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...

The Year in Pictures

A look back at my perambulations over the past year. This may or may not be the final year-end post--even though we're trotting merrily into 2017. (Click any photo to enlarge and get an (uncaptioned) slide show.)

When AAB's John Holl visited last year, we
toured Cascade. Ron Gansberg started pulling
out treasures from the cellar--and even the
brewers were impressed.

A cold, wet night in January--from inside
the warmth of Pints Brewing.

The dog of the pod making a homebrew
appearance. (He's Patrick's.)

Junket #1 in 2016 was a trip to Ireland to meet
Michael Ash, the man who invented
nitrogenation at St. James Gate. (Mr. Ash
died six weeks after this photo was taken.)

One of the many Irish pubs I visited.
Locals call these "boozers."

The Beer Bible picked up an IACP award
in April. (Yay!)

Satori Time of Year

When this blog started, I gave out an annual award for the best new release called the Satori Award:

In Zen Buddhism, satori is the moment of sudden enlightenment when the mind realizes its own true nature. The Satori Award honors a debuting beer that in a single instant, through the force of tastiness and elan, produces a flash of insight into the nature of beer. I award it for the beer released in the previous year (roughly) by an Oregon brewery (roughly) for a regular or seasonal beer.  

I managed to do this through 2012, and then, overwhelmed by new beers, I threw in the towel. Last year I happened to take note of an old Satori post and was struck by the beers I'd previously chosen: Ninkasi Believer (2006) Full Sail Lupulin (2007), Cascade Apricot Ale (2008),  Upright Four (2009),  Prodigal Son Bruce/Lee Porter (2010),  Fort George 1811 Lager (2011), and Occidental Pilsner (2012). That's a good-looking list, isn't it? I decided to pick up the tradition again, tentatively, last year. Obviously, I can't possibly taste every new beer that comes out--no one can. But it's possible to single out a beer that really spoke to me, that I would be happy to drink again and again. Last year I added Culmination Euphoric IPA (a brett IPA) to the list.

One of the most enjoyable aspects of this tradition is poring over the beers of the past year to see which sang to me. Thanks partly by prodding from Willamette Week's Martin Cizmar, I've gone back through 2016. I'll announce a Satori winner in the next couple weeks, but here is an expanded list of beers that thrilled me. (Not all of them debuted in 2016, a rule I'm getting more lax about to accommodate the sheer number of beers--but they're not too long in the tooth, either.)

• Gigantic Kiss the Goat  (doppelbock) 
• Ft. George Overdub IPA (session IPA)
• pFriem Sour IPA
• Agrarian Field Beer (hoppy petit saison)
• Block 15 Gloria! (unfiltered pilsner)
• Zoiglhaus North German Pilsner
• De Garde Petit Nectarine (spontaneously-fermented fruit ale)
• Ex Novo Where the Mild Things Are (3.5% dark mild)
• Claim 52 Fluffy IPA
• Upright Oregon Native (wild ale with Oregon grapes) (the new saison-yeast Supercool IPA was great, too) 
• Double Mountain Randal Knife IPA
• Widmer Crystal Gayle Goschie (fresh hop)

Two fairly large asterisks are my failure to get down to Wolves and People or to adequately explore Matt Van Wyk's new Alesong project. Apologies. And of course, many of my best experiences drinking beer this year occurred while sipping old favorites from breweries you might expect to see on the list. Most of the best beers in the state weren't released last year. Someday we'll have an award to celebrate them.

My list is in no special order, and the top four that I'm most strongly considering are scattered throughout. Stay tuned for the thrilling announcement of this year's Satori winner!

The Year in Pixels

Below I offer a year in beer, filtered through the particular lens of my perambulations. There's an unexpectedly large number of All About Beer editor John Holl in here. With CBC in Portland, OBF, GABF, and me visiting the East Coast, I got to see him more often than usual. There is a more national theme this year, as I wandered about on my book tour travels. But also shots of brewers in lederhosen, brewers playing banjo, and very small brewers in skirts. There are technology shots, bar shots, people shots, and even one art shot. All in all, a very good year.

They're mostly chronological, so have a look.

How my year, and 47th birthday, started out.

Early last year, Alex Ganum captured Willamette Week's Beeer
of the Year with Engelberg Pilsner.

The release of Pliny the Younger at Roscoe's.

Niki Ganong released her book.

Espied at FH Steinbart, my local homebrewing shop.

Oregon brewing royalty at CBC: Rogue's John Meier (l)
and Pelican's Darron Welch (r)

An Honorary Satori (Plus Other 2015 Highlights)

Back when this blog started, 3,633 days ago*, I used to do a year-end award for the best new beer released that calendar year. I managed to keep it alive through 2011, when the sheer force of new releases overwhelmed me. In 2012 I gave a sort-of Satori to Occidental Brewing for excellence in lager beer, and general overall awesomeness. Since then the Satori has been dark...

Until now.

It's certainly not that things have gotten easier. It's now so impossible to keep up with beers--so much so that the New School declared Occidental, my 2012 Satori winner, the second-most "most underrated brewery."  The winner, absurdly, was my 2009 Satori winner, Upright Brewing. Apparently we can not only not keep up with new breweries, what to speak of new beers, but now we're losing track of beloved existing breweries. But I digress.

This year I wanted to make special note of a new brewery here in town that should quickly jump to the top tier of must-see stops on a visit to Beervana. That brewery is Culmination, which opened over the summer. I haven't seen such a confident and sure-footed debut of a new brewery since--well, probably since Upright. Brewer Tomas Sluiter had toiled for years at Old Market Brewery, making beer for folks who had fairly pedestrian tastes. For special events, he was sometimes given the green light to make something to age in a barrel, or ferment with wild yeast, but I don't think too many people expected him to be harboring such ambitious goals.

All that time making golden ales and porters gave Sluiter the time to envision a truly adventuresome lineup, and when Culmination launched, it had an impressive array of yeast-forward beers designed to please palates. I've never seen fewer than three saisons on tap, in all colors of the beer rainbow. There's usually at least one wild ale on tap, and generally a spiced ale or two. Of course, he also dabbles a bit in hops, and it's here where he made perhaps the biggest impression. His regular IPA is in fact fairly irregular--and has become my favorite hoppy ale in the city. Euphoric IPA is made with Brettanomcyes (the chalkboard inevitably says "Brett IPA," and I bet half the people ask--"who's Brett?"), but most people would be unaware of the yeast's contribution. In the manner of modern IPAs, it's incredibly tropical, with layers of fruity flavors and clouds of citrusy aroma. The strain of Brett he uses accentuates this, but you don't have to know it's there. What you find is a deeply pleasurable, approachable beer. The Satori is typically given to a beer, so consider Euphoric IPA this year's winner.

I've been very impressed with his saisons, as well, and the black saison is a perfect winter beer. He also has a penchant for dark ales--no longer particularly popular, but personal faves of mine--and treats like the recent chocolate stout were good, old-school fun. From top to bottom, the beer list has been impressive.

Culmination has been getting a lot of press as one of the best new breweries this year, which is an accurate but understated compliment. Culmination is one of the best breweries in Portland, and if you haven't checked it out, do so at your earliest convenience.

A lot else happened in 2015, and here are a few of the highlights

Kurt Widmer
At some point I hope to have a proper post up about the influence of one-half of the titular Widmer Brothers. Kurt announced that he was going to retire this year, concluding a 31-year run with the brewery he founded. It opened within months of BridgePort in 1984, and quickly became a part of the fabric of the city. Despite those 31 years, Kurt is still relatively young, and I hope he enjoys his well-earned retirement, with our many, many thanks.

Honest Pints
For a very brief moment, it looked like honest pints might become the law of Oregon. Didn't happen.

Deschutes Fresh Squeezed IPA
Traveling around the country was a useful perspective-giving exercise. I learned many things, but one was relevant to Oregon. Basically, no one beyond a buffer of a state or two away has ever tried Oregon beer. Rogue is very like the only beer a, say Wisconsinite, will ever have encountered. This I knew. What I did not know is that Deschutes has begun pushing ever further out, and in many of the more beer districts, riding the success of Fresh Squeezed IPA. I saw it on tap throughout the Midwest. Here in Oregon, we have gotten used to these fruit-juice IPAs (the "fresh squeezed" of the title). We are still a few years ahead of other states, and so this is a radical beer in far-flung markets. Not surprisingly, people rave about it. It's the kind of beer that hints at the huge potential of hops to go beyond bitterness. It's a great beer and a great ambassador for Oregon.

Cannabis
Oregon legalized it. Almost nothing changed.

Kettle Souring
Rarely does a brewing technique deserve special attention at year-end best-ofs. But this year we must acknowledge the debt the brewing industry owes to kettle souring, that process of acidifying a wort with a lactic fermentation and then using the soured mash in beers like gose, Berliner weisse, and dry-hopped sours. All three of those styles were hugely popular in 2015--gose grew the fastest of any style, Berliner weisse the third-fastest--and follow a trend led by brewers here. In April, Gigantic's Ben Love, The Commons' Sean Burke, and Breakside's Ben Edmunds gave a talk on the process at the Craft Brewers Conference, illustrative of how well-established the practice has become here. It's a great, natural way for breweries to use lactic acid to acidify beers exactly the degree they wish. You can tinge a saison with crispness or make a Berliner weisse screamingly tart--and everything in between. Expect this to become a universal, common practice in the US in the next decade.



Some Guy Released a Book
You may have heard about it. 

Consolidation
You couldn't end a round-up of the year's activities without noting the trend toward consolidation within the craft-brewing segment. Just a quick glance at a list of the largest U.S. breweries demonstrates what's happened. The three largest US beer companies are still makers mainly of mass market lagers, but half of the next eight—all one-time craft breweries—are partially or entirely owned by large multinational beer companies. To add a cherry on top, Reuters recently reported that employee-owned New Belgium was courting a buy-out suitor. (Which goes to show that employee-owned companies may be especially vulnerable to buy-outs; earlier in the year, Oregon's employee-owned Full Sail sold out to a private equity firm.)

None of which should really bother us. I would expect that consolidation will continue to proceed apace. Anheuser-Busch InBev's strategy is to create a network of "craft" brands that it can use to create a national all-ABI family of products. That will streamline business at both the wholesale and retail levels. But there's little reason to think that it will damage the market or make good, experimental beers harder to find. Indeed, for the foreseeable future, big companies are going to be emulating the craft brands, trying to make the edgy, experimental beers that craft drinkers want. Remember the old cliche, which fits the moment perfectly: Bud couldn't beat 'em, so they joined (or bought) 'em.

That's it for 2015. Onward to 2016 . . .
_______________
*Look for special 10th anniversary blogging in the new year.

The Good and Popular Posts of 2014

Thanks to the data that Google provides (as opposed to the data they keep--which I'd love to see), I have a pretty good idea of which posts attracted the most attention over the past year.  Google tracks "entry pages," which is a good proxy for post popularity. These are the individual post pages people are referred into--from other sites or internet searches--as opposed to coming to the main site. In the modern era, entry pages are referred largely by social media referrals.  Early in the year, Reddit was responsible for some of my biggest traffic days, but that site has become an anemic source of late.  Twitter remains my biggest performer, but virality transcends platform.

I've always described my blog as a garbage scow of information--you'll find some treasures and some rubbish, but it's a theme-free jumble. Actually, that's not entirely true.  If anything unites the content here, it's my proclivity for finding a tiny thing and writing a thousand words on it. It's what I like. One thing I noticed in looking through the top posts of the year is that readers tend to respond to the same posts.  I'm slightly embarrassed by my top traffic post of the year--keying off the idea, other people took the subject to far more interesting places--but the second-most popular post was my favorite of the year.  That post could become the coda to what I've learned writing about beer over the last five years.  It's incredibly reassuring to know that people like reading, more or less, the same posts I like writing. 

So here are the top click-getting posts of the year.  (I quite liked the last post, so it's a top-11 list.)  I don't expect anyone to click around much--I know these year-end posts are mostly ways to fill up space in the absence of news--but I do think there's some decent content there.  If you missed one of these, give it a look. 

1. GABF Analysis: Five States Won Half the Medals (5,851 clicks)
2. Zen and the Art of Appreciating Simple Beers (4,535)
3. How the Word "India" Came to Mean "American" (4,341)
4. The Goose Island Challenge (4,275)
5. When Naming Goes Awry (4,112)
6. Cider Saturday: How Angry Orchard is Made, an Interview with David Sipes  (3,280)
7. A Brief Primer on Czech Lagers (3,205)
8. A Bomber Bubble? (2,673)
9. A Hoppy Ale to Rule Them All (2,238)
10. Introducing "Hop Bursting" (Part 1, History)  (2,234)
11. Big Brewers Making Specialty Beer: Lessons from MillerCoors  (2,080)

For the completist within, I feel impelled to offer my own top posts, though after the first two listings, they don't really fall in order of preference. 

• Zen and the Art of Appreciating Simple Beers. The title mostly captures what the post is about, but there's an element of appreciating any beer in it, not just simple beer.
• A Brief Primer on Czech Lagers I am not the best tribune for Czech beer, but because of the staggering dearth of information (in English) about the world's greatest drinking country, I do my best to spread the news.
• Introducing "Hop Bursting" (Part 1, History)  and Hop Bursting, Part 2 (How the Brewers Do It).  Delving into a relatively new brewing technique.  This is the kind of content I think blogs were designed to deliver; it's hard to do them in any other medium.
• Big Brewers Making Specialty Beer: Lessons from MillerCoors.  I went to a tasting of the various small, specialty brewers under the MillerCoors umbrella and learned a ton about the chasm between the way big and small breweries make and sell beers.
• How the Word "India" Came to Mean "American." A slightly controversial post in which I posit that the word India/Indian, when seen on a beer label in Portland, Prague, or London, essentially means "really hoppy in the American mode."
• In Herefordshire.  This post came from my cider research trip to Europe, and I might have selected any posts from that series--but because I landed in Herefordshire first, my experience and the resulting post was the most vivid.
• Style Ontology and the Everyman Rule.  Beer geeks spend a lot of time obsessing over style, and I proposed a way of checking our instinct to roam too deeply in the weeds.
• Full Disclosure. My explanation of how I wrangle with the tension between brewery freebies and journalistic independence.
• Beer Sherpa Recommends: Elysian Bramble On Saison.  Reviews are mostly not interesting to people, and yet, I think it's important to continue to periodically put our critical apparatus to use in judging beer.  Beer Sherpa Recommends gives me a way of looking at a beer and a style more deeply.  I'm enjoying them and hoping others are, too.
• When Craft Becomes a Commodity.  It's not hard to imagine the rise of faceless "craft" beer sold, like mass market lagers, as commodities rather than crafted products.
• The Ease of Misunderstanding Czech Beer.  An echo of my favorite post of the year, but focused on the greatest brewing country few Americans know.
• I Have a Minor Complaint: The Bombers Are Too Damn High and There are No Good Arguments For Overpaying.  This couplet demonstrates another reason why blogs are still relevant: you can delve into a topic deeply and curate a good discussion.  Social media will never be especially good at it.  Here, the very debatable premise was: 22 ounce beers are priced to gouge customers.

I'll see you next year.  Everyone stay smart and safe tonight--

Update.  Responding to this post, both Stan and Alan listed their top-ever posts as measured by the algorithmists in Mountain View.  For what it's worth, mine are below.  I think there's some randomness to all-timers like these, in that some large outlet must have linked to them at one point and goosed the stats.  I don't know that you can take much away from the list per se (the third-highest was an April Fool's post).  Anyway, here it is:

•  Why Americans Don't Make "Lambic."  (8/9/13 - 15,474 clicks)
• Brand Dissection: Pabst Blue Ribbon. (10/1/10 - 14,205)
• Pope Francis to Trappists: No More Beer. (4/1/13 - 11,675)

The Year in Pictures

Over the course of a year, we mobile modern humans often range far and wide across this sapphire planet of ours, and our travels offer a tiny window into the currents and trends stippling the beer world.  At least among those of us who direct our gaze toward things beery.  As I ramble about, I take snaps on my wheezing iPhone 4 and post them to Twitter.  Below are a selection of the choicest cuts.  See what trends you can divine.  (Yes, cider looms large.)

My year started in Salem, as I joined EZ Orchard's Kevin Zielinski
as he milled and pressed apples.

 

It was then off to Europe on research for Cider
Made Simple.  First stop--Tom Oliver in Herefordshire.

The Year in Beer

That time of year is upon us, when in the dark and cold and dearth of news we cast our gaze backward at the year to see what to make of it.  This isn't entirely in service of generating clicks--it is sometimes worthwhile to remind ourselves of events past and see if they tell us anything relevant about life in the present. 

January always starts slow, and because I was in Europe doing research for my cider book (Cider Made Simple), I was out of the loop.  Not entirely out of the loop, though; I did manage to catch the reports of a beer called "Mouth Raper."  A nice controversy to warm up a frigid month (with a follow-up here).  The incident sheds very little light on anything, except 1) that the sheer number of beers made each year means the likelihood of at least one of them offending people is 100%, and 2) people really, really take beer seriously.  Number (2) is a theme we shall return to in due course.

In February, the OLCC released final numbers on 2013, and we learned that a new crop of breweries are making some noise in the world.  The top-ten of best selling beer includes Ninkasi (#3), 10 Barrel (#7), Boneyard (#9) and Oakshire (#10).  On the other hand, four breweries accounted for half the Oregon beers sold in Oregon in 2013.

In March, the Brewers Association changed its definition of craft brewery and essentially scrapped the "traditional" element.  Pyramid came in for an assessment on its 30th birthday.  The horse having left the barn, both MillerCoors and AB InBev decided to close the door and released mass market ciders.  (An abstruse use of cliched metaphor, I'll grant you.)  Here on the blog we discussed hop bursting (in posts one and two).

Very little happened in April.  Seizing the moment, Nat West released his version of a Mexican fruit wine called tepache. 

In May, another brewery turned 30--Oregon's oldest, BridgePort.  I spent an odd afternoon celebrating this event with brewery members past and present and offered another consideration.  It was the month tragedy struck, as brewing pioneer and Rogue founder Jack Joyce died.

In June, Vani Hari's effort to get beer to fully label its ingredients came under closer scrutiny.  I still think her overall point is right, but she is a catastrophic messenger.  (And if you don't agree, this post is the one to read.)  I had a chance to sample the "craft beers" of MillerCoors and was surprised at what I found.  On the blog, we discussed style evolution in the US.

July is the month of beer.  There are seven million fests in Portland alone, and I spent most of the month with my nose in a glass of local beer.  News was happening elsewhere, though.  In a major theme for the year, brewery openings were astounding.  This article provides the numbers (headliners: brewery numbers have doubled in five year and over the past two years, 8.4 breweries open ever seven days).  Even Cantillon announced it was expanding.

Absolutely nothing of note happened in August.  Or perhaps just memory, which might better explain things.

September was personally busy.  I had the chance to make a lightning trip to the Czech Republic and also judged magazine articles for the North American Guild of Beer Writers.  Then at the end of the month, I went to Victoria, BC on a grand beer tour.  But news-wise, it was no more exciting in September than August.  I mean, this was major beer news:

We've all been there little buddy. "Skunk with head stuck in beer can rescued in Ohio" http://t.co/YtOQSXJuY8 pic.twitter.com/an3bgmooBn
— pourmecoffee (@pourmecoffee) September 17, 2014

October brought us the GABF and the realization that five states won half the medals.  It was the month that Ohio-based Fat Head's decided to open up a multi-million dollar brewpub in the most expensive real estate in Portland--which locals observed with slight mystification.  In other curious launches, Guinness put an amber ale in a wooden box and hoped people would shell out $35 for it.  Lagunitas managed to get a fresh hop beer in a bottle and, for at least 48 hours thereafter, it tasted like a fresh hop beer.  Hops native to the US and grown by monks went on sale for the first time, and a New Yorker cover caused a stir.

The last two months of the year have been dominated by an existential crisis.  It was precipitated by the news, in early November, that Anheuser-Busch was acquiring 10 Barrel Brewing lock, stock, and barrel.  It led us to question things like the soul of beer, and the meaning of craft. 

____________

Does any of this add up to anything?  I think it does.  I don't know how broadly the general public feel it, but 2014 ended with a note of unease about the health and long-term well-being of smaller, independent breweries.  (An unease I don't share, but a pervasive one nonetheless.)  The year started out with anniversaries of two early enterprises that have managed to survive the craft beer era--but which are owned by corporate conglomerates.  Just last week I noted that Founders and Surly are both in the midst of $40 and $30 million brewery upgrades.  As the year went on, we saw a staggering number of new breweries open, and the year was capped by the 10 Barrel sale. 

What we're seeing is the maturation of the market.  There's very serious money to be made in beer, which is attracting a lot of new entrants to the market.  What we're seeing are the first signs of consolidation as older breweries pass to new owners and aggressive mid-size breweries look for capital to grow.  Change is afoot and 2014 won't be an anomaly.  But no worries--with 3,000 breweries out there, surely you can find some beer to get excited about.

The Year in Review

Note: post has been edited slightly for clarity.

Ecliptic, one of 500 new breweries in 2013.

What year is complete without a year-end review?  BuzzFeed has more or less made us all despise these things, but I've been doing year-end recaps since long before the ubiquity of click-baiting listicles, and by God, I plan to keep up the tradition.  (Completists may like to peruse the old posts from 2011, 2010a and 2010b, 2009, 2008a and 2008b, and 2007.)  So without further throat-clearing, let's get right to it.  Here were the trends and developments I thought were most interesting.


Good Trend: Lager's Triumphant Return
As recently as a few years ago, I was pretty sure no one on the West Coast was going to be able to give away lagers.  Full Sail got the ball rolling, but their line of lagers seemed more like a brewing cul-de-sac rather than a blazed new trail.  The presence of the LTD series and Sessions appeared to be the exceptions that proved the rule, not a new trend.  But by last year, signs of a lager renaissance were becoming insistent, and this year, lagers were everywhere.  Not only did lagers return--there was even a lager fest--but they were really good.  Standouts included Breakside's Float and Pilsner, the pilsners from the Commons and Upright (the latter an early trendsetter), Ninkasi's Bohemian Pils, and possibly my favorite, Hop Valley's Czech Your Head.


Bad Trend: Price Spiral
In the very competitive Portland market, the prices on standard beer has remained mostly flat for years.  We can thank Bill Night for his steady work in making those figures available.  (In 2009, a six-pack set you back $9.09 and now you have to pony up just $9.50.)  But in that four-year period, specialty releases have become a much bigger part of the brewing calculus, and prices on those beers has really spiked.  Beyond Beervana, where competition is lighter, prices have spiked even more.  You can see the effect of that at bottle shops, where fairly standard beers from other parts of the country are often ten bucks a bomber.  Specialty releases are even more expensive, and as Alan has pointed out a million times, this feels more like gouging than compensation for spendier processes like barrel aging.  (If Frank Boon will sell me a bottle of his Mariage Parfait for less than ten bucks, why should I be paying $20 for an American brett bomb?)


Good Trend: Cider Comes of Age
It's weird to talk about the emergence of a beverage that has been around longer than the country, but until 2013, cider was on no one's radar.  Mass market cider was at the end of cooler next to the alco-pops and good luck trying to find it on tap.  This year, cider finally seeped into our collective consciousness.  It's in nearly every restaurant or pub I visit, and nearly always in the form of an all-juice "craft" cider.  (I know this is different outside Portland, where if you see a cider, it's likely to be Angry Orchard.)  One of the breakthrough products was Two Towns Rhubarbarian--the first cider I heard people talking about and using as an example of what "good" cider could be.  It was such a good year for cider that it even started appearing at beer fests.


Ambiguous Trend: New Breweries
When historians look back on 2012-2013, they probably won't remember lagers or ciders so much as the explosion of new brewery openings.  This is a continuation of the trend that started last year, when more than 400 new breweries opened up (!) and continued on this year.  The numbers aren't in for 2013, but the Brewers Association thinks there might be as many as 500.  I am still unconvinced this is the sign of a catastrophic bubble, but there is at least one thing to worry about.  For the first time in a long time, production brewery openings are outpacing brewpub openings.  (The stats are slightly unclear--what would you call Ecliptic, which opened as a brewpub that bottles beer?)  There is plenty of room for craft beer growth, but supermarket shelves only have so much real estate.  Will there be a shakeout in the next five years?  With 900 breweries opening in two years, I guess we're running the experiment in real time.


Troubling Trend: Too Many Beers
The market within the craft beer segment has changed dramatically in the last five years.  Once breweries were able to build up a single brand or two build their brewery around it.  The explosion of choice has created a kind of manic ADHD scramble for the new, however, and now breweries regularly make dozens of different beers.  Breakside made a hundred, but even old stalwarts like Widmer Brothers and Deschutes made dozens.  I've mentioned feeling personally overwhelmed by the choice, but there's something more than personal preference at work here.  Selling to a promiscuous consumer base is touchy business, and godspeed to those breweries--particularly the bigger ones--who are trying to find what the public wants next.


Good Trend: Permanent Market Realignment
I don't think there's any doubt that the beer market is permanently altered.  Each year, the market for mass market lagers declines--sometimes precipitiously--and each year the craft beer segment expands.  At this point, China is the battleground for growth among the industrial giants.  Locally, their growth strategy involves getting some of that craft money.  Mass market lagers won't disappear, but they're headed for a long decline.  Meanwhile, the biggest of the little guys--Sierra Nevada, Lagunitas, New Belgium--are borrowing a page from the industrial playbook and opening new breweries.  This will further push hoppy ales into the mainstream, hastening the decline of the various lights and lites.  There is an equilibrium some decades in the future, and it includes a healthy share for all-barley ales. 


Ambiguous Trend: Changing Media
I'll go out on a bit of a navel-gazer.  This will be the first year I don't do the Satori Award.  It's partly due to the fact that the changes is brewing have made it obsolete--breweries don't really think in terms of permanency anymore.  But it's also because blogs themselves are no longer particularly relevant in the discussion of beer.  When I started this blog in 2006, there was a bit of utility in offering my reviews and opinions about beers.  It's amazing to think about, but Facebook didn't launch as a national site until that September, and Twitter didn't exist.  Social media as such was limited to things like blogs, which offered a chatty alternative to newspapers.  But in the few short years since then, everything has changed.  No one really looks to blogs to help them navigate niche worlds anymore.  Opinion is so ubiquitous we are instantly tired of it.  In an environment saturated with people oversharing, a blog looks like grandpa's old-timey Facebook page.

There are a lot of opportunities for bloggers to do new and interesting stuff.  But we need to rethink the blog.  Once, we were the BuzzFeeds offering our listicles as an alternative to newspapers.  It's quite possible the reverse is happening: now newspapers don't offer in-depth reporting anymore, so it may be up to citizen bloggers to do that.  I've always tried to do long-form blogging with actual reporting (such as I am able to do it), and this blog may morph ever more in that direction.  I only posted 210 times in 2013, the lowest number since 2006.  If I can break myself of old habits, I may try to do more of the long-form stuff.  We shall see.

Whatever 2014 brings, I hope it is fresh and tasty, just like my favorite beers.  Happy new year to you all--

Most Interesting Brewer 2011

A post over at the New School jogged my memory about one final year-end post I had in mind. It was written by Breakside's Ben Edmunds, and he was discussing the various exotic ingredients he tossed into beers.

In all, we’ve made 92 different beers at the pub this year, learning lots about the various ingredients we’ve incorporated along the way. Some of that includes the fun of working with different base malts, the challenges of finding substitute hops when our supply of Citra and Amarillo ran dry, and the learning curve with bringing in a new yeast strains. It also includes all the Reinheitsgebot–forbidden ingredients that I love to use in the brewery. Over the last few months, it seems like we’ve been on an especially adjunct-heavy kick using a number of less common fruits, herbs, spices, and so on in some of the beers. (At the same time, we’ve also been making a series of traditional lagers, for what it’s worth.)

Ben has an almost unique situation at Breakside. It's a three-barrel brewery with owners willing to completely cede the brewhouse to their brewer. The small batches allow Ben to experiment endlessly even while keeping the house range on tap. As a consequence, Ben can brew beers that are hugely experimental. Larger breweries can't afford to gamble as much. It creates a virtuous cycle: Ben is now well-known for being able to pull off experimental beers, and that makes people eager to try them.

Beyond making some of the most interesting beers over the past year, Ben has also done more than any other brewery on the education front. He blogs at the New School, regularly brews authentic revival beers (his Devon White Ale this year is one of the all-time highlights of Oregon brewing), and has collaborated with various bloggers, writers, and groups to design and brew their own recipes. (A personal highlight of mine was brewing a grisette--a low-alcohol saison--with Ben.)

Breakside may be a tiny brewery in a remote quadrant of the city, but Ben's made it a destination. I can't think of any brewer who did more interesting work in 2011 than he did. Kudos--

Trends in Beer 2011

A few years ago, it was fresh hops; a couple years back it was sour beers, last year it was CDAs (or black IPAs or bitter darks or whatever). Like birds in flight, when one body inclines in a different direction, the whole flock changes course. What are the trends this year? Which birds are driving the flock? It occurred to me that the list I compiled for the Satori candidates does a great job of summarizing four of the more interesting developments in the world of beer. Here they are.

1. Strong ales
This is admittedly the most inconsequential of the year's trends, but one worth noting. With the release of Kingpin in six-packs, BridgePort solidified a trend that has been emerging over the past year or two: very strong beers released in six-packs at standard (that is, non-specialty) pricing. BridgePort had already scored success with Hop Czar, and Kingpin joins the lineup as another 7.5% giant. GoodLife Descender IPA (7%) and Boneyard Hop Venom (10%) are in the same vein. BridgePort is an appropriate marker for the trend because when they released one of the earliest IPAs back in 1996, they thought it needed to be a sessionable 5.5% to sell. They wouldn't make that decision today.

2. German Revival
When craft brewing started thirty years ago, the early pioneers wanted to work in a non-German milieu (except in the Midwest). German tradition--or its sad descendents--had dominated American brewing for over a century and craft brewers were looking for inspiration elsewhere. Folks like the Widmers had little luck exciting people about their rich German heritage. Lagers were commercial death (literally, in some cases--Saxer RIP). You might sneak a doppelbock into your line-up, but no one was interested in anything carrying the whiff of macro. With the arrival of Occidental and Fort George's delightful 1811 lager, there are signs people might be ready to give the Germans another go. (Yes, 1811 is based on a pre-prohibition American lager, but that style came from the breweries of the wave of German immigrants who remade the industry in the second half of the 19th century.)

3. Saisons
I think I may have cited this as a trend in past years, but I continue to be amazed by how many saisons are on the market--and 2011 was another banner year. There were 65 entries in the saison category at the GABF, more than all but ten other categories (of 83). BeerAdvocate list 982 saisons ... and just 924 German pilsners. This is a staggering turnaround for a style Michael Jackson declared nearly extinct 30 years ago. It may seem crazy for someone to build a brewery on the idea of farmhouse ales, but Dave Logsdon is riding the wave of one of the hottest styles in brewing. I once thought there were a lot of saisons because brewers like them, not customers, but that's becoming harder and harder to believe. In fact, when I interviewed Avondale, a brewery that opened in Birmingham earlier this year (Alabama's fourth), I wasn't even that shocked to learn that their flagship was slated to be a 7.5% saison. Well, why not?

4. Strange Ingredients
Perhaps the biggest trend of the moment is using non-standard ingredients to make beer. We have two beers on the Satori list that are useful examples--Bend Brewing's Ching Ching, a pomegranate and hibiscus Berliner weisse, and Burnside Sweet Heat, an apricot and pepper wheat ale. (Throw Deschutes Chainbreaker in there, too.) American craft breweries--not to mention breweries over the span of history--have often wandered into the fruit, spice, and veggie aisle for added flavor oomph. But often, the additives were there to mask the beer. The current trend is an evolution in brewing where the beer's nature is accentuated and bent in the direction of fine cuisine. Not every experiment works, but those that do are helping to redefine the way we think about beer. I expect this trend to continue and fundamentally change beer. It could take decades, but I think it's irreversible and inevitable. Oh--and good.

I've had to consider the Satori hopefuls in light of these larger trends and I've come up with a winner, which I'll announce tomorrow.

CDAs and People's Choices

Last week, I polled you about your favorite CDAs. There was a method to my madness: as we come toward the year's end, I start eyeballing the Satori Award (which honors the best debut of a beer to an Oregon brewery's regular or seasonal line-up). The really big trend this year was Cascadian Dark Ales, which I have to consider for the Satori, even though it's a style I don't really love. So to help winnow things down, I polled you. Below are the results with a weighted average (1-4, poor to excellent):

• 3.1 - Deschutes Hop in the Dark
• 2.9 - Widmer W '10
• 2.6 - Oakshire O'Dark 30
• 2.6 - Boneyard Armored Fist
• 2.4 - Alameda Cascadian Coal
• 2.4 - Terminal Gravity CDA
• 2.2 - Full Sail Bump in the Night

So there you have it: Hop in the Dark the clear winner. (It also polled the best in a multiple choice, but that was biased toward the beers more people had tried.) Widmer placed a close second, and I kept hearing complaints that Hopworks' Secession wasn't on the list. Technically, it was an '09 release because it appeared at the Organic Beer Fest that year. I'm persuaded by those who think it's properly a '10 beer, though: it couldn't have qualified in '09 because I didn't expect to ever see it again. I'll therefore add all three to the final Satori long list, which currently includes these beers, annotated where necessary:

• Beetje Small Saison
• Block 15 Figgy Pudding (based on its expected return)
  
• Boneyard (?) - not sure which, if any, beers this new brewery might place in the long list.
  
• Breakside Dry Stout - I could be persuaded this wasn't Breakside's best beer
  
• Cascade Noyeau (also thinking we may see this beer again in the future)
  
• Coalition King Kitty Red/Loving Cup Maple Porter - either one of these should be in there--the red's the best of their hoppy beers (ie, most of them), but the porter's the really inspired beer.
  
• Columbia River Brewing [Paddlers Porter?] I should check this brewery out before final Satori balloting.
  
• Deschutes Hop in the Dark
• Hopworks Secession
• Mt Tabor Little Bull Stout - This was so well-loved at the Microhopic I'm thinking it's this new brewery's best. Yes?
  
• Ninkasi Maiden the Shade (appeared at the '09 Oregon Country Fair, but counts even less than Secession's '09 appearance)
  
• Prodigal Son Bruce/Lee Porter - I could be persuaded this wasn't the best Prodigal Son beer, maybe. Damn fine beer.
• Rogue Single Malt - easily the best of their debut beers made with homegrown ingredients
  
• Widmer Sunburn
• Widmer W '10 CDA (I'll check to see if this will be back in the future)
  

Obviously, not every beer that meets the criteria is on this list, but you might see something that I clearly missed. Please holler. I'd hate to miss an obvious choice. Although the Satori isn't exactly the most important award on the planet, I'm pretty happy with how the previous choices look in the rear-view mirror. I like to get it right.

In case you're scoring at home, only two of these are straightforward hop bombs (you could boost the number to five by including CDAs), while five are porters or stouts. Only a couple Belgian-styles, which may mean the streak in that genre (of two) may be over.

Weigh in and I'll post a follow-up poll with all the finalists and get a people's choice. (Oh, and the interns are madly collating your suggestions on the DMS Awards, which will be announced by week's end.)

Beer Trends of the Year

[Note: if you haven't already, please consider filling out the Cascadian Dark Ale survey.]

Karl Jung would have something to say about the way trends emerge and evolve in the American craft brewing world. Somehow, without getting instructions from the head office, breweries nevertheless manage to pick up on invisible cues and create trends every year. Fresh hops, farmhouse ales, sour beers--all have had their moment. This year? Here are my thoughts.

1. Exotic Ingredients
The use of exotic ingredients (fruit, vegetables, spices, etc.) is as ancient as brewing, and craft breweries dabbled with them almost from the start. So on the one hand, you could make the argument that this isn't any trend at all. What has changed, though, is that these ingredients are no longer the purpose of a beer. Once, breweries made "chili beer" or "cherry beer" and there was no mistaking the adjunct. Now, breweries are tossing in extra goodies to draw out flavors already present in the recipe.

You tend to notice this a lot more at the fests. Winter beers have always deployed spice, but at this year's OBF, 40% of the beers had nonstandard ingredients (a partial list included dried tulips, ginger, grapefruit peel, hibiscus, hyssop, lemongrass, orange blossoms, and pepper).

It's a far more interesting way of brewing, and the results are more subtle and far more accomplished. In the old model, the adjunct was used to mitigate the beery-ness of a beer. Now brewers add ingredients to enhance it. (Actually, there are plenty of the old gimmick beers around, too.) This is how Belgians brew, and it's so common that the extras aren't regarded as anything special. Many times they're not even acknowledged. As American craft brewing continues to mature, I expect we'll see a Belgian attitude emerge. We're well on the way already.

2. Historical Revivals
If the use of adjuncts is a long-developing trend that has finally fully blossomed, the appearance of historical revivals is just beginning. It's not as if every brewery is awash in grätzers and roggenbiers. But the mere appearance of a grätzer or roggenbier is interesting. Combine that with the flood of goses and Berlinner weisses, and we can credibly call it a trend. In addition to the aforementioned grätzer, another--and a more traditional one--will apparently be on offer by Burnside Brewing when it opens next year. Block 15's Figgy Pudding Olde Stock gets credit for being a nice take on a traditional English old ale--replete with tasty brettanomyces. And, the fact that I found rauchbier and gose in Portsmouth suggests to me that this isn't isolated in Beervana.

3. Cascadian Dark Ale Goes Commercial
Until 2010, the term "Cascadian Dark Ale" was retrofitted to beers without their permission. Certain examples (many bearing the hated title "Black IPA") have been around for years, but the term hasn't appeared on bottles. Until this year. Widmer called their version "Pitch Black IPA," but christened it a Cascadian Dark in the small print. But then Oakshire, Deschutes, and Full Sail went the fully monty, no hedges.

I have no idea whether this style will survive and, if it does, whether the name will survive. But give Abe Goldman-Armstrong credit: he managed to get breweries to start using the name officially. As a secondary consequence, I think Abe may have inadvertently introduced "Cascadian" as a regional appellation for any style of beer that bears the hallmarks of the Pacific Northwest. I started to see it used as a way of claiming certain characteristics (alcohol heft, hoppiness) that are not unique to the region. The use of CDA is itself a controversy (other parts of the country take exception to the regional claim), and no doubt further extension of the word will create more controversy.

But hey, controversy sells beer, right?

The Year in Beer

I understand why the year 2000 had such a pull on us and why, despite the math, we decided to celebrate the new millennium then. But I refuse to submit to the tyranny of the the masses and do a review of the decade in beer until next year--when it properly ends. However, it does appear we've come near the end of 2009, so here's a few observations.

The Crisis That Wasn't
Back at the start of the year, it looked like a sure bet that breweries and pubs were going to be in big trouble. I even ran a couple of polls (here and here) to see how purchasing habits were changing with the intention of tracking the trend by quarters. But at mid-year, the numbers started coming out and surprise of surprises--the industry was still growing. I don't doubt that some breweries--and definitely some pubs--saw business decline. But the category five hurricane turned out to be just a little rain.

Saison Season
Every year there's a mini-boom (a boomlet?, a pop?) in some style. Last year it was Belgian golden ales. This year, saisons. Locally, we had Upright doing a wave of them, plus a couple nice examples by Full Sail and Standing Stone. I saw lots of national versions too, from The Bruery's to Boulevard and Goose Island.

The Gose revival was constrained to just two breweries, but let's hope that's a preview of coming attractions.

Barrel Madness
It hardly bears mentioning the trend in barreling beers, save to note that it now looks like a standard practice, not a trend. I haven't run any numbers, but surely well over half the bottling breweries and a large percentage of brewpubs have barrel-aging programs underway (at least locally). One nice element of this trend is that it's expanding beyond bourbon barrels. In the last year, wine barrels were on the move, as were previously unused barrels (what do you call those, "fresh?"). Bourbon adds a wonderful note to some beers, but by no means all. Yet barreling a beer can add wonderful character, whether or not you're trying to leach residual alcohol into the beer.

Looking Forward
I mentioned in my Satori Award post that 2009 was in some ways a year of rest for the industry. A wise year of rest, given the uncertainty. But given beer's surprising resilience this year, I see signs of enthusiasm about new projects going forward. Right off the bat, we have something on the order of 8-10 breweries scheduled to open in 2010. One of them is focusing on gluten-free beers, evidence of some of the potential micro-markets within craft brewing. Look for a rock and roll year.

Finally, I'll leave you all with a prediction, one that is more advocacy than actual prophesy: 2010 will be the year of small beer. We've done big beer, we've done hoppy beer, we've done sour beer. Of all the extremes left to explore, small beer may be the final frontier. Let it be so!

Trends of the Year: 2) Sour Beers

Northwest beers are famous for being robust and, particularly, robustly hoppy. Breweries could be charged with giving other ingredients short shrift: except in a small minority of cases, malts are essentially a pedestal used to showcase the hops; Oregon water, so close to rain, is elementally neutral--no Burton-on-Trent minerals here; and except for stunted forays into lagering, yeasts are almost uniformly descendents of English ales.

I don't expect hops' supremacy to wane anytime soon, but 2009 will be noted as the year breweries started to get funky. Breweries have messed around with Belgian yeasts in the past, but mostly the safer ones--abbeys, biere de garde, wit, strong goldens. This year, they went sour. Off hand, I can think of at least five examples:

• Cascade/Raccoon Lodge's range of funky beers
  
• BridgePort Stumptown Tart
• Double Mountain Devil's Kriek
• Deschutes Dissident
• Roots Flanders Red
  

The difficulty in souring a beer, what to speak of the danger, is demonstrated by Roots' entrant, which while it was announced months ago, hasn't actually been released yet. I haven't a clue why, but it's not surprising. Souring a beer isn't an exact science, like bittering it. Breweries have a few methods available to them, but they are at best unpredictable. At worst, as when Deschutes danced with wild yeasts, they can actually screw up other beers. If you are working with fruit, that will affect the sourness. When Ron Gansberg soured his blackberry and cherry beers, the blackberries actually made the beer more tart. I'm not sure how BridgePort soured their Stumptown Tart, but it wasn't an entirely successful effort. I found it to have a chemical signature. So it's not easy or safe work.

My guess is that we won't see this evolve into a major trend. Sour beers are niche beers. Even the companies that make only sour beers are small by international standards. Lambics, so beloved, are obscure enough that most Americans won't even have heard of them much less seen or tried them. But there may well just be enough nuts like me to make it worthwhile for a few NW breweries to continue to experiment with this high-risk, low-reward genre.



(In any case, the trend was so well-established this year that it prompted me to make the Sour-o-meter, one of my favorite innovations of the year.)

Trends of the Year: 1) Oregon Fresh Hops

The use of fresh hops was far from original in 2008--it was probably in 2005 or 2006 that more than a random brewery or two started to experiment with these and we saw the emergence of a trend. But this year, Oregon made a pretty decent stab at establishing itself as the main purveyor of fresh hop ales. At this year's GABF, Oregon got national attention for pouring ten fresh-hop beers.

It makes sense. With so many breweries so close to hop fields, no other state can touch Oregon. Nearly every Oregon brewery is within 100 miles of a hop field, something even Washington, which produces more hops, can claim. (Seattle's 140 miles from Yakima.) As a result, we had more than 4o beers from nearly 30 breweries making a version. Call this the home-field advantage.

Other, non-Oregon breweries are putting in hop fields, and over time this will become more of a national phenomenon. But for the moment, no region is so poised as Beervana (and the greater Northwest) to seize the mantle as the premier producer of fresh hop beers, ala the Beaujolais region of France. The first codification of this seasonal tradition began last year with the roving fresh-hop "Tastivals," and perhaps we'll have a permanent, regular fest to celebrate the harvest in the future. (Yakima has already established one; but wouldn't you rather go to to Corvallis or Eugene?)*

A trend to watch and nurture--and reason 2702 that this is indeed Beervana.

___________
[Update] *Sometimes bloggers get things very wrong, and because they're flying without a net (ie, editors), they go live with very wrong info. As GG pointed out in comments below, Hood River has hosted a fresh hop fest for five years. I'm an eejit.

Best Debut Beer - Your Choice

For the past couple years, I've awarded the "Satori Award" for the best debut beer. It must (generally) have been released in the calendar year, and (generally) be brewed in Oregon, and (generally) should be a regular or recurring beer. But I'm never slavish about details, so if a beer's been around a couple years but I only discoverd it this year, who knows? I wouldn't eliminate Walking Man for being on the wrong side of the river (a Seattle brewery ... well, probably not, but you never know). And who's to say a beer won't recur? John Harris made another batch of last year's winner, Lupulin, this year, but didn't have access to the Amarillo hops that made it so transcendent last year. Recurring? Sort of.

But you have a vote, too. Below is a list of beers I considered for the award (plus one comedy choice), and three have made my final cut. The Satori Award isn't a popularity contest (more of you will have had Full Sail Prodigal Sun than Double Mountain Kriek, so it won't be fair in any case), but being popular isn't a bad thing, either. So have at it. What was the best debut beer in 2009?

The Year in Review: Timeline

This is the week when I begin, during the doldrums between Christmas and New Year's, to toss a glance backward to see what happened over the past year. I'll look at some of the trends from this year, and of course, name a Satori Award for the best debut beer. But to kick things off, here's a timeline of the events we enjoyed. It's not exhaustive, but gives you a sense of how much happens in the world of beer in just a single year.

January

• Alworth to Hawaii in celebration of his own decreptitude; misses most of the month
• Fears about the hop shortage spread

February

• It's Pub Night blog debuts
• First annual Firkin Fest
• Block 15 Brewpub opens in Corvallis
  

March

• Lucky Lab Barleywine Fest
• Hopworks Urban Brewery opens in Portland
• Spring Beer Fest
• Steve Novick offers "Left Hook Lager" as a fundraiser in his senate campaign
• Weinhard releases an IPA--the first craft-style beer ever in the Henry's family
  

April

• Cheers to Belgian Beers Fest
• Pyramid/McTarnahan's merges with Magic Hat

May

• Deschutes opens a brewpub in Portland
  
• Oregonians recommend IPA to Barack Obama when he visits
  
• FredFest

June

• Columbia, Mt. Hood, and Gold River Distributors merge and become CoHo Dist.
• InBev announces intention to acquire Anheuser-Busch
• Organic Beer Festival

July

• Widmer-Redhook officially merge
• Moortgat (Duvel) buys Liefmans
• Sagebrush Classic in Bend
• Portland International Beer Festival
• Three Creeks Brewing opens in Sisters
• Oregon Brewers Festival

August

• Bud's American Ale released
• Beer Around Town blog launched

September

• Fresh hop season begins--Oregon breweries will release more than forty fresh hop beers

October

• Oregon breweries win 8 gold, 3 silver, and 7 bronze medals at the GABF
• Brewpublic blog launched
• Fresh Hop Tastivals tour Oregon

November

• I believe there was some kind of election--tears of joy and sadness spilt in beers across America
• Rogue buys the Green Dragon pub
• Inbev officially purchases Bud--becomes AmBev

December

• Holiday Ale Fest
• Fourth Street Brewing opens in Gresham
• Winter Beer Fest at Amnesia, Oregon gets hammered with the great storm of 2008--a record 19 inches of snow fall in Portland.

For those not keeping score, that's four brewery openings, 12 beer fests, five merger/consolidation/buyouts, three new blogs, and two faux micro releases. The number of new beers released is unknowable, if not uncountable. I'd say it's somewhere north of 200, but that's just a retrospective eyeball calculation. Let's put it this way: more than any person could conceivably drink. Or this way: another year in Beervana.

Cheers--