Links From All Over

1. Bill has clearly breached the firewall: not only does he write about the Widmers, he is a part owner of the brewery. Alert the feds! Actually, it's pretty brilliant, because now he acts as our mole inside the Craft Brewers Alliance:

Somewhere in between, I made a small investment in 115 shares of HOOK, ignoring my own advice about the risks involved.... And so it was that yesterday I wandered over to Russell Street to attend the 2011 CBA Shareholders Meeting.

Indispensable reading.

2. Ritch Marvin has put together a really fantastic video of Upright Brewing for their 2nd anniversary. It features an interview with Alex Ganum, but also has lots of beautiful photography, as well. I considered stealing it for Friday Flick, but The New School deserves the traffic. So go watch. Indispensable viewing.

3. Alan McLeod has an ax to grind: craft beer drinkers are impure. They inhabit the same grubby, fallen world as macro drinkers. They are secret swillers. They frost their terrible drinking habits with the sugary lies about moderation. Fair enough, Alan, but I'm an innocent bystander.

4. Colorado blogger Soggy Coaster visited Oregon recently and made some discoveries:

Craft brewers in Oregon, having mastered the arts of the hop bomb and barrel-aged strong ale, are looking farther afield for inspiration. Most remarkably, I had three beer styles I'd never before encountered: Gruit, Gose and Berliner Weisse.

Unfortunately for the rest of the country, if you want to taste these beers--and many more non-hoppy examples like them--you have to come to Oregon. Their distribution is about a fifty-mile radius. Even then, they can't brew enough beer to satisfy gose-heads.

5. Roscoe's is having one of their regular mini-fests, and it looks rocking good: the Second Annual Belgian Beer Summit. It's a really nice mixture of rare-ish Belgians (Struise, Glazen Toren) and examples of exceptional Belgian-style American beers. Fri, 4pm - close, Sat, 2:30pm - close. 8105 SE Stark, Portland.