Best Beer? America, Hands Down

Since I'm in a bomb-throwing mood, let's pick up the pace. The political bloggers have enjoyed a strange little explosion of beery blogging lately (I've been meaning to get to it, but...). The thrust had to do with neoliberal economics, which I won't subject you to--at least not yet--though here are a few of the key posts: Yglesias, Philpott, Konczal. I then tuned out and missed the piece at Crooked Timber Stan linked to yesterday. Written by Brit Chris Bertram and titled "Beer Chauvinism," it was a bomb itself:

Some people think that the United States now brews the best beer, but even they are forced to concede that should you wish to actually drink the stuff, you are better placed (for example) in England where a ten-minute stroll from your front door (in any major or minor city) will likely get you to a pub with a decent selection. However, the partisans of nouveau American beer chauvinism have asserted that whilst England may score highly on that dimension, the typical US supermarket has a world-beating selection of brews.

Chris then embarks on a well-written, amusingly chauvinistic post designed to put impertinent Yanks in their place (was it ever not thus?). And indeed, Chris's argument holds sway because he's able to dictate the terms. He is indeed correct that there remain many places in America where you can't find good beer. He is furthermore correct that in most towns, the corner bar doesn't have a best bitter or mild on tap.

Where Chris does not go, where he can't go, is the question of diversity. On this score we crush all comers. Is there a style brewed on the earth that's not brewed in America? Doubtful. Is there a style once brewed in the world that's not brewed in America? Arguable. Chris might toss out a few likelies: gratzer (we brew it), gose (brew it) adambier (yup--sort of). He might dig into his bag of tricks. What about a Devon White Ale, the ghastly-sounding egg-beer once made in the toe of England in the sixteenth century? Sorry, we make that, too.

It’s the fermentation process that makes this beer unique, however. First, the beer was fermented with a portion of unfermented wort reserved from the previous batch called ‘The Ripening.’ The reserve was kept warm until it was time to brew the next batch, when it was added before fermentation. Presumably, this smelled or tasted like modern sour wort. For this part of the brewing, we pulled about two liters of first runnings from an upcoming beer, put it into a conditioning vessel with some ground malt and an ounce of hops.

And I'm willing to bet $100 Chris has never been to Oregon, or he'd be a lot less certain of himself.


Update: In comments, Dan writes: " America probably brews greatest diversity of stuff, but you'd have to make a more sophisticated argument for outright 'best.'"

Fair enough. Here it is. Breweries in the United States not only produce every commercial beer style produced everywhere else, but for every commercial beer style produced, a domestic US brewery makes at least a credible example. This includes not just standard British, German, and Belgian styles, but rare specialties like lambics (Allagash). Can any other country make this claim of producing credible examples of all the world's styles? No.

Reviews: Red Rising, Westvleteren 12

One thing you have to say about the beer bloggers conference: insanely good beer. At every moment, in and out of sessions, someone was handing you a beer. Things got rolling in the first half hour, when Angelo started waving a bottle around in the universal, "what some?" gesture. We were at the back of the room in a scene that recalled my school days, sniggering and whispering and generally goofing off. He might have been proffering a Budweiser, but I was happy to thrust my glass forward. By way of communicating what the chestnut beer in my glass was, he handed over the cap: Westvleteren 12. And we're off.

I'm not going to review every beer I tried over the weekend (and maybe I shouldn't be reviewing beers at all--the general consensus among bloggers held that reviews are mostly boring) but a few can't be missed. Here they are.

Westvleteren 12
This is easily the most coveted beer in the geek-o-sphere. In order to secure a bottle you must travel to the abbey of Sint Sixtus in Westvleteren, Belgium (or get one from someone who did). The brothers don't distribute. So perhaps it's the rarity or maybe the beatific setting, but Westy 12 has this reputation: ambrosia on earth, god's tears, holy water. (Behold the love.) Styled a quad in the literature, I was shocked to see that it was brown. This was not the only surprise. Angelo said he thought the bottle (secured via eBay) was three years old, and it definitely exhibited the qualities of age. But beyond that, it was very much like an English barleywine. It has a bread pudding aroma with caramel and alcohol. The palate is deep and figgy, with notes of caramel and cola, boozy in the fashion of Thai Mekong whiskey. I wouldn't call it especially complex, though. There was little in the way of yeast-contributed complexity. Perhaps as a Westy unbeliever I am not a reliable witness; for me the beer was not made blood. I wouldn't turn down another pour, though, don't get me wrong. Call it a solid B.

Deschutes The Stoic
Speaking of quads, we've got a new one in town. Last week, Deschutes released a beer that's been in the works awhile, an 11% quad aged in rye and pinot barrels, spiked with sugar and pomegranate molasses, and aged and refermented four times. ("Stoic" is an interesting choice. A Greek philosophy holding that man should be free from passion, unmoved by joy or grief. As one observer said, 'pomegranate molasses--what's stoic about that?") My main reaction is that it seems a bit green. It's still sweet and a bit rummy. There's a mild phenolic note. It is exceedingly smooth, though, and there are no higher alcohols to make it sharp or prickly--which does make it an easy-sippin' 11% beer. I would love to see it grow past this youthful stage and into a more mature...stoic one. I'll get back to you in a year.

Hopworks Galactic Red
It may be that Hopworks will transition slowly into the Imperial brewery. They seem to really hit their stride at about 9% alcohol. I missed Galactic Red when it orbited earth last year, so this was my first opportunity. With big beers, the key is to create clean, clear flavors that don't fuzz out like sounds on an overmatched speaker. It's easy to add intensity; hard to produce clean, bell-like notes. Galactic Red nails it. It's got a candy-like malt base that offers just enough of a foundation for the hop assault, which is vivid, varied, and violent. In a kaleidoscope of hop flavors, you pass from earthy to spicy to piney to citrusy. Like a mushroom trip for hop flavors. They are distinct, though, and a joy to behold--in that eyelids-pasted-back kind of way. An A- any day of the week, and possibly an A if I'm feeling good.

Cigar City Tocobaga Red Ale
One of the hottest breweries in the country is Cigar City, from Tampa, Florida. They are brewing in the classic "International extreme" mode--a sure way to attract geek attention. (Though their list of beers is longer than your arm, so who knows what lies at the heart of their vision.) I approached the beer with a hearty skepticism. Sure, Floridians think it's good beer, but what do Floridians know? Turns out: something. This was a very nice beer, and more to the point, something fresh and new (Alan might take note). The red was, like Hopworks', based on a candyish base, maybe just a touch of caramel. The hopping though, was unique. It was very long and woody, resinous, and cedary. "Woody" doesn't always mean spicy, but here it does. Spicy-oily. And for those who think things must be tame in the South, this beer is a nice refutation. It was very big and very bold. Perhaps just a notch behind Hopworks, but what the hell, call it an A-.

Double Mountain Black Blood
Just a word or two on the robust porter produced from the cherries we picked on Kriek Kamp. Charlie Devereux brought up a growler for the conference, and I got to sample a splash. The main thing is that it was an intense, slightly disturbing color. "Black blood" was right on the money. My palate was a bit shattered when I tried it, but I recall thinking of desert--chocolate, cherry, and a twist of tart. You probably won't have a chance to try it unless you're passing through Hood River in the near future. Still, it was a cool beer.

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Apologies again to Matt Wiater, whose photo I've stolen. Matt was sitting next to me when we tried the Westvleteren, and his photography is always sumptuous (whereas mine is blurry and poorly-composed).

Listen to Your Beer

Karl Ockert wants to change the way we think about beer. Ultimately, he wants to change the way we talk about it, too, but first he wants us to abandon our old mental models. There's a pernicious habit among the beery folk to treat beer like a lab experiment and find the flaws. Beer judging is almost a perverse process of totting up a beer's flaws; as in golf, the least strokes--or black marks--wins. When we do approach beer from the perspective of appreciation, our language is often imprecise and overly broad: "malty," "hoppy" and so on.

Karl, now the technical director for the Master Brewers Association of America, is putting together a program that will teach people to be better appreciators. It's in the vein of the cicerone program, but focused more narrowly on the sensory experience of beer. The idea is to use all one's senses to explore beer, then use a consistent set of terms to describe them. To put a bit of mustard on the process, Karl asked us to think about listening to our beer. (Turned out the point had more to do with the way sounds trigger impressions, memory, and expectations--a nice way of illustrating how the brain, the sixth sense, intrudes on the process.) The sound of beer being poured into a glass and the visual presentation--that's where the process starts, and it goes through the final swallow.

More interesting for our purposes, Karl has completely reimagined the taxonomy of beer. Gone are the classic divisions of ales and lagers, of clusters of styles based on region. Instead, beers are grouped into four groups based on their dominant flavor:

• Malt-driven beers (Examples: Munich helles, brown ale, bock, barleywine, porter)
• Hop-driven beers (Examples: pilsner, pale ale, IPA)
• Fermentation-driven beers (Examples: lambics, Bavarian hefeweizen, abbey ales)
• Flavored beer (Examples: wit, rauchbier, fruit beers, bourbon barrel-aged)

I'm not actually sure these are the best ways to break down beers by category. Saint Angelo De Ieso brought a Westvleteren 12 to the conference (bless him!), and I was struck at how much it reminded me of a barleywine. There was very little fermentation character in it. Speaking of barleywines, some are malt-driven but some, like Ockert's own Old Knucklehead, are damned hoppy.

But that misses the point. Karl's goal is to make us think differently about beer. If we're focused on the dominant flavor, we're looking for the beer's character, its positive attributes. Conceptually, beginning at the place of the dominant flavor and then exploring from there makes perfect sense. Along the way, we might well find a dreaded off-flavor. But finding it doesn't dominate the process; it's just one of the many qualities we find in the beer. It orients the taster toward appreciation, not judgment. (Once you've located the beer's central character, the specifics follow in a more familiar way; the descriptors Karl suggests are standard adjectives that relate to specific elements in a beer, like "clove" or "citrus" or "toffee.")

Whether the Beer Steward Program's model becomes the standard or not, I very much hope the idea Karl's promoting gains currency. We need a new way of thinking about beer; one based on understanding and appreciation rather than judgment.

Volunteer for Mighty Mites and Achieve Beervana

One reason I don't want to get into the event business like my betters is because it's hard and stressful. We have, for example, a bit of a volunteer crisis on the Mighty Mites front: we need more! So if you have even the most passing interest and you don't want to see posts like this again, consider donating a few hours to the cause, wouldja? You need an OLCC server card, and you will be rewarded with tasty beer for your labors. Plus I'll owe you, which can't be a bad thing. Email me at: the_beerax (at) yahoo (dot) com.

Thanks thanks thanks--

Communicating Beer and Social Media

Over the weekend, Portland hosted what I assumed was going to be a fairly dull conference (or is that redundant?) on beer blogging. The issue here is that we're talking about beer blogging--not exactly a topic that requires a lot of training or expertise. As the panels rolled by, what emerged was something entirely different. Turns out it wasn't a bloggers conference after all: it was an exploration of how to communicate craft beer.

That is, after all, one of the central issues that's confronted the industry since 1980. How do you simultaneously educate potential consumers about what beer really is, reconstitute beer culture, and, oh yeah, sell beer? A huge part of this quandary involves communications of various kinds. We've made some progress in three decades, but it's a nice wake-up call to interact with people from around the country in all phases of the industry (the conference is attended by brewers, importers, marketing people, and distributors). I'm reminded that Portland is not the United States and that if you were to run a national poll asking people to guess what an IPA is, only a fraction would have any idea. (Never mind who George Hodgson was).

Social media plays a pretty important role in all of this. The mainstream media never did really cover beer adequately, and now they cover it almost not at all. Information now travels via tweets, through Facebook, indirect vectors like Groupon, and sites like Yelp and BeerAdvocate. Bloggers play their role, too. If you're looking for more in-depth information on breweries or beer, you're likely to find it on a blog. If you search a brand of beer, you'll almost certainly to find blog posts on Google's first page of results.

Much of this is critical stuff. One of the best panels of the fest featured Mississippi blogger Craig Hendry's effort to drag the Magnolia State into the modern era. The issue there is almost entirely one of communication: Mississippi's laws reflect early-20th-century thinking on beer, and Craig's been doing yeoman's work to change views and the laws. Fascinating stuff. (I think we ought to hold next year's conference in Jackson, MS and blow the roof of the joint.)

Karl Ockert, long-time brewer at BridgePort and now technical director of the Master Brewers Association of America, had an absolutely amazing presentation about a new initiative called the Beer Steward Certificate Program. In putting together the materials, the MBAA took the opportunity to entirely re-think the question of beer appreciation, and they came up with a pretty radical conceptual framework. I'll post about that later this week, but the upshot is that MBAA are trying to figure out a better way to communicate beer appreciation.

I talked a bit with Allan Wright, organizer of the conference. He was already thinking about next year's event and wondering how a panel might try to reveal the importance of distribution in the beer industry (surely one of the least-understood aspects of craft brewing). He's also pondering the question of brewery size and beer quality--one that becomes ever more pointed as consolidation picks up speed.

My sense is that communication is a constant. If you read the British blogs, you know that getting the word out about new trends, new research, and providing just basic, accurate information is sometimes an uphill battle. A "bloggers conference" may not address that in a significant way. A beer and media conference like the one we just attended--it could be a great shot in the arm for people trying to get on the same page about the very big task of communicating the manifold issues confronting craft brewing.

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Photo of Ben Love speaking at the 2011 Beer Bloggers Conference by Matt Wiater. See more photos from the conference at Matt's Flickr photostream.

My Debt to Oregon Breweries Grows

This weekend the city of Portland has been hosting a conference for Beer Bloggers. (Which is, actually, a bit of a misnomer. It's more like a conference of beer and social media.) At about every step along the way, Oregon breweries have been helping out and offering free beer. They do it cheerfully and with pleasure. For the bloggers--who've been treated to things like Deschutes' new Stoic, Widmer's 2010 Braggot, Breakside's Gin-barrel Double Wit, Hopworks' Galactic Imperial Red and many more--it's been a real treat. For those of us who worried these bloggers would be stuck in a Doubletree conference room and missing out on the extraordinary bounty, it was most gratifying. Oregon breweries always step up for things like this--always exceed my high expectations--and it's a pleasure to be associated even distantly to them.

Thanks, folks--

Gallup's Latest Alcohol Preferences Survey: Noisy

The last couple years, Gallup has sent me a link to their annual alcohol preferences survey. This year they didn't and it fell to Alan to alert me to the latest numbers. One of the things that really lept off the page last year were the number of women who were apparently flocking to beer. I illustrated the numbers with this handy graph:

Women Citing Beer as Preferred Beverage

_____________________2009____2010__Change
All__________________21%_____27% ___+6%
Under 49 years old___25%_____35% ___+10%
Over 50 years old____15%_____18% ___+3%

Great, right? Well, this year's numbers show a substantial reversal--still positive over '09's numbers, but only modestly so.

Women Citing Beer as Preferred Beverage

_____________________2009____2010___2011
All__________________21%_____27% ___22%
Under 49 years old___25%_____35% ___28%
Over 50 years old____15%_____18% ___17%

The numbers are worse for beer across the map. Beer was favored by 41% of respondents last year and only 36% this year (wine gained 3% to 35% and liquor 2% to 23%)--tied for the lowest ever measured. And it was down particularly badly among young people, who cited it as their favorite alcohol in just 39% of cases (down from 51%).

Of course, it's pretty clear we're just seeing poll "noise." These surveys have a margin of error of ±4%. When you look at the graphs, you see a lot of zig-zagging year-to-year. It's hard to think that such large populations are swinging in preference one year to the next. Rather, there are trends that become exaggerated by single data points.


If you consider the averages, things appear a little different. Over the past ten years, beer is cited as the favorite by an average of 41% of respondents (high of 46, low of 39). That is off the average from the previous decade's average of 45% (high 47%, low 42%). Wine has picked up some the slack, cited by 33% of people over the past decade, up from 30% the decade before. The remainder goes to liquor.

So if we go back to the number for women, I think we could assume the same phenomenon. (Unfortunately, we don't have numbers going back two decades, so we can't see the trendline.) Probably things are moving in the right direction, but far more modestly than it appeared after last year's survey.

Oregon at the GABF

Note the update below, which clarifies the GABF selection process.

Every year the GABF comes and goes and I cast a momentarily longing eye toward Denver--then whinge with indignity that our breweries didn't sweep the medals. Well, for once, my eye won't be longing. I applied for and was miraculously granted a media credential. This means I'll be able to try to sample a vast array of American beers without having to travel a vast array of miles--handy for someone writing a book on beer. It also means I'll be blogging about the fest. To the extent possible, I'll give you a blogger's-eye-view of things, with maybe a dish or two along the way.

For today's post, we have news about the attendees. I was surprised to see the Oregon contingent ringing in at an impressive 27 breweries--or 5.7% of all breweries in attendence. They are:

• 10 Barrel Brewing Company
• Barley Brown’s Brew Pub
• Bend Brewing Co.
• Breakside Brewery
• BridgePort Brewing
• Cascade Lakes
• The Commons Brewery (Beetje)
• Deschutes Brewery
• Full Sail Brewing Company
• GoodLife Brewing Company (Bend)
• Hop Valley Brewing Co.
• Hopworks Urban Brewery
• Laurelwood
• MacTarnahan’s Brewing Company
• Ninkasi Brewing Company
• Oakshire Brewing Company
• Pelican Pub & Brewery
• Ram Restaurant & Brewery – Clackamas
• Ram Restaurant & Brewery – Salem
• Rogue Ales
• Seven Brides Brewing
• Silver Moon Brewing
• Standing Stone Brewing Company
• Steelhead Brewing Company
• Three Creeks Brewing Company
• Upright Brewing Company
• Widmer Brothers Brewing Co

That's nothing compared with California (84,* 18% of all breweries) or Colorado (74,* 16% of all breweries), but pretty good. Washington, incidentally, has 24 breweries in attendance. The full list can be seen here.


Update. Thanks to a comment below, I realize it may not be obvious by this post how the GABF selects breweries. Answer: it doesn't. It's not like Sundance, where even getting into the fest is a big deal. Pay your shekels and you're in. You don't even have to be a craft brewery. So the numbers I cited for participation are purely based on the interest of the breweries in the states themselves.
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*It's actually a little hard to calculate numbers because contract brewing and mergers screw things up. For example, Genessee, Pyramid, and Magic Hat are listed as "Oregon" breweries. Miller is listed as a Colorado brewery. I trimmed the Oregon list and did what I could with CA and CO, but I wouldn't consider these bulletproof counts.

A "Revealing" Promotion?

Just yesterday, I was arguing vigorously that craft brewing promotes an atmosphere of family-friendly conviviality and enjoyment. But today I get an email touting a secretive after-hours pub crawl of establishments where children definitely aren't allowed:

I hear that you are attending the Beer Blogger Conference this weekend in Portland. As you are aware Portland is known for making some World Class Ales and Lagers…. and also for its wide selection of Gentleman Clubs with good beer. How convenient! With that said an “Unsanctioned” group of us from [redacted brewery] would like to load you up on a bus (no pun intended) and take a tour to the following Portland Iconic locations; Acrop, Sassy’s, Mary’s, Union Jacks, or Cabaret. [Redacted brewery] has been known to throw down and the bar tab will be taken care of, but sorry, not the lap dances!

I don't disapprove of this, and I don't want to get anyone in trouble or scotch the event--thus the redacted names. I found it so remarkable, though, that I thought I'd pass it along. To the [redacted brewery]'s credit, lady bloggers were also apparently invited.

For all those visiting bloggers, this is actually a perfect example of the strange city that is the People's Republic of Portland. We have, on the one hand, an ethos so crunchy and socialistic that we have a TV show to mock us, but on the other a classic pioneer libertarian streak that has led to the greatest number of strip clubs per capita in the US. Those strip clubs are also the most flamboyant; the Oregon supreme court has ruled that stripping is expression, and the Oregon constitution has an even more expansive definition of speech than the US constitution. All I'm sayin' is, if you go on the tour, don't expect thongs or pasties.

Go See "The Love of Beer" This Saturday

The Bagdad Theater is the site of the world premier of The Love of Beer, a documentary about women in the craft brewing industry. Alison Grayson filmed it mostly in Portland, and there are a lot of familiar faces. The thrust is that women are slowly making their way into a male-dominated world and being accepted on their own terms. It's not a feminist document (or if it is, it's only in the most mild, third-wave feminist mode), but it does expose some of the challenges women face. Grayson's point of entry was Sarah Pederson of Saraveza and Tanya Cornett at Bend Brewing. The movie follows them along over the course of about a year.

The film isn't a perfect documentary. It has a bit of a shaggy dog feel, and I think it would have been stronger if it had followed Cornett's story and used other women in the movie--Lisa Morrison, Teri Fahrendorf, and Pederson--as examples of other women doing other things. (I shot a documentary about the 2002 Olympics in Salt Lake, and I recognize the challenge Grayson faced of reconstructing a narrative out of a potpourri of interesting footage.) Some of the music cues are strange and the chronology isn't always obvious. But never mind that. It's a very heartfelt movie and an honest one. You get a revealing look into the lives of women, see their challenges and supports. As a bonus, there's some really nice footage about the GABF, which will be new to anyone (like me) who hasn't attended. For Portland craft beer fans, it's a must-see. The feel-good movie of the year!

Saturday August 20th 730pm
Bagdad Theater, $6
3702 S.E. Hawthorne Blvd.
Portland, OR 97214
Advance ticketing at Cascade Tickets

The Strange Nature of Culture and Beer

See the update below with numbers from the Oregon Brewers Guild.

The city of Portland, Oregon is widely regarded to have the best beer culture in the US. (Ashevillians, sit down and listen.) It is abutted:

• on the west by Beaverton, population 90,267,
  
• on the southeast by Milwaukie (not Milwaukee), population 20,291,
• on the east by Gresham, population 105, 594,
  
• on the south by Lake Oswego, population 36,713,
  
• on the southwest by Tigard, population 47,460.
  

Portland has 53 breweries, and the residents consume an absurd percentage of craft beer. Beaverton, Milwaukie, and Lake Oswego, combined, have zero breweries (there are a couple McMenamins pubs scattered around, but none have attached breweries). Tigard has one brewery, and Gresham has one. Doing a little back-of-the-iPhone math here, I see that the 583,776 residents of Portland enjoy one mash tun for every 11,000 citizens. The 300,325 residents of the suburbs ringing Portland, by contrast, have one brewery for every 150,000 citizens.

You could probably calculate this in ways to make this disparity appear smaller--adding the McMenamins into the mix, for example--but the result is not going to much change. The fact is that the city of Portland has scads of breweries and the cities immediately adjacent to Portland have next to none.

All of this came into my head yesterday as I read a story that Milwaukie is looking to attract a minor league baseball team. The teaser mentioned that a brewpub would be a part of the deal. A brewpub--in Milwaukie--huge news! Well, sort of. It turns out the McMenamins are the suitor, so it's not clear if there will even be a brewery attached.

One of the things that most fascinates me about good beer is the culture that surrounds it. It may be that Portland suburbanites drink a fair amount of good beer. Those cities have a far less developed sense of pub-going, and only 10% of the beer sold in America is sold in pubs. So possibly fridges are stocked with Hopworks, Upright, and Deschutes beer. Portland suburbs benefit from the richness of Portland's beer culture, whether they support it directly or not. If we had depended on Lake Oswego to create the craft brewing renaissance in Oregon, though, we'd still be waiting.

Why don't breweries flourish in the suburbs? Why doesn't the market demand a corner brewery in every neighborhood? Why do people living within five miles of each other have such different attitudes about pub-going? I haven't the vaguest clue. I do know that it has nothing to do with the beer and everything to do with the people. But what?

Theories?

Update. Brian Butenschoen, Director of the Oregon Brewers Guild, sent me a note with these numbers which you can take to be the gospel truth. It doesn't change the thrust of the post, but it does resolve some of the issues with exact counts. (Vancouver, WA isn't included.)

I did want to clarify for your records Portland has 40 breweries in the city limits, 53 in the metro area. Gresham has two breweries, 4th Street and McMenamins Highland. Tigard has two as well John Barleycorns and Max's Fanno Creek. Beaverton has none, Oregon City has none. Sherwood now has one, Wilsonville now has one and West Linn has had one for a while.

Beervana's Best Pub Crawls: The Northern Expedition

Best pub crawls: Downtown | Southeast | Division St. | North

I had really planned to get all of these pub crawls completed by the OBF, but.... In the interest of completeness, however, I'll forge on and finish up with the last great trove of breweries. This one isn't quite as convenient as some of the others, and it requires a bit more walking. Still, you've come to Oregon, a place to which Meriwether Lewis and William Clark once hiked from Missouri. This requires hiking on the order of a couple miles round trip. In pioneer country, sometimes you have to adopt a pioneer spirit.

Getting There and Back
The cool thing about this crawl is that it employs the light rail. Starting out downtown, you want to take the MAX Yellow Line. It will take you across the Steel Bridge and into the Rose Quarter (that's where the Blazers play). Disembark at the Rose Quarter station (stop 11508). From there you're going to hike north around the Rose Garden and travel until you get to Broadway. In the fork where Broadway and Weidler divide, you'll find the Left Bank Project; Upright is located in the basement. You want to retrace your steps and get back on the Max. Continue north to Stop 11509, Mississippi/Albina. Walk north one block and west one block and you'll be at the Widmer Gasthaus. Retrace your steps and continue north again to stop 11510, Overlook. You'll continue north along Interstate Ave (where the light rail runs) until you come to Failing St. Trying to ignore the inauspicious name, you turn east and follow Failing until you arrive at the Lompoc Fifth Quandrant. Don't stop there, but turn the corner at Williams, walk 20 feet, and enter the Sidebar. Hopworks is another half block north.

Alternatively, you can ride the 44 bus from downtown and get on and off at Russell Street. You'll walk down Russell to the Widmer Gasthaus and then back for the bus the rest of the way to the Sidebar. Here's a Google map with the locations, and you can click on the map to enlarge it.

Stop 1: Upright Brewing (420 N Broadway, Left Bank Project basement)
Have you ever played one of those games where you're shown five objects and asked to identify which one is not like the others? In a lineup of Portland breweries, Upright's the one. Brewer Alex Ganum has created a little farmhouse brewery in one of the most industrial spots in the city. But from his open fermenters issue absolutely lovely farmhouse-style beers. He has an extensive barrel-aging program, and you'll always find something strange and wonderful on tap. Ask if Alex is around; he's a knowledgeable and entertaining guy, and he'll be happy to tell you the story behind his beers. Important Note: the Upright tasting room is only open from 1pm to 6pm on the weekends.

Stop 2: Widmer Brothers Gasthaus (929 N Russell)
The Widmer Brothers have been one of the country's biggest breweries for a couple decades. People know them for their Hefeweizen and feel like they get the whole Widmer thing. Ten to one you don't get them. A stop into the Gasthaus, which regularly has one of the most advernturesome and eclectic taplists in the city, dispels all preconceptions. And for most of the beers there, you have to go to the Gasthaus to find them. They don't pour anywhere else in the city. The Gasthaus also has a great menu of German cuisine, so if you're looking to fortify your stomach, this is a great place.

Stop 3: Hopworks Bike Bar (3947 N Williams Ave)
To get to Hopworks you'll pass two brewpubs, including the fourth stop. It's odd, but trust me, you want to do it in this order. The main Hopworks pub is across town, on Powell Blvd. This recent addition captures all the elements of the original, plus it has a absolutely beautiful patio out in the back. Hopworks is known for hop-forward beers in the quintessential Portland mode--the pale and IPA are classics. Consider the lager, though, which has a big following, too.

Stop 4: Lompoc Sidebar (3901A N Williams Ave)
The New Old Lompoc was founded in 1996 in NW Portland and has created a mini chain since. The Fifth Quadrant was one link in that chain, and it's located just around the corner from the Sidebar. You'll find the usual Lompoc fare there, but do yourself a favor and stop into the Sidebar. it's effectively a barrel house that has been converted into a pub. There's a fire crackling opposite the bar, and the walls are lined with casks of aging beer. As for the beer, the Sidebar is where the aged and rare stuff pours. You'll find big, boozy beers here, and maybe even a sour. It's a perfect way to end a pub crawl.

Other Areas of Interest
You'll be passing through some prime beer real estate, and if you want to go off the beaten path, here are a few possibilities:

• Amnesia Brewing (832 N. Beech Street). If you want to skip the Sidebar/Hopworks spur, you can stop off halfway and hit Amnesia (turn right off Failing at Mississippi and head south a block). It's another Portland institution, like Hopworks famous for its hoppy beers. Good vibe and good sausages to boot.
  
• McMenamins White Eagle Saloon (836 N. Russell St.). Just down from the Widmer Gasthaus is a classic old bar the McMenamin's bought back in the 1990s. The building dates back to frontier days, and you can feel the wild old ghosts knocking the walls.
• Pix Patisserie (3901 North Williams). In between the two Lompocs, occupying the corner space of Williams and Failing, is one of the best dessert shops in the city. They also have an impressive selection of bottled beers--Belgians, mostly--which are cheaper than anyplace in the city.

News and Events

First, the big news, which Ezra finally broke: Ben Love and Van Havig are going to partner up to form Gigantic Brewing--a rather restrained, understated name for a Havig endeavor. In the music world, when members of a band get together to form a new band, it's known as a "supergroup." Ben and Van are two of the most admired and liked brewers in the city, so this must be a superbrewery. (Fun game: which rock stars are Ben and Van like? I'll go with Jerry Garcia and David Lowery.)

Next, there's a whole lotta events going on about which you should be apprised:

Block 15 La Ferme de la Ville Provision Release
Tonight! -- 5pm
The Beermongers, SE 12th and Division

When I visited the brewery with Patrick last fall, Nick Arzner pulled out a few bottles from his specialty stash. His saison, an evocation of the classic aged farmhouse ales of decades past, absolutely blew me away. I've been waiting anxiously for this year's version. Nick's also brought up kegs of the sublime 2010 Demon's Farm (Cheers to Belgian Beers winner), 2010 Hopnosis barleywine, Alpha IPA, and Wandelpad Belgian blond.

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Oakshire Night
Tonight! -- 5pm
Bottles, 5015 NE Fremont

What is this, an invasion from the lower Willamette Valley? Arzner's at Beermongers, and at the same time across town, brewer Matt Van Wyk will be at Bottles with eight of his beers, including some rarities-- Rose Mountain Gruit, Bruine Von Brugge, and Hibernator Doppelbock. It's more good beer than a person knows what to do with.

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Deschutes Street Fare
Thursday, August 18, 5-9pm
Portland Pub, 210 NW 11th

This is a fundraiser for Morrison Child and Family Services that may well turn out to be one of the city's best events. Deschutes closes down Davis Street next to the pub and invites in bands and food carts--where, of course, the beer is matched to the cuisine. It's a lot of fun and totally Portland.

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Lompoc 15th Anniversary Party
Saturday, August 20th, 11am
New Old Lompoc, 1616 NW 23rd Ave

Inconceivably, the Lompoc is 15. They will be throwing a big bash at the original location--which, apparently, is destined for the backhoe. (The faithful, obviously, can decamp to its other locations.) In celebration, the brewery is digging into the archives and pulling out fifteen very special beers.

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Coalition One Year Anniversary Party
Saturday, August 20th, noon
Coalition Brewing, 2724 SE Ankeny

Must have been a good day to start a brewery. Coalition trails Lompoc by a few years, but the small brewery a stone's throw from my house has already become a Portland fixture. Live music, barbecue, and one of my favorite beers in the world--maple porter. Perfecto.

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Beer Blogger's Conference
August 19-20

This is of no real interest to anyone who's not a blogger, but I thought I'd mention it anyway. You may see a pack of awkward beer geeks roaming in packs--that would be us. Wave and smile.

So Which Ingredient Is the Most Important?

Yesterday's toss-off post, which quoted Daniel Fromson saying "beer’s third-most-important ingredient, after water and barley..." raises the question: which is the most important?

Hops, obviously, are out. Beer was made for millennia before anyone thought to toss hops in. (Along the way, they tossed just about everything else in, too. Everyone who thinks bog myrtle should be in the top five most important, raise your hands.) Beer is so simple to make that the ancient proto-Sumerians were able to shake a few stalks of wild grain into a bowl of water and let stand for a few days. It probably wasn't tasty, and it surely wasn't very alcoholic (though even before civilization dawned, those crafty pre-historical brewers had invented malting), but it was beer. Ish.

So grain and water are in. What about yeast? One could argue, and this one might, that yeast is not an ingredient so much as a helper. A microscopic brewer who finishes the job once all the conditions have been met. This is nevertheless a controversial position. When yeast does its thing, it creates all kinds of chemical compounds that remain in the beer. These become ingredients--and essential ones in many styles--so I guess we have to keep yeast in, too.

To make good beer, tasty beer, though--that's another matter. Water is wholly beside the point. As long as you have it, you have beer. Brewers can adjust water's chemistry to look like classic profiles or to compensate for hardness, pH, etc. Even homebrewers can amend water to meet their needs--its effect on the final product is easily the smallest.

The remaining three ingredients play different roles in different styles of beer. Hops play next to no role in lambics, but they're the whole ball game in IPAs. The same is true of malt and yeast, depending on the style. That is, in fact, the wonder of beer as opposed to, say, wine. Beer is constructed of ingredients. Depending on the recipe, you may emphasize one or another element.

The answer to the question: none. Or all--take your pick.

Water?

I have no time to blog today, so instead I'll offer you the introductory paragraph from a Washington Post article and let you do the rest--sort of in the vein of Ron Pattinson's Protz Shield/Papazian Cup awards (which, god willing, I shall never win):

Beer’s third-most-important ingredient, after water and barley, is almost as mystifying to most beer drinkers as Prohibition. But a new kind of beer has recently emerged that gives consumers an unprecedented ability to learn: the single-hop India pale ale.

Poor yeast.

Champion Beer of Britain ... Another Mild

I'm a bit slow getting to this, but apropos of Mighty Mites, I should point out that once again a mild was crowned the Champion Beer of Britain.

After a year of local tasting panels and regional heats leading up to the finals, CAMRA, the Campaign for Real Ale, is today proud to announce that Mighty Oak brewery's Oscar Wilde has been crowned the 'Best Beer' in Britain at the Great British Beer Festival, Earls Court, London.

Oscar Wilde, which has an ABV of 3.7%, is described in CAMRA's Good Beer Guide 2011 as a 'roasty dark mild with suggestions of forest fruits and dark chocolate. A sweet taste yields to a more bitter finish'.

That makes three of the past five years. The intervening years were won by bitters. None of the past five winners was north of 4% and in fact, you have to go back to 2004 to find a beer that exceeded 5%.

I'm not going to make the argument that American hopheads are about to start falling down for three-and-a-half percent 15 IBU milds. But it goes to show that serious beer fans can be serious about something other than double IPAs. Bully for them.

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IMAGE: THE INDEPENDENT

Craft Beer Grows at 15%; 725 New Breweries Planned

The Brewers Association has new numbers out that at this point won't surprise anyone:

Dollar sales were up 15 percent in the first half of 2011, excluding brewers who left the craft segment in 2010². Volume of craft brewed beer sold grew 14 percent for the first six months in 2011, compared to 9 percent growth in the first half of 2010.

(That little footnote points to BA's rules about who can be called a "craft brewer," and it excludes Craft Brewers Alliance, Goose Island, and others. So who knows how much more good beer people are actually buying.) Perhaps more shocking is bit of news:

The U.S. now boasts 1,790 breweries—an increase of 165 additional breweries since June 2010. The Brewers Association also tracks breweries in planning as an indicator of potential new entrants into the craft category, and lists 725 breweries in planning today compared to 389 a year ago.

I stick with analysis I did at the beginning of the year, wherein I argued that the new brewery explosion is a rational market response to sales growth--but yikes, that graph gives me a visceral shock. When you look at the beginning stages of bubbles, that's exactly what they look like. The growth better flatten out soon, or I will become less bullish on the future. I'd hate to see another late-90s style recalibration.

Get Ready for Some Big Little Beers: Mighty Mites

mighty (adj): possessing might; powerful.
mite (n): a very small object or creature.

I am a fan of small beers. However, unlike many of my fraternity, the reason isn't because I particularly care about long sessions in a pub. For me, the reason is purely aesthetic: small beers taste great. Aesthetics is something we don't often apply to beer, but we should. We should approach each beer with an eye toward a kind of artistic mark of perfection and say: how does this beer perform against an ideal? In this way, best bitters are not judged ill because they lack the roasty heft of an Imperial stout.

Beer geeks are generally pretty good about this, except when it comes to beers that ring in at under 5%. They are then dismissed as lesser substances, like diet soda, skim milk, or frozen yogurt. (And indeed, in America the small beer has been roughly treated--it's often a throwaway beer aimed to appeal to Bud drinkers.) Yet a small beer by its nature is not a compromise. It exists as a fully-formed beer, ready to be judged on its own merit.

Many small beers are vivid with flavor. The virtue of small beers is that they have less molecular density; the flavors have room to unfurl and blossom in the mouth. Certain styles have taken full advantage of this: Bavarian weizens have remarkable complexity (and are just psychedelic, period); Irish stouts can be sharp and intense with roast and hop bitterness; Berliner Weisses are so sour that Berliners developed the practice of cutting them with sugar syrups. And on cask, British ales reveal flavors you can never find on regular taps, sometimes with such bell-like clarity you feel you've found a fourth dimension of beer. Unlike heftier beers, the flavors in these little ones are distinct, particular, and knowable.

With this in mind, I have helped nudge along a wee fest of wee beers. The idea was to find examples that showcased how much flavor a brewery can pack into a low-alcohol beer. I will reveal the full, final list later, but breweries include Hair of the Dog, Block 15, Coalition, Oakshire, Upright, Double Mountain, Breakside and several others. (Also, full disclosure, although I solicited beers for the event, I am not involved on the business end of it at all. No dollars spent or earned on the event will come near me.) This year we're starting out small, but I hope we see a recurrence of the fest in the future as the inevitable groundswell for small beer builds. I'm also very excited that it will be happening as a part of this year's inaugural Portland Beer Week, August 19-28th.

Details
Saturday, August 27, noon - late
Coalition Brewing, 28th and Ankeny (in the parking lot behind the pub with the Grilled Cheese Grill)
Bring a mug or glass from a past fest (or buy one at the door), tix $1 a pour.
Also bring: an open mind about how tasty small beers might actually be.

Finally, we need a few volunteers who are OLCC-certified as servers and alcohol monitors. Would you please email me [the_beerax @ yahoo (dot) com] and I'll put you in touch with Elan Walsky at Coalition. As usual, the brewery will ply you with free beer for your labor.

Bailey's Fourth

Last night was the fourth anniversary of Bailey's Taproom, and as usual, I was remiss by not letting you know beforehand about the party, which featured rare, barrel-aged beers. The event caused a few sparks to arise from the dying embers of my brain, which is about all you can expect. Here they are:

1. Bailey's is only four years old, but it has already achieved watershed status. Geoff Phillips didn't invent the alehouse idea, but he tweaked it in a way that has now been emulated a number of times across the city. Rather than focusing on a standard range of beers with a few rotator handles, Geoff decided to rotate his whole line of 20 taps. He has focused on Oregon beers and was a huge friend to small breweries and breweries in obscure places. If you founded a pub in Nowhere, Oregon and wanted to place a keg in Portland, Geoff was the guy to talk to. If it was good, he'd put it on. The effect is like a constantly evolving beer fest. He solicits great beer, so if you're looking for a rarity, Bailey's is a place to start. There are now enough other pubs that have followed his lead (many worthy of high praise) that it seems like this is a standard feature of Beervana. It is, but it's only four years old. Four years and a day.
2. There were scads of good beers available at the celebration. One that really knocked me back was Double Diesel Stout by Cascade. It was a dense, leather-and-tobacco beer that took only enough oak, oxygen, and foreign booze (from bourbon and pinot barrels) to burnish and smooth its burly edges. Proof that Cascade can work outside the sour oeuvre if they put their minds to it. I don't know if any is still available, but Flat Tail's one-year anniversary beer is really special. It's a hard beer to describe because the facts (soured, 8%) obscure the reality. It has a massively fruity nose that some people called grapefruit and others oranges. I couldn't identify it, but I was reminded of Hawaii, and some fruit I had there. These notes don't come from hops, though, but rather fermentation and the strange fission that occurs when flavors start dancing together. It is very light-bodied and wholly absent booziness. The acid is delicate and tart, and the beer finishes crisply. It drinks like a summer quencher--right up until you figure out how strong it is and are forced to lie down.
   
3. A sort of impressionistic photo, the only one I took.
   

Friday Flick: 1950's Promotional Vid

We often mock Soviet Union for its incredibly ham-fisted propaganda, but have a look at this 1950s promo for beer. It wouldn't even work as parody today--it's way too over-the-top. Which makes it all the more amusing. Enjoy--

What People Buy at a Timbers Game

Last night, I enjoyed watching the Portland Timbers dismantle the vaunted offense of the David Beckham/Landon Donovan LA Galaxy with 18,000 of my close friends. I could go on and on about the game--my man Jorge "Lightning" Perlaza showing his speed on the game's second goal, for instance--but this is a post about beer.

I'm always interested in not only what beers are on offer at sporting events, but what sells (of course, it's a business so there's lots of overlap). The Widmer Brothers and Budweiser share honors as sponsors, and at the first game, I was surprised to see beer guys walking through the crowd with what appeared to be full buckets of Bud. Closer inspection revealed that there were a few Widmers in the mix.

Last night, it was the opposite. I struck up a conversation with the vendor, who had two Buds and maybe a case of Widmer. How much Bud do you sell, I asked. "Bud? Here? You gotta be kidding."

The crowd has spoken: don't try to sell Bud at a Timbers game. Almost makes you get a little misty, doesn't it?

Bill Argues For Small Portions, I Argue for Small Beer

Bill Night has a great post up about the issue of "session beers." The post riffs on an earlier post by Andy Crouch arguing that Americans just aren't cut out for small beers. Andy says a drinking session is a British thing, and anyway, we don't like small beers. I half disagree with Andy. Americans do like drinking sessions--those who live out here, anyway--but we don't really like small beers. Bill, however, takes it in a different direction:

Reading it as I returned from vacation in Europe, it made me reflect on the beer-drinking culture I'd seen in Amsterdam and Belgium. The beers were not low-alcohol -- that's a 10% Westvleteren in the picture above -- but serving sizes were generally very small: often 25 cl (less than 8.5 ounces) or 33 cl (less than 11.25 ounces). Instead of simply beating the drum for lower ABV beers, maybe we need to start calling for lower alcohol servings. If it's a lighter beer, the serving can be larger; if it's a higher-gravity beer, serve it in an appropriate volume.

Fair enough. I think if you're going to have a session of drinking, it's healthiest to make sure it's moderate. If that means drinking Belgian tripels by the thimbleful, godspeed. It's better than throwing back an imperial pint of Pliny the Elder.

I, however, happen to like small beers. The flavors may not be as screamingly intense, but they often have more molecular space to unfold and blossom. You find subtle aromas and flavors in small beers you couldn't hope to identify in bruisers. All things being equal, I'd choose a well-crafted 4% beer over a well-crafted 8% beer almost any day of the week.

What's frustrating for this advocate of small beers is that our team is burdened by an economic disincentive. If you pull up to the bar at the Horse Brass and consider your options, I believe a certain calculation crosses your mind. It goes like this: "Hmmm, that cask bitter looks mighty tasty, but it's only about 4% alcohol. If I have it, I'm likely to want two at the very least and probably three. That IPA looks almost as tasty, but it's north of six percent and I can probably get by with one if I nurse it. Maybe two." A session of the cask will run you $10-$15, but the IPA only $5-$10. So you go with the IPA. Bill thinks this won't affect most beer geeks, but he's wrong: I know because it even affects me.

Now, there may be a festival in three and a half weeks that could turn the tide. It may be called Mighty Mites and I may have had something to do with it. But we'll come to that in due course.

The Future is Craft

MillerCoors, seeing the writing on the wall:

Big beer brands have been losing the affinity of core drinkers over the last two years, according to YouGov's BrandIndex, a research firm that tracks brand buzz, loyalty and quality perceptions based on consumer surveys. MillerCoors' Miller Lite and Coors Light and Anheuser-Busch's Bud Light have had negative ratings for most of that period.

Craft beer has posted double-digit sales gains for three of the last five years and is likely to do so again in 2011. Craft brews account for about 5% of consumption, a figure that could rise to 10% in five or six years if industry sales were to remain flat, according to Beer Marketer's Insights.

MillerCoors isn't betting on the Silver Bullet. The article describes a strategy that foresees "craft" beer as an increasingly large part of the portfolio:

"[There] will not always be thousands and thousands of tiny brands," Long said, referring to the 1,700 brewers in the U.S. today. "Big brands will emerge, and they already have: Sam Adams and Fat Tire and others. Certainly Blue Moon fits into that category."

MillerCoors' goal "is to make sure that some of those emerging winners are ours," Long said. To do that, he said, the company will have to be successful in gateway beers that introduce consumers to the craft segment, as well as to other brews for "eclectic palates."

My post yesterday about Goose Island provoked a huge amount of skepticism--not surprisingly. Big breweries have a terrible record of playing it straight with good beer. Some commenters were absolutely certain that A-B will force Goose Island to "cut corners" and water down their product. In fact, the opposite is true. Over the past three decades, the big breweries have watched their share of the beer market slowly erode. It's gotten particularly bad in the last five years.

That trend will continue for the decades to come. It's impossible to say whether bad beer will find a stable floor of support, but even if it does, it will be substantially lower than it is now. To fill in the gaps, they need good beer. The reason A-B bought Goose Island was not for the brand--it was for the beer. Goose Island has what Bud lacks: the reputation as one of America's boldest, most sophisticated breweries. The good beer are (sorry!) the golden eggs. Why would you spend $40 million on a brewery only to turn it into a tiny plant making the same kind of beers you already make?

The future's craft, and the macros know it.

Traditional South African Utwala Beer

I got a remarkable email from Jeff Renfro, an Oregonian now living in South Africa. He discovered a local, traditional beer and sent me a detailed description of it, along with photos. My sense is that these kinds of traditional homebrews are common, but little documented. (I remember hearing about a coconut beer brewed in South India, but I could never find it.) In any case, Jeff's agreed to allow me to print it for you here, so I'll turn the story over to him. Fascinating, fascinating stuff.


Local Brewing in South Africa
Jeff Renfro

I am an economics grad student currently living in Cape Town, South Africa doing work on indoor air pollution in the townships. Yesterday, I was taken to a shebeen (small, unlicensed bar) where they make their own beer. Given your interest in local styles and their origins, I thought you might be interested. The type of beer is called utwala (pronouned ch-ala).

They can't grow normal brewing grains in these areas so they use either sorghum or corn. The process starts by boiling water and adding flour, then letting it sit for a day. Then, they boil the water again and add malted sorghum (they malt it themselves). Adding the sorghum turns it into a rich porridge. They let that sit for a day, then boil it one last time while adding more flour. The flour is for taste, sweetness, and some nutritional content.

They take their thick porridge mix and put it in 55 gallon drums and let it sit outside without a top. The porridge gets crusty on top which forms an imperfect seal and allows fermentation to occur underneath. The mixture smells like sourdough bread as it ferments. When they decide it is ready (don't get exactly how they know), they drain the liquid out of the bottom and serve it in small, metal buckets. The beer is normally less than 3% alcohol so the buckets contain about 3 pints and cost less than $1. When drinking it, you swirl the mixture frequently (I assume to make sure the flour is not sitting on the bottom).

They say if you are wearing a hat, the beer "won't work." The taste is strange. It is sour because lactobacillus is naturally floating around in the air here. You can taste the flour, and feel it in your mouth. There is also a slight metal taste that could be from the brewing process or the bucket. Hops don't grow here so they don't use them. I told them the sour taste was very on-trend where I am from. It is extremely cloudy and looks thick. I put what I couldn't finish into a 2L Coke bottle because they said the brew would continue to ferment and change over the next few days. It is sitting in my closet right now. I have to open the top every 8 hours so it won't explode because it is putting off a lot of gas. I don't think this is a style that is going to catch on anywhere else, but it shows how local agriculture and geography come together with culture to make something unique.

Photo Essay
Attached are some pictures of the South African utwala process. The township these pics were taken in is Khayelitsha which is SA's second biggest township. Unfortunately, they were not cooking when I was there.

The picture of the mix in the blue drum is soon after cooking. The porridge is just starting to create a seal on top.


The picture of the drum and wood is where they cook, and the wood is Port Jackson, which is one of the few plants you can find growing around here.


The mix in the white buckets is further along and has a pretty good seal on top.


The two buckets are the beer right before it is ready, and the foamy drum is the beer ready to drink after it has been drained out of the other drums.


The stack of metal buckets are what people drink out of.


The last picture is the beer in a glass. It is extremely cloudy.

Evolution of the Macro-Micro, Goose Island Example

This is a fascinating development:

Three months after being acquired by Anheuser-Busch, Goose Island Beer Co. said today that its massively popular 312 Urban Wheat Ale will soon be brewed in an AB facility in upstate New York.

Oh, the humanity! But wait:

Goose founder and Chief Executive Officer John Hall said the move will be a boon for fans of the brewery's higher end beers, like Matilda and Bourbon County Stout. Accounting for almost half the brewery's sales, 312 has required significant resources at Goose's Fulton Street plant. With the beer's production heading east -- partially at first and likely entirely at some point -- that space can be used for other projects, Hall said.

So A-B's purchase of Goose Island may actually increase their experimental brands. And all that A-B money will ultimately mean lots and lots of everything: "Hall also said he hopes to return all Goose Island brewing to Chicago within the next three or four years by building a massive new Goose Island plant."

Just to throw this out there: does ownership by the Lords of Darkness mean, ipso facto, that Goose Island must be dead to beer geeks? This is a question of philosophy, not beer.

Oregon Brewers Fest First Reax

The first day of the fest is down, and the second is about to commence. I have some bits and pieces, pics, and even a video to share with you. I'm not alone. John Foyston has coverage (story, pix), as do Angelo, Brady, Jon, and Sanjay.

Now, to the fest. When you take into account the number of sniffs and sips I had from my own beers and those of friends, I managed to sample a pretty broad selection of the beers yesterday. A few that really stood out were these:

• Ninkasi Helles Belles. This beer is designed to mislead. You want to read the name as "hell's" bells, but it's actually a Munich helles (pr. hell iss, not hels). You assume it's going to be an ale, a hop bomb, a booming Ninkasi beer. Instead, it's a classic helles and the beer that stood head and shoulders above others for me at the fest. A beautifully elegant beer with delicate, soft malts and peppery hopping, crisp and refreshing. It may be the most accomplished beer Ninkasi has ever brewed, and that's saying something.
• Rock Bottom Zombie Flanders. Van Havig has brewed a Flanders Red called Ned Flanders in the past, and I don't know--but I assume--that this is one of those. Thus the Zombie. But whatever its provenance, the beer is exceptional: slightly sweet, almost chocolatey malts and a sharp, true sour.
• Boulder Hoopla Pale. Colorado beers take some heat for their lack of hop character in these parts. But David Zuckerman, who cut his teeth at BridgePort before moving east, has put plenty of hop richness into this beer. A great hoppy session.
• Goose Island Pepe Nero. This is an unusual beer, a peppery dark saison. It's the kind of beer that seems a little one-dimensional at first sip, but which deepens to reveal further layers as you sip. A ruminative pour.
• New Holland Golden Cap: Speaking of peppered sasions, here's a blond example. Maybe it's the pepper: again, at first I was slightly put off by the beer, which had an astringency that seemed a bit pushy to me. But after a couple sips, it developed into a tang that I started to appreciate and then crave.

There were other interesting experiments I'd say were slightly misguided. Widmer's Foggy Bog Cranberry Ale could have used less cranberry and more ale; Dogfish Head's Black and Red featured both mint and raspberry--and the mint was too much of a weird thing. Finally, Elysian's Idiot Sauvin, made with Nelson Sauvin hops. Some people taste human sweat (me, Jon Abernathy), others get wonderful tropical fruits. In Elysian's, I got both.

Of course, there were lots of other great beers, some which others were raving about. That's the beauty of beer: its diversity pleases all palates. So sample broadly. I will leave you with some sights and video of the Fest.

A McMenamin Hammerhead escorts the ceremonial cask.

I shot this from my still camera and I don't know how to turn it off--so the end is bad. Sorry!

Organizer Art Larrance and parade dignitary Fred Eckhardt.

A rare sighting of Brian McMenamin.

The ceremonial tapping of the keg. (Again, a problem at the end of the vid by the videographer.)

Ninkasi co-owner/brewer Jamie Floyd.


Goose Island master brewer Brett Porter (an alum of both Portland/MacTarnahan's and Deschutes)