | Wander Brewing |
In 2024, the fifth annual Sunnyland Fest ran four days, September 19 through 22, with punch cards collecting stamps across six participating breweries including Twin Sisters, according to Washington Beer Blog. A year later, the festival ran Friday through Sunday, September 26 to 28, and the roster had quietly become five stops, with Stemma West standing in for the address that used to be Twin Sisters, per My Bellingham Now.
That's the mechanism working exactly as it always does. You pick up a card at any participating brewery, collect a stamp at each stop, and turn in a full card for a shot at swag and gift cards. Nobody had to redesign the festival to absorb the change. The card just points somewhere different now.
What's actually on tap this week
If you're less interested in ownership history and more interested in where to spend a Tuesday night, the weekly rhythm at the two original James Street taprooms hasn't wavered.
Kulshan's Sunnyland location at 2238 James St, the brewery's first taproom and still home to its small-batch and R&D program, runs a standing calendar of live events, per Kulshan's own site and its listing on bellingham.org:
- Tuesday evenings, 7 to 9 p.m., through September 1
- Thursday evenings, 6 to 8 p.m., through August 27
- Sundays, all day, for "Sunnyland Unplugged," a free acoustic happy hour
- The second Tuesday of every month, when 10 percent of taproom sales goes to a local nonprofit
Greene's Corner, on the opposite corner at James and Virginia streets, keeps its own analog calendar going. Unlike most of the brewery-only spots in the neighborhood, Greene's built its identity around food first and beer second, with an in-house kitchen turning out thin-crust pizzas and scratch-made sandwiches alongside 16 rotating taps. Its August lineup, posted on Greene's own site, includes Sharp 5 Collective on August 6, Yankee Drivers Bluegrass on August 10, and an Old Time Fiddle Jam on August 12. September picks the same three acts back up, with Sharp 5 Collective returning September 3, the Old Time Fiddle Jam September 9, and Yankee Drivers Bluegrass September 10.
The two newer builds keep the row from feeling like a formula
Not everything in Sunnyland's beer scene is about who owns which building. The neighborhood's two most recent additions got there by building something nobody else in town was doing.
Otherlands Beer opened at 2121 Humboldt St on June 25, 2020, founded by Karolina Lobrow and Ben Howe, who met while working at Cambridge Brewing Company in Massachusetts before Ben spent time brewing in rural Denmark and at Wayfinder Beer in Portland. Their self-described "funny little family-owned brewery & cafe" pairs rustic lagers and farmhouse ales with European street food, pierogies and Belgian-style fries among them, a menu you won't find replicated at any other stop on the row, according to bellingham.org's writeup at the time of opening.
El Sueñito Brewing came from an even less predictable direction. Founders Dennis Ramey and Osbaldo Hernández built their reputation running Frelard Tamales, a family tamale shop in Seattle, before converting an old Sunnyland auto shop into a brewery, kitchen, and taproom. For their opening weekend, they collaborated with brewing neighbors Kulshan and Aslan on a horchata milk stout and a raspberry-strawberry gose, pairing their own house beers with tamales built to stand up to hop bitterness, according to Sip Magazine. Neither of these places exists because a bigger operator needed a second address. They exist because two sets of owners wanted to do something specific in this particular neighborhood.
What September still owes you
Earlier this summer, Sunnyland ran its annual Stomp, the July event where local artisans and musicians open their home studios for a free, self-guided walking tour. That one's done for the year. What's still ahead is the bigger one.
Based on the last two years, Sunnyland Fest tends to land somewhere in the back half of September, running either a long weekend or a full four days depending on how the participating breweries want to structure it. Given the current roster of El Sueñito, Kulshan Sunnyland, Otherlands Beer, Stemma West, and Wander Brewing, expect the same punch-card format that's carried the festival since it started, just with one fewer independent name on the card than it had two years ago.
That's not a loss for the neighborhood. The taproom count held. The beer garden held. The pub crawl held. What changed was who signs the lease, and that's the kind of detail you only catch if you're paying attention to the block, not just the address.
If Sunnyland's weekly rhythm is already part of your life, keep the punch card handy this September and see which stop still surprises you. And if you're the kind of person who notices when a building changes hands and wonders what that says about the neighborhood underneath it, that's exactly the kind of local read Julian & Company spends its time on. Reach out any time you want a second opinion on what's actually happening in Bellingham's neighborhoods, beer gardens included.
