Posts of the Year Analyzed

Eventually this picture will make sense, believe me.

Indulge me, if you will, with one last end-of-the-year post. As part of my year-end routine, I went back and looked at the top posts of the year, as measured by the number of direct visits--which basically indicates which posts went viral. When people start sharing my posts on social media, it sends people to direct links, and Google tracks those. Now, of course, there's no arguing that every post on this blog is a delight, so there are no wrong answers here. And yet.

I went back over the 200 posts I wrote in 2016 and came up with the following list of personal favorites. These are articles I put time and thought into, and there was often a visit or actual reporting involved (shocking, I know). Some of them are deeper dives into the way beer is made, some of them are think pieces, and some are tinged by history. Of the "best" posts of the year--subjective, sure--I'd proudly stand behind any day of the year (click through if you missed one):

• Cartwright Brewing's Weird Steam(?) Beer 
• The New England IPA series: How American IPAs Evolved, The Newly-Coveted Cloudiness,  A Deep Dive About New England IPAs (Way Nerdy), and On the IPA Cutting Edge  
• My National traditions series, which was a secret preview to the new book: The Identity of Irish Beer, What Makes a Good Pilsner?, Considering the Belgian Tradition, IPAs as National Tradition, and even Danish Hay Beer--and Lots of IPAs
• Wait, There's Corn Sugar in My IPA??
• Dusting Off an Old Manifesto 
• Why I'm Not a Beer Geek 
• Ninkasi at 10 
• Zoiglhaus Bets on Lents 
• Defining the Indefinable 
• The entire "spontaneous files" series: De Garde, Solera, and Block 15
• The Sacred and the Profane

Now, how does this compare with the posts that received the most traffic? Well, not identically, let's just say that.  Below I'll list the top ten posts by traffic of the year and while some of my faves did make the list, so did some weird stuff. Because people still get linked to posts directly when they do Google searches, none of these are static but as of today, these are the top ten, along with the hits and the date of publication.

• The Argument Against (Henry's Hard Soda), 29,410 direct visits (Jan 4, 2016) 
• The Spontaneous Files: De Garde Brewing, 6908 direct hits (11/14)
• The Future of Beer is Hiding in the Footnotes,  6079 direct hits (4/5)
• Why Locals Say Breakside is Portland's Best, 4323 direct hits (10/10)
• Is Boston Beer Doomed? 4293 hits (8/8)
• The Newest Trend: "Retro Craft?"  4091 hits (10/3)
• What Makes a Good Pilsner?  3917 hits (4/26)
• Won't A.I. Beer Inevitably Result in Bud Light? 3881 hits (12/16) 
• Dusting Off an Old Manifesto 3837 hits (5/2)
• Why I'm Not a Beer Geek 3851 hits (6/1) 

(Google doesn't give an average, but eyeballing it, I would guess the average post can expect to welcome around 1800 visitors directly when it goes live. Most of these come from Facebook and Twitter, and some find love on Reddit.)

By far my most-trafficked post this past year was a throwaway piece on the sad end of the Henry Weinhard name inspired by a press release some poor marketing intern had the misfortune to send my way. It took me seven minutes to write, probably, and was four times more popular than the next most-popular post.  (It is currently the fifth article returned when you do a Google search on the product, which surely wasn't what MillerCoors had in mind.)

All of which to say is: no one has any idea which posts are going to go viral. Traffic seems to be as random as the pattern of waves. (I had a few other posts like this that were traffic duds.) I will continue to toss out varied content, hoping people find some of it interesting. No doubt the ones you liked weren't on either of the two lists above. Subjectivity...

Why We Love Lists and Awards

My cursor hovered over a link to "the best IPAs in each state." I wondered--did they get Oregon right? But, in that moment of indecision, I asked myself another question: why do you care what some random site thinks? On a Saturday morning a few weeks back, live tweets from Denver started announcing winners at the GABF. I spent an hour looking at my phone as the results dribbled in, again, transfixed by the results. As consumers of online media, these moments happen all the time.

Why do we care?

There's a totally functional purpose for awards and best-of lists--they help us navigate worlds populated by too many attractions. Whether it's beers or books or 80s alt rock albums, there's just not enough time to consume everything. We've all found ourselves Googling for best-of lists to help us winnow choices. Awards serve a similar purpose in helping us find the creme of any given crop. Looking for a novel on Kindle; why not scan recent Hugo award winners for guidance? But this function is a mere downstream benefit of awards and best-of lists. They actually function at a much deeper level--the desire to bring authority to the subjective.

A perfect example of this dynamic is playing out in the kerfuffle over Bob Dylan's recent Nobel for literature. The Nobel has cultivated the reputation as being the most authoritative judge of merit. The Nobel is by far the most prestigious award on the planet, and serves, for winners, as a crowning confirmation of greatness. The basis for that authority is rarely challenged (except by non-winners), but Dylan, in refusing to even acknowledge that he's won, has illuminated the grubby, largely subjective nature of the whole thing.

On Saturday, an academy member called Mr. Dylan “impolite and arrogant.”  “One can say that it is impolite and arrogant,” the member, Per Wastberg, a writer, told the Swedish newspaper Dagens Nyheter, according to a translation by The Associated Press.

Of course, the Academy is not a purely neutral algorithm of aesthetics; it is comprised of humans with idiosyncratic opinions. Their authority comes in part from the universal agreement of their authority--and not least by the acknowledgement of the winner. Wastberg erred by demonstrating that there's a quid pro quo at play: we call you the best, you say we are uniquely qualified to make that judgment. Dylan, in refusing even to comment, challenges the sandy foundation on which Nobel rests. (Sartre declined the award, but announced his rejection. In doing so, he affirmed the import of the award.)

The thing is, we know this, and yet we still have this bizarre urge to find "the best." It appears when our finger hovers above the link to a listicle, of our urge to fight over the meaning and approriateness of Dylan's Nobel. We may often disagree with a particular award or list, but we seem never to disagree with the idea of the award or list. The problem arises when our own personal preferences come in conflict with the authority of the list or award. Weirdly, we rarely think, "this idea of 'the best' is stupid"; instead, we think, "that award/list is wrong." Why can we not just abandon our urge to quantify the subjective?

Whatever the reason, we can't. And so year after year, listicle after listicle, we continue to debate these things, forever thinking that somehow, someway, there's got to be a satisfying (read: quantifiable) answer to it. Humans are such funny creatures.

(Incidentally, I considered titling this post "Eleven reasons we love lists (you won't believe #4!)" but I spared you that. You're welcome.)

Defining the Indefinable

There is a cafe in Brussels. It is close and cozy, feminine in a way that is unlike pubs anywhere else I've visited. The walls are so coated in objects and pictures that you are able to confirm their existence largely by inference. The tables are small and dainty, as are the chairs. The beer list is extensive, but I didn't bother to consult anything but the lambic selection. This is the only place on earth they're made, and they've been made here for centuries. When you order one, the waiter arrives with a little basket; once he decants a portion into a pleated tumbler, he lays the bottle so that it reclines with its head resting on the edge--a vision of happy repose.

The beer list is extensive, despite my single-focus, and inside one finds a dozens of offerings spanning the range of local styles. In Belgium, the word "style" is especially fraught, since the local breweries work to make each of their beers different from everything else on the market. But whether we call them a dozen styles or three dozen, they are all there, well-represented. You could visit this pub every night for a month and not drink all the beer on offer.

The lineage of those lounging bottles dates at least to 1400, and they have been so ingrained in this city's heritage that they appear in paintings by Flemish master Pieter Bruegel, the Elder. Other Belgian beers have been brewed by Catholic monks for over a century (with a tradition dating back 1500 years). There is a selection of ambrée and brune beer, which cast back to Belgian brewers' old habit of boiling their worts for many hours to caramelize the wort. There are foeder-aged red ales, which took a lesson from 19th-century London porter, and there are beers called "stout" which have inevitably gone through that unmistakable Belgian cultural distortion filter. There are even the "new" blondes, which started to become popular a few decades into the last century.


What one doesn't find is the latest release from Stone or Mikkeller--or even classics from Weihenstephan or Pilsner Urquell. There are a few places to find these beers, as the international craft brewing movement noses into even places with beer culture as well-established as Brussels--but they are by no means prevalent. And Brussels doesn't need them; the native drinking culture, the living history found in each bottle, the famous brewing school at Leuven, twenty miles from Brussels' Grand Place, the strange way brewers make their beer, the local ingredients they make it from, and even--especially--the respect and knowledge local drinkers have for this fixture of national identity. For a beer fan, casual or fanatic, there are few better places to drink beer.

Surprisingly, this isn't an opinion shared by everyone. There is an argument about what constitutes a good city for beer drinking, and it was on bright display yesterday when Jason Notte made a case that "New York cares more about craft beer than Portland." I spent an hour debating with Jason on Twitter--the second time in the last couple weeks we had this dispute. I'd considered doing a debate-style rebuttal about why I find this such a perverse position to take, but I'll limit it just to the acknowledgement that we understand "good" in very different terms. For Jason,

"...that ignores one of the key purposes of small brewing and craft beer: To try new ideas, to take chances and to explore. Sure, in lager-soaked Manhattan — where beers I had with friends at non-craft bars included Heineken, Labatt’s Blue and Rolling Rock — you have to go a bit out of your way to find a broad selection of craft beer. But those who do are rewarded with some of the best beers that all corners of the country have to offer.

I mentioned on Twitter that by this definition, Copenhagen would be a better beer city than Brussels. He made an adjustment to my comment, but agreed: "No, my argument would still apply: It's not a 'better' beer city, it's a more diverse, cosmopolitan beer city. But the Portland-Brussels parallel is a great one. Both have great beer, both are fairly insular and heavily emphasize local."

It is not possible to square this circle--we think of "best" in very different terms. For Jason, a "truly great beer town won’t be afraid to explore what’s brewing beyond the horizon line." For me, judging a city by how much of the local beer is brewed elsewhere seems a bizarre metric for assessing "truly great." New York and Copenhagen do have lots of foreign beers available in their bars, but it's precisely because locals haven't developed a taste for local beer in the way they have in Prague, Munich, and Brussels--and brewers in Copenhagen, for their part, are actively trying to invent a local tradition like Brussels has.

I'll never convince New Yorkers that their hometown is by most of my metrics one of the poorer beer cities in the country, and I don't know that there's any point in trying. (It's a promising sign that they are defending New York with such gusto!) But would I rather drink a Drie Fonteinen in a Brussels cafe, from a bottle my waiter has decanted and laid in a little basket, or go to a New York City bar that offers a menu of the world's beers, removed from their context and shipped across an ocean?

Rhetorical question.

What Makes a Great Brewery?

Over the weekend, a discussion broke out on Facebook that led, as discussions often do, down a little side alley away from the main topic. It got me thinking. In the beer world, we spend countless hours discussing "bests." Beers get the most attention, but breweries get a lot, too. (The Facebook discussion started out with this post about people lining up for hours just to buy a brewery's beer.) The debates, inevitably, come to tears or smears because no one agrees about the definition. And there's the rub--and opportunity.

It occurred to me that I have some criteria for what makes a top tier brewery. I'm talking here about the crème de la crème--the Duponts, Schenkerlas, and Sierra Nevadas. Some of them are so famous no one disputes their membership in this rare club, but most are not. When you survey the breweries of a country like the US, where there are so many of them and many are so recent, how would you distinguish the best from the rest--particularly lacking that agreed-upon consensus? (And the truth is, we should probably throw that out as well.)

Are these people waiting outside a great brewery?
Credit: Jon Urch

I haven't toured the world anywhere near as extensively as some people, but I have drifted around a bit. As a writer who's supposed to bird-dog the good breweries and guide people to them, it's not just an academic exercise. As I've traveled, I found myself relying on a set of criteria that seems to work pretty well. Like all considerations of "best," it ultimately runs aground on the shoals of subjectivity and tautology (a good brewery is one that makes a lot of good beer!). But it does rough out the important categories that define greatness. Which breweries qualify will always be a personal judgment, but I think these are the criteria against which greatness should be judged. Note that a great brewery has all of these:

• Consistent excellence. First, the beer has to be excellent across the entire line. Not every beer has to be a world classic, but the whole line should be accomplished and consistent.
• An exceptional beer. It must also have at least one exceptional beer--that evanescent "world classic" or whatever terrible term we use to describe it.For my purposes, it should be unique and original, not just a good example of a well-known style. The kind of beer that sticks in your head both because it is so good, but also because its unlike anything out there. It doesn't hurt if it's the standard for a style, either. (Until about a decade ago, there weren't many American breweries that met this standard.)
• A unique voice. Next, the brewery must have a distinctive "voice." Talented brewers can reproduce beers they've tasted elsewhere. Making a line-up of quality ales is a function of craftsmanship, and it's critical but not sufficient. I also want the brewery to offer a vision for their beer. When I taste a Schlenkerla, a Dupont, a Fuller's, I know the beer. This is an under-appreciated virtue, and possibly the hardest mark to hit.
• Bonus: continued originality. The final criterion is really extra credit, a fixture of modern brewing. I appreciate it when a brewery is able to continue to create new and original beers along with the established classics. I would not mark Westmalle down for failing to do this, but I admire it when breweries like Schneider do. And with young, new-world breweries, it is almost a requirement. It's why Sierra Nevada, for example, continues to stay out in front.

I would guess that there are no more than a couple hundred breweries out there that meet my standards for "great"--and maybe only twenty or thirty in the US.  There's a tier below this that is much larger, though still small considering the tens of thousands of breweries in the world. In that group you'd have breweries that might have an exceptional beer but are inconsistent, or which have great standards but lack anything truly exceptional, or the ones that haven't yet found their voice.

And what about longevity? How do we compare breweries that have been making great beer for decades or centuries with ones that have been making them for months or a few years? It's a good question, and one I've never settled on. Greatness is not a permanent achievement. Once-great breweries can and do go into periods where they're making mediocre beer. But it's also important to establish a track record of quality. I might put an asterisk next to a young brewery that had a great year with the mental note to check back and see how they manage after competing in the marketplace for a few more years.

Your thoughts?

Good Beers 2015

This past year was an odd one for me--a good portion of the best beers I tasted came from breweries beyond Oregon. I spent six weeks on the road, traveling to 24 cities in 18 states (plus DC), and managed to drink a beer or four at each stop. What I enjoyed is illustrative of what's available in American craft brewing right now. We can't really hope to keep abreast of the beer scene anymore, with upwards of a hundred thousand different brands being made last year. (Rough math: if the 3,800 breweries last year made an average of 26.3 different brands--which sounds about right--we had 100k beers in 2015.) The best we can do is sample and hope to have found a few big winners. Here are mine.

• Block 15 [forgotten name] saison. One of my first events was at Block 15, at their new Taproom outside of town. It's a great facility and they pour a nice selection of the kind of beers I think of when I think of Block 15--saisons, sours, barrel-aged beers. I had a couple beers that evening, including a summery saison that was kissed by Brettanomcyes. Delicate, fresh, tropical, and it drank way underneath its heft. I was reminded why I think this is one of Oregon's best breweries.
• Russian River Beatification. In Corte Madera, I had a wonderful event at Book Passage, in which the bookstore had four beers available for tasting. My event became that tasting, which included a porter, two IPAs, and Russian River's Beatification--the batch that hadn't even been released to the public yet. About halfway into the first beer--Russian River--I realized I could talk about the beer from the point of view of what the dominant ingredient contributed, and people were wowed to learn how much yeast can do for a beer. 
• Fremont Interurban. The Book Larder in Seattle arranged to have growlers of Fremont Brewing. I am ashamed to say I'd never had Interurban IPA. Vivid, Northwestern, sessionable--a great beer.





A typical blackboard, this one at Ale Yeah! in Decatur, GA (note gose).



• Revolution What the Helles. I made a special trip out to Revolution when I was in Chicago, and on the whole I was underwhelmed. (Top to bottom, Goose Island, where my event was, had more accomplished and daring beer.) But they had a helles that saved the day. It wasn't particularly authentic, but it was just perfectly made in terms of balance and pleasure.
• Urban Chestnut [forgotten name] corn lager. This was an evocation of a classic American pale lager made with corn, and it showed how well corn works when people are trying to make a good beer with it. Supremely crisp, but with a hint of sweetness, all of which made for a perfect platform for zingy little hops. 
• Schlafly Lemon Basil Gose. Gose was the big surprise on my trip: I would estimate that at least 75% of my stops had one on tap. My fave, and perhaps my favorite beer on the trip was Schlafly's gose, which had a perfect savory-tart-sweet balance point. It was in so many ways not like beer--it was like a beery Gatorade on a hot day--and yet I couldn't imagine anyone not liking it. I loved it.
• Other Half Brett IPA. I managed to get half a glass of this elixir as the keg blew, and it was one of the highlights of the trip. Other Half is the beer geek's choice in the Empire state, and they really had this beer dialed in; it was all sticky tropical fruit and deep aromatics. I suspect no one knows what the "brett" meant, but I bet they love this beer. 
• Hidden Springs Berliner Weisse. Tampa, Florida, unexpectedly had a fantastic beer scene. My event was at Hidden Springs Ale Works, which was just a few months old. Nevertheless, the brewery had already dialed everything in. The IPA could have come straight from Portland, but what really caught my eye was the tropical-fruit Berliner (there was more than one fruit and I forget which ones). Even in November, when I visited, the city was 85 degrees. What you want is something like this that can both impress with its intensity, but also slake a mighty thirst.
• Ardent Single Hop IPA. In Richmond, VA, I did another guided tasting at Ardent Craft Ales, a wonderful newish brewery there. As I was talking, I got off on an IPA jag (I was supposed to be talking about saison) and the brewery folks ran back and got tasters of an IPA so people could see what I was talking about. They brought out one of their single-hop IPAs (they did a long series), and I think it was with El Dorado. Whatever the reality, it was a perfect example of the (new) American penchant for late- and dry-hopping beers to tease out insanely intense flavors and aromas. 
• Fullsteam Wild Sacch beer. In Durham, NC, the Fullsteam Brewery is trying to isolate a wild Saccharomyces strain to use as a house yeast. We generally think of Brett when we're thinking wild, but standard Sacch start out that way, too. The beer they had made was a session ale that had something of a saison and something of a kellerbier in it. Crisp but slightly funky, hazy, and rustic. 
• Atlas Brew Works Home Rule Lager. Maybe it was just because I was tired and that point a bit sick, but my last stop, which I enjoyed with my brother- and sister-in-law, really hit the spot. Lightly sweet, a bit cakey, and laced with just enough herbal hopping to keep it interesting, Atlas was a perfect final beer for the trip.

I also had great beer at Boulder, New Belgium, Goose Island, Yazoo, Magnolia, and at various pubs in Brooklyn (things got a bit away from me there), but those are the ones that really stood out. It has become pretty easy to find good beer in this country of ours. You no longer have to be in a town like Portland to do it.

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
  

End of Civilization (2)

My eye gleamed when I saw that CBS had named the "Five Best Beers in America"--and all were from Portland. Until, that is, I read the slugline:

All Are From Nation's "Brewery Capital," Portland, Ore., a.k.a. "Brewvana"!

Brewvana? Hey, great reporting, CBS. I see the standards of Murrow and Cronkite are alive and well. To be fair, they get it right in the actual story text. On the other hand, they also give Oregon credit for starting the "whole brewpub movement," a fact to which Bert Grant would have strenuously objected. In his stead, I object for the good people of the Evergreen State. And to be further unfair, not by the most generous definition can Newport be said to be a part of Portland. Thus the top five are are really from Oregon: Widmer Hefeweizen, Full Sail Session, Deschutes Green Lakes Organic, BridgePort IPA, and Rogue Dead Guy.

More Bests -or- The Blogger Whinges Yet Again

I'm just getting around to the latest round of "bests"--RateBeer's tally of highest-scoring beer and breweries in a number of different categories. I no longer spend much time on RateBeer--I find the reviews and the overall ratings to be less-informed that BeerAdvocate. These kinds of ratings are plagued by a number of problems: sample bias (raters of NW-distributed beers are more knowledgeable than, say, Ohio-distributed beers), style bias (19 of the top 25 highest-rated beers are imperial stouts), and so on. But the ratings really come down to the quality of the rater.

(In BeerAdvocate's best-beers compilation, stouts are also favored, but not quite as disproportionately. Only 12 of the top 25 are imperial stouts. That list also includes a fair number of abbey ales, two sour ales, and IPAs.)

So, it's not too surprising that I have lots and lots of problems with RateBeer's best beers by style, best breweries, and best beers by nation. For example, Three Floyds occupies three of the top four slots, and Cigar City bourbon barrel stout is cited as the best. Now, not to harsh on Floridians, but the effusive three pages of ratings suggest that beer drinkers in South Florida may not have as large a beer palette as drinkers elsewhere. Maybe this is the best beer in America, but I'd feel a lot better about those ratings if there were a few Midwest and West Coast beer geeks among them.

Or take it out of the realm of homerism. In the best beers of Belgium list, Orval doesn't come in until 26th (twice as low as the inferior Chimay Bleu, which snagged 13th), Saison Dupont is 38th, Rodenbach Grand Cru is 49th, and Duvel doesn't make the top 50. It's just not a useful list.

But let's leave the hating aside and note a few of the locals who managed to find themselves on various lists. Because, while I have no doubt that lots and lots of good stuff got left off the list, the names that got on them by and large are excellent. In one sense, you can tell something by these lists. Oregon did very well in the brewpub and brewery-to-visit lists (a distinction RateBeer botched somewhat), which is exactly right. And special commendation to Heater Allen, whose score in the pils category I can't begin to explain. Here we go.

Best Beers by Style
Pale Lager - Heater Allen Bohemian Pilsener, first place
English Style Pale and Bitter - Rogue Brutal Bitter, second place
Dark Lager - Rogue Chatoe Dirtoir, first place

Best Beer Bar
Brouwer's Cafe (Seattle), 7th out of the top 50
Uber Tavern (Seattle), 8th
Beveridge Place (Seattle), 39th
Naked City (Seattle), 42nd
Concordia Alehouse, 45th

Best Beer Retailer
Bottleworks (Seattle), 11th out of the top 50
Malt and Vine (Redmond, WA) 13th
Belmont Station, 47th

Best Restaurant for Beer
None (!)

Best Brewpubs
Walking Man (Stevenson, WA), 15th out of 50
Pelican, 24th
Raccoon Lodge, 44th
Deschutes (Portland, 48th

Best Breweries to Visit
Hair of the Dog, 2nd out of 50
Hopworks, 25th
Widmer Gasthaus, 28th
BridgePort, 29th (doesn't distinguish between NW and Hawthorne)
Rogue Newport, 34th
Full Sail, 42nd
Maritime Pacific (Seattle), 45th

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Best Oregon Beer of 2006: Ninkasi Believer

Long ago, in a world far, far away, a young man from Hope was our President, and breweries made seventy-five beers plus seasonals. 'Twas the wild west in brewing, and if you didn't have a hemp beer, three wheats and a blackberry ale, you weren't really trying. I remember going to the grocery story and every week there were three or four new beers. Sadly, this was moments before the bottom fell out of brewing, companies realized they could lose money, and everyone started to focus on core brands.

We haven't returned to those days, but for the first time, things are looking a little more creative in the beer world. Deschutes went nuts and released about 30 new beers--apparently a strategy more than a quirk of timing. Widmer, BridgePort, and Full Sail all got in the game, too. And even wee Hair of the Dog, which has never been profligate with new releases, had a banner year with Blue Dot and the now-legendary Jim (aka Jim K). New brewpubs started opening up again, and I have been remiss in visiting many of them. Still, a fine trend. All in all, I'd call it the best year in beer since the mid-90s.

To celebrate this new trend, and since this blog is almost a year old, it makes sense to begin a tradition of naming the year's best beer.* Owing to the fact that this blog is Beervana, I'll constrain my focus to those brewed in Oregon (not to mention that trying to sample the vast array of new releases at the national level would pickle my liver). I'll also limit myself to beers released this year, or in the cases of small, far-flung brewpubs, those that made their Portland debut.

The Contenders
None of the new beers I tried were a misfire--maybe one reason why it seemed like such a good year. But among the notables, five stood out:

Deschutes Inversion IPA and Buzzsaw Brown
Full Sail Vesuvius
Hair of the Dog Blue Dot
Ninkasi Believer

Let's work backwards toward the winner, which, since I put it in the title, is not much of a secret. I had a half glass of Hair of the Dog Blue Dot and then it was gone. I don't know if the brewery intended it to be a limited edition, or if it's a seasonal, but if you didn't act quick, you missed Blue Dot. (Since it was named for the earth, maybe this was intentional; a commentary on global warming?) It was a massive, cloudy ale with an herbal quality that, like so many of HotD's beers, defied category. It was part NW IPA, part Belgian golden, and another part that was totally unique. I would love to have tracked down another bottle, and if you want to give this old blogger a wee, late Christmas bonus, you could do worse than digging up a bottle from your cellar hoard.

Full Sail's Vesuvius was also notable for its variance from the NW norm. A Belgian golden, it had the hallmarks of that style--rich yet approachable, and dangerously misleading on the tongue. You could throw down two pints like water, but you'd pay for having missed that it was 8.5%. I wrote about it: "Vesuvius [is] extremely approachable, quaffable, and tasty, concealing its substantial alcohol. [N]ice fruitiness, a very slight Belgian tart, and a long, dry finish. Very tasty and very dangerous."

Deschutes had a banner year and deserves a special award for consistent excellence. You could take the beers they released this year, found a brewery with those beers alone (never mind Mirror Pond, Black Butte, et. al.), and you'd have one of the best in Oregon. The first of the two honored beers, Inversion IPA, may one day challenge BridgePort as Beervana's king--a possibility I wouldn't have considered 12 months ago. Of it I wrote "Hops are the main note (again, as expected), a festival of citrus that contain notes of apricot and spice. The malt offers a nice biscuity complement and the alcohol seems to atomize the aromas in the mouth."

Deschutes' other honoree, Buzzsaw Brown, was my second-favorite beer of the year. Brown ales are deceptively simple affairs until you start sampling them or trying to brew them. Then you realize that hitting the sweet spot on creaminess, malt sweetness, and balancing hops is exceedingly difficult. It's a mild style, so imperfections are magnified. I have waited for literally fifteen years to see a good brown ale come out in the bottle, so Buzzsaw was a long-delayed dream. I wrote these understated comments in my review: "It's essentially a session ale, so it's not bursting with intensity. Yet it's that kind of beer that immediately has a comfortable, recognizeable quality, like you've been tippling pints for decades." A really nice beer.

The Winner
Before I introduce the winner, let me tell you about the first time I ever tried BridgePort IPA. I was joining an out-of-state friend for a movie at Cinema 21. We were trying to kill some time, so we stopped in at the Gypsy across the street, where I had BridgePort's newest beer. The second I tasted it, I knew the brewery had done something special. This was amid that period of shakeout, when B-Port was casting around to find a replacement for Blue Heron as a flagship. A lot of really fine beers had failed to find a market, but this one was so good, I knew instantly that it was destined for greatness.

I have had that experience very rarely. At the Holiday Ale Fest, even before I tasted Ninkasi Believer, I suspected I had found another. The aroma was so exceptional that I didn't even try a sip before I handed my mug around for people to smell. To a person, they all had the same surprised look, and they all went back for a follow-up sniff. The flavor was no disappointment--like BridgePort's IPA, it was sunny and delightful, equally appealling to a beer geek or a novice. I have no idea whether Ninkasi will continue to brew this beer, but I hope they do. It could become an Oregon standard.

So congrats to one of Oregon's youngest breweries and one if its most engaging and accomplished brewers, Jamie Floyd--that was a helluva beer.
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*Usual caveats: I didn't try every beer released in 2006. I visited not a single non-Portland brewpub in 2006. Beer preference is wholly subjective. Mood, circumstance, and conditions play a more than insignificant role in one's experience of a beer.

Your Best Beer of 2006

I am at this moment preparing a Best Beer of 2007 post. I am poring through old posts and notes and trying to recall all the beers I tried this year. For the first time in a long time, we saw breweries really experimenting, and so there's a lot of material. It occurred to me that you might have some good thoughts. So, what was the best beer you tried in 2006? (My criteria are that it had to be new in '06--or, if it's from an obscure brewpub, new to me--and it had to be brewed in Oregon. You need not adhere to these strictures.)

Here are a few of the newbies to prime your keg:

BridgePort Supris
Deschutes: Buzzsaw Brown, Anniversary Pils, Inversion IPA, The Abyss, Hop Trip
Widmer: '06 Hoppy Ale, Broken Halo IPA, Hooligan
Full Sail: Vesuvius, Black Gold Imperial Stout
Hair of the Dog: Blue Dot, Jim K (aka Jim)
Ninkasi Believer
Pelican Full House
Klamath Basin Brewing Cabin Fever Stout

Thoughts?