The Angry Beaver has endured a lot. Perhaps that’s why it’s so angry.
Billed as Seattle’s only hockey bar, the Angry Beaver has been operating in the Greenwood neighborhood since 2012. On busy nights, it looks like a hockey quilt: different fans in different jerseys, clustered together, watching their NHL teams, never having to ask for the games to be put on the TVs because they’d already be on when they walked into the Beaver.
It’s a bar that would open at 6 a.m. for World Juniors, and stayed open past 2 a.m. when Canada won Olympic gold in Sochi. It’s a memorabilia-packed, puck Mecca owner Tim Pipes calls “a beautiful bar that can smell like a jock strap by the end of the playoffs.”
It also exploded once. Then it was robbed, right down to the last bottle. That was before the COVID-19 pandemic forced it to close recently, throwing its future into question less than a year before this hockey bar was finally going to have an NHL team to call its own with the arrival of the Seattle Kraken.
“It’s part of the Seattle hockey grassroots community,” said John Barr, an Angry Beaver patron who founded the NHL To Seattle advocacy group. “To stick it out through the lockout and the explosion and now a pandemic, and to be so close and then not to make it … that would be devastating.”