Draft's Best Beer Bars List for 2011

Draft Magazine has put out their annual best bars list, and the NW done good: seven pubs in Portland and four in Seattle. Other cities faring well include Philly (5) and Chicago (4). If you collect together Brooklyn and NYC, you get five, and four if you combine San Francisco and Oakland. I'm proud to say that two SoCal pubs, Tony's Darts Away and the Blind Lady, are both certified purveyors of honest pints. Congrats!

Portland pubs on the list:

• Apex
• Bailey's
  
• Belmont Station
• Concordia Ale House
• Green Dragon
• Horse Brass
• Saraveza

Seattle pubs:

• Beveridge Place
• Naked City Taphouse
  
• Stumbling Monk
• Uber Tavern
  

Honest Pint in Draft Magazine

The September/October issue of Draft Magazine arrived in my mailbox late last week, and I was pleased to find my editorial promoting the Honest Pint Project inside. "A Pint of Honesty" (good title--the editors, not me, came up with it) appears on the last page, in the "Beer Me" column. Although a fair amount of the issue's content is online, my piece is not. You'll have to go find it on the newsstand (Barnes and Noble for sure, maybe also Borders and Powell's).

I sent the piece in because, while regular readers of this blog are familiar with the effort, it still hasn't gotten major attention nationally. I'll excerpt the final paragraph, so you can get some of the gist:

[B]eer drinkers outside Oregon also deserve honest pints. Whenever I travel around, I study the glassware. It’s no different than it was here; drinkers across the country have no way of telling how large their glasses are, and the problem persists because customers haven’t demanded a change. The most important thing you can do is bring the issue to the attention of your local publican. He’s there to make you happy, and if you demand an honest pint, he’ll serve you one. If you know that your local does serve honest pints, go to the project's web site and find out how you can certify it as an Honest Purveyor. The time has come for America to have glassware standards as good as our beer. Go forth, beer drinkers, and demand an honest pint!

Draft Magazine
Incidentally, Draft Magazine may now be the most interesting beer mag on the market. If you haven't checked it out, you might pick up a copy. This issue has a great story on hop farming in Michigan, a piece on Okinawan sake (nearly lost after WWII, but making a comeback), and a nice piece on innovations in brewing (which really just charts the current state of American brewing). I also appreciate their beer ratings, which do more to place their well-selected beers in context and provide the reader more clarity about what the beer will taste like and why it gets the rating it does.


More Honest Pint News
Speaking of Honest Pints, I got this email from Jim LaPlume:

I am an avid home brewer, craft beer afficionado, and President and Founder of the Northern Rhode Island Home Brewers Guild, and I have never taken the time to ensure I was recieving a proper pint.

So with that being said, I am mobilizing the NRIHBG Army, and the month of November we will be calling the Publicans and Pint Pourers of Rhode Island to task. We are going to be assaulting the local beer bars, sports bars, reasturants and taverns armed with measuring glasses and camera's.

I will notify you when our campaign begins and you will recieve regular updates.

We Shall Overcome, Amen, Halleluah, Pour Another Pint.

Kind of makes you patriotically misty when a New Englander gets his dander up, doesn't it? I look foward to posting the results of Jim's assault next month.