Numbers of the Day: 17 and 47

The post has been updated below.

The Oregon Brewers Guild put out a press release today with the latest stats and figures on the state's beer industry.  It charts the ever-upward trends that now come to seem rote: 1.3 million barrels of beer brewed, up 11%; nearly one gross breweries operating 174 facilities in 59 cities; fifty-one breweries in Portland.  But what did leap off the page were these figures:

More than 17 percent of the 2.79 million barrels of all beer — both bottled and draft — consumed in the state were made in Oregon. For draft beer, that percentage is even higher, with Oregon breweries producing an estimated 47 percent of all draft beer consumed in the state.

Oregon-produced beer is all "craft" (admitting that the word has little real use)--or better yet, none of the beer made in Oregon is mass market lager.  The Guild helpfully points out that nationally, craft beer has only a 6.5% share of the beer market.  To put the 17% figure in context, the market for ales in Britain is currently just 14%.  You can also see the place of craft beer in the drinking ecosystem of Oregon: when people go out for a pint, they're drinking "craft" beer at an astounding rate--well over 50% when you consider the national craft and imported beers Oregonians are drinking alongside the local beers.

I have really tried to ratchet back the tub-thumping when it comes to writing about Oregon, but these are the kinds of stats that illustrate how mature our market is becoming.


Update.   I had an exchange on Twitter that reminded me of an important point these numbers reveal.  When we see that 17% of the beer market is craft (actually, the non-mass market is more than 20% with imports and beer from other states), we may think of this as shorthand for a discrete group--17% of beer drinkers are craft-beer drinkers.  This is where the 47% figure is a useful antidote.  In Oregon, a ton of people drink non-mass market beer.  When that Bud drinker goes out to a decent restaurant, he's probably drinking a Mirror Pond.  That twenty-four-year-old at Freddy's with the sixer of Pabst probably drinks a fair amount of Ninkasi.  As weird as it may seem to some beer geeks, the reality is that a lot of people don't think of mass market lagers as "swill."  It's just beer, and sometimes they like it.  Sometimes they like IPA.

It's why the notion of a low ceiling for craft beer is misguided.  There's no reason Oregon won't one day be a majority-craft market, and part of the reason is because the people drinking both the mass-market lagers and craft beers will be the same people.

Update to the update.   Oh, and I see that the Beeronomist has further analysis.  He hones in on the pub market as a point of focus.

Fermentation Sciences at OSU

I have been to a lot of very cool beer places.  Many of them have strata of beeriness, one packed on another over time.  The Brussels area, various places in Bohemia.  None, though, can compete with Munich.  It is in the heart of barley-growing country and just down the road from the Hallertauer hop fields.  Three styles were invented or strongly associated with the town ("inventing" dunkel--I won't go there).  It is absolutely loaded with famous breweries: Spaten (where helles and marzen were first brewed), Paulaner, Augustiner, Hofbrau, and nearby are Ayinger, Andechs, and Weihenstephen.  Speaking of Weihenstephen, there are two brewing schools there, too--it and Doemens.  In Germany, all roads lead to Munich.

I don't want to get too boosterish, but Oregon is starting to lay in a few layers of bedrock itself.  I was reminded of another in an email from Oregon State pointing me to a webpage they recently finished to promote the Fermentation Sciences program.  It used to be that if you wanted to get a undergrad degree in brewing, it meant heading to Davis.  Now you have OSU as an alternative, and it's nothing to sniff at.  The university has wisely put Tom Shellhammer out in front--as one of the world leaders in hop research, he's a pretty attractive draw.  You have hop fields nearby, the campus has its own little brewery, and of course, you can't swing a dead cat without hitting another brewer in the nose.

No place in Oregon is about to eclipse Munich anytime soon.  But if you wanted to Munich-ize your region, you'd do what we're doing here.  Over time, you'd see large breweries emerge, see agriculture respond to the brewing industry (including, as in Hood River, the farming of wild yeasts), see schools dedicated to teaching brewing, research done to support it, and a very broad base of local culture consuming it. 

So far, so good.

Oregon: the Most-Breweried State?

Note: Post has been updated.

Oregon Public Broadcasting has been reporting this interesting tidbit the last couple days:

Oregon may have surpassed Vermont last year as the state with the most breweries per capita.  That's one conclusion of a new report from Oregon's employment department.

I can't find the report, and after enticing us with that lede, OPB offers no support for the finding at all.  With brewery openings happening as fast as they are, it would be hard to nail down this number--and that's if you could agree on what qualifies as a "brewery."  (The Lucky Lab has two brewing locations and four pubs--do you count it as one, two, or four?)  If some official body did award Oregon the laurel, bully for us.  It would be another talking point for Beervana.

A word of caution, though.  The only reason to cite per capita numbers is to use them as a metric for something.  Something we might call a "beeriness index," I presume.  If you have a lot of breweries per capita, it follows, you must have great beeriness.  This is partly a statistical illusion.  Which is a more beery state, Idaho or California?  Intuition tells you that the home of Firestone Walker, Sierra Nevada, Anchor, and Russian River probably bests the home of ... er, whatever.  Idaho, it turns out, has about double the density of breweries per capita.

Looking at the lists of these things, what you find is that measuring breweries per capita makes states with small populations look especially grand.  The seven most breweried states: Vermont, Oregon, Montana, Colorado, Maine, Wyoming, and Alaska--the 49th, 27th, 44th, 22nd, 41st, 50th, and 47th largest states.  Or, put another way, for California to have the same density of breweries as Vermont, it would have to have 1,267 of them.

A beeriness index should include per capita numbers, but it those numbers don't begin to tell the whole story on their own.

 _____________________

Update.  In comments, Greg points to the actual findings of the study, which are beyond dubious:

"In 2010, Oregon was ranked second by the Brewers Association for states' brewery per capita with 31,660 people for each brew pub. At that time, they counted 110 breweries. Using the 184 brewery and brew pub units from this analysis (units with or without employment) and the Population Research Center's 2011 Oregon population estimate, in 2011 there were just 20,965 Oregonians per brewery. That puts Oregon well above Vermont, the 2010 number one ranked state. In 2010, Vermont had 27,800 people per brewery. The Brewers Association has not published a 2011 ranking."

It's bad enough that they compare Oregon's 2011 numbers with Vermont's from the year previous, but egregious over a period when the number of brewery openings exploded by 20-30%.  Not only that, but they have used a statistic ("brewery and brew pub units") that is inconsistent with the way everyone else counts breweries.  The Oregon Brewers Guild--the gold standard in these matters--says, "There are currently 120 brewing companies, operating 153 brewing facilities in 59 cities in Oregon."

I have no idea which state has the most breweries per capita.  Neither does the Oregon Department of Employment.

Admittedly, It's No Munster, Indiana

Update to the update:  I missed this, from that same BeerAdvocate thread.  It comes from Josh Noel, who originally quoted Floyd in the Chicago Tribune.  Caveat reader:

"I like and respect Three Floyds’ work, as evidenced by my story in the Tribune this week. I stand by how I quoted Nick Floyd regarding Portland beer in the blog post that accompanied the story."

Update:  Hat tip Matthew DiTullo for spotting this at BeerAdvocate:

I would like to say I do not hate Portland or the Portland brewers or brewing scene. I was misquoted in a remark I made about ONE early McManamins pub I didn’t care for.  I f%$@ing love Portland and all its beer I am a good friend of Van Havig.  I drank many times with Don Younger (RIP) and loved him and the Horse Brass, Tony Lawrence from Boneyard ( I know it's in Bend) is a best friend. Portland was the first place I traveled as a professional brewer--to the old Flanders street pub.  Bridgeport is one of my favorites.  It's the first place I saw nicros on draught 9 to 1 over macro beer and at a stripclub.  Portland rules! Put a bird on it!  I love it! Aorry I was misquoted
-- your humble narrator, Nick F 3Floyds

A classic case of blaming the media.  :-)  I'd still like to drink some beers with Nick the next time he swings through--

____________

Thanks to an eagle-eyed Matt Wiater, we have this fine quote to consider.  It comes from Nick Floyd, founder of Three Floyds Brewing:

"If you're not traveling and learning new stuff, you're sort of stuck," he said. "Look at Portland. It's still based on Willamette and Cluster (hops). It's the same (bleeping) beer you were drinking 30 years ago!"

"Portland was great in the 80s and 90s when there was nothing like it," he continued. "It used to be inspirational. It still is. But the more you travel and learn, the better."

A post-1980s barrel room.

There are certain personality traits that make for successful entrepreneurs: brash self-confidence, drive and energy, the risk-taking of a riverboat gambler.  They can even benefit from willful ignorance--of risk, for example.  These traits are not uniformly prized in other areas.  In this case, for example, we might note that a Google search might have disabused Nick of some strange views; and a little humility might have prevented him from offering opinions on topics he has no recent information.

I mean, cluster hops, really?  Quick, aside from that novelty beer Double Mountain made with them last year, can anyone name me a single Portland beer that uses Cluster?  Willamettes are not as vanishingly rare, but suffice it to say we've managed to get wind of some newer strains out here.  (Partly by visiting the hop fields one hour south.)

The great irony is that the reporter led into this quote by explaining that "Floyd loves traveling because it is stimulating and challenging, which he explained by slightly denigrating what's being poured these days in craft beer's early mecca, Portland, Ore."  I have no idea where he might have gotten his ideas about our fair city, but it's clear the one place he didn't get them was Portland.

A stimulating and challenging trip to Cascade Barrel House, Hair of the Dog, The Commons, Upright, Breakside, et al is exactly what I recommend to Nick.  Come on out, man, we'll show you what remains the best beer city in America, two decades running.  No Willamettes or Clusters need be harmed in the making of your adventure.

How Many Breweries ... ?

Stan Hieronymus, newly moved to St. Louis, writes:

The other day I had a quick keep-it-to-less-than-140-characters exchange with a professional brewer not in St. Louis. He asked, in view of the number of relatively new breweries and additional ones about to open here, how many I think the region can support. I copped out and answered I’m too new to town to guess.

Always keen to promote Oregon, I'll offer a few benchmarks. (Keeping in mind that no macro-breweries Portland/Oregon is different from notable macro St Louis/Missouri.) Based on our fair city (population 583,776, forty breweries) and state (population 3,831,074, ninety-one brewing companies), Stan's new home could support 22 breweries in St. Louis or 142 in Missouri. The actual numbers are 11 and 39 respectively.

In fact, it is nearly always the case that mental ceilings placed on the number of breweries a state can support or amount of craft beer it will buy are lower than totals already enjoyed in Oregon. More than 15% of the beer sold in Oregon is craft-brewed. If the rest of the US matched this mark, the volume of craft beer would be 30.6 million barrels sold--in 2010, the actual figure was 10 million. Maybe the rest of the country won't ever reach this point (though there's not a shred of evidence to suggest why), but clearly, it's got a lot of room to grow.

___________
Sources: Oregon Brewers Guild for Oregon stats, Wikipedia for population stats, and Beer Me! and VisitMo.com for Missouri stats.

Must Be Beervana

Gardeners have used hops for decades as ornamental and hardy climbers. But how many nurseries include alpha acid percentage and recommendations for beer styles with their rhizomes?


I was surprised and amused to find these at Portland Nursery this morning. Obviously, gardeners in Portland don't care about hops' ornamental value.

If Football Were Beer, Oregon Would Crush Alabama

I have a grave fear about tonight. (This owes more to being principally a fan of the Badgers, Blazers, Packers, and Red Sox than anything.) As a pre-emptive strike--or maybe a diversionary tactic--I offer one way in which Oregon absolutely trounces the Yellowhammer state: beer. We're number one, we're number one!

Alabama: 6 breweries
Alabama pop: 4.6 million (3.2 mil 21+)
Alabama breweries per-capita: 1 in 767,000

Oregon: 112 breweries
Oregon pop: 3.8 mil (2.5 mil 21+)
Oregon breweries per-capita: 1 in 34,000

Auburn, AL: 0 breweries
Auburn pop: 58,000
Auburn brweries per-capita: 0

Eugene, OR: 5 breweries
Eugene pop: 155,000
Eugene breweries per-capita: 1 in 31,000

Alabama per-capita beer consumption: 30.3 gallons/yr
Oregon per-capita beer consumption: 30.8 gal/yr

If my fears are borne out, please refer to this post as a pick-me-up. In the meantime, Go Ducks!

The Miracle Mile

Time for a little profit-taking. Although this blog is called "Beervana," I try to limit the amount of chest-thumping I do with regard to its objective superiority as a beer mecca. Such histrionics are bad form and not particularly edifying to those outside our cloud-soaked hop heaven. Nevertheless, objective superiority does call for certain admissions at times--journalistic, cold-eyed appraisals of just how superior this place really is.

Everyone knows Portland has a lot of breweries. More, apparently, than any city on earth. We drink more pints of craft beer than any city in America. We have 719 beer festivals a year (roughly). No data on such facts exist, but my bet is that more styles of beer were brewed in Portland in the past year than in any city in the world. Amid these Ripley-like Amazing Facts, let me add another: the Miracle Mile, a short jaunt (.9 miles, actually) that takes a person to the doorstep of four breweries. The route takes you from Hair of the Dog (recommended tipple: Adam) to Rogue's Green Dragon (try the rotating brewery special, but don't ignore the 50 import and craft taps) to the newly-opened Cascade Barrel House (Apricot Ale) and finally, if you're still upright, for a nightcap at the Lucky Lab (Super Dog). Can any other city match this speed--four breweries a mile? Can they match the quality of beer along our own Miracle Mile? No. I haven't done a study, but no.

That's why we call it Beervana. Unashamedly. If you haven't had the pleasure, please, come and check it out.

Get Your Kicks on I-84

Okay, so it doesn't have the same ring as Route 66; but I-84 from Portland to Ontario, Oregon may be among the richest troves of beer in the US. Along those 375 miles, you encounter seven sizable towns (Hood River, the Dalles, Boardman, Pendleton, La Grande, Baker City, and Ontario) and three tiny ones (Biggs, Arlington, Rufus). The population of these towns, collected together, is 75,000, or about the same size as Medford, our small state's 7th largest city.

Yet also along this route, you will encounter seven breweries (and that's if you don't take a bridge across the river where you can immediately locate two more). Not bad. There is a bit of a rocky stretch there between Hood River and Pendleton, where you have to drive nearly 147 long miles between breweries. Thereafter, you find a brewery in every major town all the way to the Idaho border.

For those not familiar with this stretch, it is, shall we say, stark. An amazing climatic shift happens in east Hood River; the firs change over to pine, and then disappear altogether as the wet climate gives way to arid high desert. Humans have managed to cobble together hardscrabble lives along the Columbia River, herding cattle and tending fields--but not many of them. It's not a landscape that supports much life at all. Each city huddles under river-fed trees in the bright sunshine like little oases, but they don't seem to promise much in the way of exceptional beers. But this is Beervana, so appearances deceive.

I wonder, is there any other stretch of America so apparently bereft of civilization but rich in craft breweries? We are fortunate indeed.

________________
PHOTO: H ROACH

Amusing Tweet of the Day

Okay, so here I am, scanning all the election results, tweeting like a madman on my other account, and this comes across the transom:

MayorSamAdams For the love of hops, VOTE! RT @dtboyd: Spread the word to make sure Portland is voted Beer City USA http://bit.ly/98PQrx #Pdx

Primary election night and the mayor of Portland is exhorting his neighbors to vote BeerCity USA in an online poll? See, Asheville, that's why they call us Beervana.

Beer City USA? Let's Sit This One Out

Last year, Charlie Papazian hosted an online poll to crown "BeerCity USA." The poll was almost as silly as cramming together the words "beer" and "city," but we Portland bloggers gamely played along. (With one prescient, notable exception.) In the end, Portland won, but Papazian violated his own rules and declared us joint winners with Asheville, North Carolina.

Charlie's doing it again this year (though mercifully, the poll is only open a week, not months like last year). And again the only two cities who are competing are Portland and Asheville. Personally, I find the whole business unseemly. I say let Asheville (where the poll has made the local news) run away with it. Who cares? Better yet, vote for a different city altogether, one deserving of the attention. This year I voted for San Francisco, mainly because Jay Brooks seems genuinely disappointed that no one there is voting for his fair city. Lord knows it's a better choice than Asheville.

Portlanders, let's be dignified this year. We can watch it with amusement from one of our 33 breweries. Sit it out. And go San Fran!

Not This Again

I give this three and a half yawns. Yet another rating of best beer cities, yet another selection of someplace other than Portland as best. For sheer chutzpah, the list (from Men's Journal--you're a reader, right?) includes Chicago and New York but not Denver, SF, or Seattle. Nicely done!

Men's Journal's Best Beer Cities
1. San Diego
2. New York
3. Portland
4. Philadelphia
5. Chicago

We have had this debate many times in the past, and we'll have it in the future. It's always a stupid exercise designed to sell magazines, and it usually works (which is why I won't link to it). The criteria is never clear, and the writers almost never know their ass from a hole in the ground. For what it's worth, I've already written about the criteria on which I'd judge a "beer city."

Hat tip to Seattle Beer News--and if you follow the link, it will take you to the Men's Journal article.

Compare and Contrast: Minnesota and Oregon

Those of you who follow me on Twitter will know that my recent sojourn to Minnesota was somewhat fraught with failure in an attempt to find indigenous beer. In four days I managed just two: a bottle of Schell's Dark and draft Summit Extra Pale. I found this very strange. The Upper Midwest is beer country and Minnesota has been home to a host of famous brands: Hamm's, Schmidt, Grain Belt, and Schell (still independent after 149 years).

At the various restaurants I visited, the slate of draft beers was almost identical: Corona, a national brand and its "lite" variant, Summit Extra Pale, and one import (variously Guinness, Beck's, and Smithwick's). Yet it is consistent with a surprising finding I stumbled across when I was doing research on highly-concentrated brewing regions: Minnesota, with just 22, a per-capita rate similar to Kansas'. Why would a place with a rich brewing history and towns as funky and beer-ready as the Twin Cities have so little local craft-brewing ferment?

One component is definitely local liquor laws. I discovered this as I wandered out the first night on a post-sunset amble. As is my habit, I made for the first grocery store I could find, in this case a Whole Foods near MacAlester College. I spent a good ten minutes trawling the aisles for the beer cooler before it occurred to me to check the iPhone: sure enough, beer and wine can only be purchased in liquor stores. I have no idea how much this dampens sales or blunts local beer culture, but since that's the intention of such a law, and since both beer availability and local beer culture are so constrained, one has to conclude it's working.

Another measure: according to the BeerAdvocate listing, Minnesota has only 15 brewpubs; compare that to the 71 in Oregon.

Admittedly, I didn't go to real pubs or even restaurants where one would expect many beers. But all had several taps, yet only one devoted to local craft. In Oregon--or at least in Portland--it would be nearly impossible to find a restaurant with four taps that had only a single local craft beer.

I don't doubt that the beer geeks of Minnesota are just as geeky as Beervana's, nor even that there are a lot fewer of them. Yet the experience for the casual visitor is that local beer just isn't getting made or consumed there. I welcome insight and conversation. As always, I return to Portland with renewed appreciation.

The Tension Between Art and Commerce

Charlie Papazian has a very insightful (if slightly scattered) post up today about the trajectory of German brewing. He set the stage yesterday with a post alluding to the huge changes both in the drinking culture and beer of Germany:

There are many reasons for this. The competitive nature of the beer business is purely based on price, forcing many to call it quits. Large breweries buy out small breweries to eliminate competition and international global brewers buy out large breweries to do the same.... The variety and wonderful nuances of different brands of pilseners, Helles lager, dark beers, wheat beers, etc. in Germany are disappearing.

In the first post he fingers consolidation, but of course, consolidation is nothing new; it is a trend dating back at least decades and perhaps centuries. In today's post, he points to a more disturbing phenomenon--one that goes to the heart of what makes a good beer country good.

There is one technical theme I have noticed throughout the decades. Innovations and new techniques are borne of the need to control the character of beer.

Here’s where my perception may get a bit controversial. The basis of brewing science is being able to identify beer character; flavor, aroma, appearance, mouthfeel, etc. It seems that the majority of scientific papers about beer focus on first identifying a character and then technology is further pursued to eliminate or reduce that character.

It’s the identifiable characters in beer that differentiate beers from one another. These characters lend personality and flavor and aromas of interest – but the most delicious and interesting are often not very stable. If a character in flavorful beer is not stable, then for mass beer producing brewers it’s not a good thing. For them consistency in character is king. If a beer changes on the shelves or while in the distribution system, well then, you can’t advertise its character. Why? Because it changes....

That is why whole or natural forms of hops are often not used in these kinds of beers. Hops of different varieties lend character nuances that are not as stable as beers that have been formulated with hop extract, which has no flavor or aroma character, just bitterness.

I have said since I started blogging that we are living in a golden age of brewing. Our brewers are now world-class. They have the luxury of appealing to a large customer base willing to try their new experiments--and this encourages further innovation and improvisation. Charlie is describing the death-spiral that happens when this trend reverses itself. Customers don't care about or understand good beer; they just want something cheap and predictable. Breweries can no longer appeal on the basis of quality or flavor, just cost, meaning only the biggest, most-efficient breweries survive.

Nothing lasts forever, and in 50 years, Oregon may no longer be Beervana. We might have just a handful of large breweries (or two, or one, or none) brewing a handful of boring styles (or two, or one, or none). It's a good reminder as we head into day two of Craft Beer Month. Sometimes we grow complacent about our bounty, but let Germany be a reminder: this really is one of the beeriest place on earth.

Reward Good Behavior

[Post edited for clarity. Man, I gotta start proof-reading these things before hitting "publish post."]

I have been meaning to mention Burgerville's bold experiment for some weeks now. As beery types, you have probably already heard and digested the news. In a pilot program, a Vancouver store is now serving beer and wine.

In some ways, this seems like a no-brainer. Adding locally-made beer and wine is perfectly consonant with Burgerville's commitment to our local bounty. The hard par, I'd imagine, was making the selections. For beer, they went with Full Sail Amber, Widmer Hefeweizen, and Terminal Gravity IPA. Amber is an obvious choice--it is versatile and goes well with food. Hef isn't a bad choice, either, for the same reasons--not to mention its popularity. TG IPA, though--that's bold. I suspect they have it there to match strength with their Anasazi bean burger--as a veggie, I have relied on it when I go. A burly IPA would be a tasty combo. And in any case, the idea of TG IPA at a burger joint is beautifully subversive.

Wines are harder, because they vary year to year. (Parenthetical diversion. A few years ago, Sally and I were introduced to La Bete's Aligote on our anniversary. It was sublime. A year or two later, we bought a bottle at the grocery store, and it was really an inferior vintage. This is the scourge of vinting--Ma Nature has final say. Sidebar to the parenthetical--Alex Ganum scored barrels in which to age his beers from ... La Bete.) The current selection: Ponzi Tavola Pinot Noir, O'Reilly Pinot Gris and the Eyrie Vineyards Chardonnay. Given the difficulty of finding a bottle of local pinot for under $20, it's not surprising that a glass of wine at Burgerville runs you $6.50-$9.

Fantastic, right? Well, oddly enough, Burgerville's gambit has come in for some criticism.

The group Oregon Partnership worried it could lead to trouble, since the restaurants employ underage workers.

“Fast food restaurants are filled with young customers and young employees,” Pete Schulberg, Oregon Partnership’s Communication Director said. “That’s a mix you don’t want when you are considering the sale of alcohol.”

This is mystifying to me. The presence of beer and wine cannot, by their presence, corrupt young minds. (One could more plausibly argue the opposite.)

Resist this controversy and support the local chain. It's a cool idea by an innovative and purely Northwest institution. I regret that it's up in the 'Couv, for I rarely find myself north of the Columbia. I encourage anyone who is to stop in and have a burger and a beer and try to encourage the pilot program. Because there is a Burgerville right over on Hawthorne, and I would love to see that branch follow suit.

Salmon Creek Burgerville
13309 NE Hwy 99
Vancouver, WA 98686
(360) 573-8223

Hipsters With Beer

The New York Times discovers Portland (again):

One accessory, however, was ubiquitous: as breakdance crews windmilled and as the Portland legend Fogatron did his human beatbox routine, every hipster — male, female or otherwise — carried a plastic cup full of beer. Free beer.

And not just free beer but pretty good free beer. Next to the cash registers, barmen pumped kegs of hefeweizen and amber ale, both made by Widmer Brothers, one of the two oldest breweries in what has become the microbrew capital of America. (There are better beers in Portland, but compared with your usual party beer, Widmer’s is premier cru.)

Hipsters? Great, another trigger for Doc Wort's inner curmudgeon. But actually, the article is a pretty spot-on. Writer Matt Gross captures happy hour and brewpubs:

All that exertion justified the other indulgences, which would resume around 4 p.m. with happy hour. Portland requires that its restaurants serve a certain amount of food with their booze, so even the fanciest places offer high-end treats at a big discount. My friends and I ate briny-sweet Willapa Bay oysters ($1 apiece) and short-rib macaroni and cheese ($5) at Ten01, one of the city’s top restaurants, and at the pan-Asian Ping, in Portland’s dilapidated Chinatown, we had Thai-style dried cuttlefish (paradoxically juicy) and Macanese pork-chop sandwiches.

Happy hour didn’t always mean food. On Mondays, it meant $2.50 pints of the wonderful smoked-malt Lompoc Strong Draft, at the New Old Lompoc tavern, and on Tuesdays, it meant $3.50 IPAs at Hopworks Urban Brewery, an energy-efficient brewpub that’s a stop for cyclists on their way home from work.

As well as our other (mostly unmentioned, saltier) drinking establishment:

Finally, and because, as my friend Becky said, a visit to a Portland strip club is inevitable, I wound up one night at the Acropolis Steakhouse Plus, a Vegas-y joint with a $3 cover charge that had been recommended by — of all people — my little sister. She liked it, however, not for the performers (who earned it its nickname, the A Crop) but for the ludicrously cheap steaks. My eight-ounce sirloin cost $5.50 and came deliciously medium-rare. This being Portland, the meat was locally sourced, too, from cattle on the owner’s ranch.

The title tells you the orientation of the writer: to a New Yorker, we practically give stuff away here. (He raved about Thai food at Pok Pok that was $25.) Just no one tell him that salaries in town are also rock-bottom. Maybe we can lure some of those New Yorkers for a visit.

The Scorsese Principle

America's contribution to the history of film is mostly on the commercial side. There are a few exceptions--Billy Wilder, John Ford, Orson Welles. One of these is surely a contemporary, Martin Scorsese, whose oeuvre will one day be considered among the world's finest. Among his credits are some landmark films that changed cinema (Mean Streets, Taxi Driver, The Last Waltz, Raging Bull, Goodfellas) as well as some underappreicated masterpieces like Gangs of New York and Bringing out the Dead. Yet for none of these was he awarded Hollywood's supposed marker of artistic achievement, the Oscar. That he was finally awarded one for a minor picture is a testament only to the shame of the academy who had spurned him for three decades.

The point is, Scorsese's talent didn't require an Oscar for validation. That the Academy hadn't seen fit to award him one only reflected their own shameful, stunted sense of art.

I bring this up because tomorrow is the final day to vote in Charlie Papazian's online poll to recognized "Beer City USA" at next week's American Craft Beer Week. It is likely that the winner of the poll will be Asheville, NC, which currently leads Portland 39% to 34%. This is, of course, a function of a more robust effort at boosterism among the locals of that nascent beer community than anything like an objective survey of which town beer geeks think is the most beery. Some from Beervana are mounting a last minute get-out-the-vote campaign to push us over the top, and so maybe we'll win in the end.

I say don't worry about it. Let Asheville win the contest. It may be good for their brewing community to have a shot in the arm like that. Maybe more people will head down to their local pub and try a craft beer. In the end, a contest like this says a lot more about the people conducting it than who wins. Scorsese's films were landmark creations whether or not the Academy thought Kevin Costner's directing was superior. How many of you still rent Dances With Wolves?

A week or two ago, I was in the County Cork after work having a pint and a lentil burger. In that sun-suffused neighborhood pub, eleven tables were occupied and in the room, eight of the patrons were children under ten. They were accompanied by their parents, nearly all of whom were also having a pint, and by seven, seven-thirty, they had all departed, mostly by foot. Of the many ways in which to gauge what a "beer city" really is, I can think of no better marker. If you have local pubs where families go to dine and enjoy locally-made craft beer, you have deep penetration into the culture of the town. You have young parents who are beer fans and who are rearing their children to regard beer not as a vice, but a healthy, wholesome part of the diet and the pub as a healthy, happy place to see members of your community. The health and roots of such a beer community are robust and sturdy and will support the creation and consumption of local beer for decades to come.

In my admittedly not-to-extensive travels around the country, I've never seen anything like it. Show me a mom with a toddler on her hip and a stout in her hand and I'll show you Beer City USA. Better yet, I'll show you Beervana.

Papazian Asks: Where is Beertown, USA?

Charlie Papazian goes there:

There are many great beer cities such as San Francisco, Philadelphia and Boston. You’ll even find incidences among beer enthusiasts in Portland, Oregon, Seattle, Washington and Denver, Colorado often battling over bragging rights as “Top Beer City, USA.” They’re all out of contention for top honors when it comes to actually calculating the number of breweries per capita in America’s towns.

Guess what? He concludes that based on a per capita basis, Colorado towns finish 1-2 as best Beertowns. Portland finishes fifth. We're going to be having this argument 'til the cows home for their spent grain, but I don't think anyone is really going to buy Durango, Colorado as the best beer town in the country.

First, the factual errors. According to the Oregon Brewers Guild, there are 38 brewing facilities in Portland--for a ratio of 1 in 14,484, moving us up to 4th place. He also misses Bend, with 7 breweries and a ratio of 1 in 10,270 (it'll be 1/9000 in the spring when Brewtal opens). That's good enough to edge Boulder for number 2. The real problem is that small towns have a huge advantage over larger ones. It's no wonder that there's only one actual city in Charlie's top five. (And no wonder that it's Portland, either.)

Looking at cities through a single data point doesn't hardly begin to answer the question. Portland drinks more craft beer than any other city (not per capita--total) and we have the most breweries of any city in the world (not per capita-total). If you're running the stats, you gotta run these, too.

Personally, I think there are far more convincing reasons why Portland's the best beer city in the country:

1. Horse Brass Pub/Bailey's Taproom
   
2. Ducks games at the Mission
3. Organic beer
   
4. Meet the brewers at local pubs
5. Oregon Brewers Festival
   
6. Fred Eckhardt
7. Lucky Lab porch on a summer afternoon
8. Fresh hop ales
9. Six winter ales at the Lompoc
10. Cheers to Belgian beers competition
    

I could come up with another ten--and I'm sure I missed some critical reasons--but you get the point. Durango, Colorado?--come on. We rock.

Dogfish Head 90-Minute IPA versus Beervana

I have begun translating my March Madness winnings into beer (explanation here). Mostly I invested in foreigns and mostly, I confess, in Belgians (I should be more ecumenical, but ...). One domestic I did buy is the much lauded Dogfish Head 90-Minute IPA. Everyone loves it. Esquire called it "perhaps the best I.P.A. in America." Zymurgy didn't stop there, and instead called it "the best commercial beer in America." Raters on both Ratebeer and Beer Advocate give it top marks. In other words, next stop: Transcendence.

Pah.

Dogfish Head has three versions of its IPA, identified by the length of time they infuse the boil with hops. The 90-minute weighs in at 9% and 90 IBUs. Along the East Coast it is renowned for how extreme it is, particularly those 90 IBUs. What I admired about the beer is that the long boil seats the hop flavor into the caramelly maltiness so that the perception of depth is enhanced. Unlike the East Coasters who regard it as cosmically hoppy, I found it leaning in the direction of a barleywine, emphasis on the malt and alcohol. The hops are roughed up during that long boil, and their more evanescent qualities are lost in the boil or kept hidden under the iron fist of the malt and alcohol. I'm not a huge barleywine fan, but as barleywines go, it's a nice version. But it's hardly exceptional, and for a proud and loyal resident of Beervana, all this swooning over an above-average beer looks a little silly.

The Northwest is the furthest region from population centers of our country's founding. The generations of immigrants to Oregon have shared the desire to want to get away from home, and they had to do something more than wander here--they had to want to come. We are too far away and too small to attract the attention of the nation (except Seattle, which is largely misrepresented), and this provokes in us a strong ambivalence. We don't wish to attract attention to our little paradise, because that runs the risk of attracting immigrants who don't understand what makes it a paradise. On the other hand, when you live in paradise, you chafe when the rest of the world fails to acknowledge it.

So it is with beer. I am confident that only Belgium rivals Oregon for the variety of beer, broad availability, and penetration into the consciousness of the residents. But our beers don't leave the Northwest, and when they do, they meet perplexed reception by those who do not have the appreciation and sophistication of our drinkers. On that "Best Commercial Beers" list, 50 in all, there are only three Oregon beers--all from Rogue, the only brewery with national distribution. None rank higher than 34, and that beer is Dead Guy, a decent beer that almost no one in Beervana would call Oregon's best. Yet to the brain trust in Colorado, this is our pièce de résistance.

It's the cross we bear. Our beer is the best, but like our region, no one knows or will or can ever acknowledge it. To the rest of the country, we have the delusions of grandeur typical of parochial backwaters where people just don't know better. And since there are so many parochial backwaters where the locals have delusions of grandeur, I don't blame em.

Fair enough, but I'm still saying Dogfish Head is a good but forgettable beer. A solid B but nothing more. Take that, Delaware!