There’s no better excuse, or time, to visit Seven Brides Brewing in Silverton than when heading to the Oregon Garden Beerfest. That’s where you’ll find the freshest pint of the brewery’s Frankenlou IPA (at the brewery, not necessarily at the festival).
One of the very first breweries in Portland was the eponymous Portland Brewing Co., founded in 1986. Based on the popularity of its MacTarnahan’s Amber Ale, released in 1992, the company name was changed to MacTarnahan’s Brewing Co. From there it gets even more confusing, with ownership tied to Pyramid Brewing, Vermont’s Magic Hat, and New York’s North American Breweries. But the brewery itself never left Portland, and its brand new name reflects that. In 2013, it’s back to Portland Brewing once more! While Mac’s Amber isn’t going anywhere, to commemorate all this old newness, Portland Brewing will be releasing new beers, starting with Rose Hip Gold.
Thinking about the popular bar snack beer nuts, I pitched this exploration nutty beers to CraftBeer.com (Dec, 2012). Truth in advertising is vital in craft beer culture. There better be fresh hops in our fresh hop beers, real cherries in our krieks, and just as seasonally-relevant, real pumpkin in our field or pumpkin beers. Yet the distinguished British classic, nut brown ale, contains nary a nut.
The name derived from this medium-bodied beer’s use of toasted malted barley as opposed to roasted malt—gives the style its telltale nutty color and flavor.
The only logical decision is to drink winter seasonal beers while the getting’s good. Most craft breweries release a “winter warmer” to ward off Jack Frost, a tradition dating back millennia to when agrarians celebrated the solstice by brewing beers made heavier with extra with grains (and perhaps fruits and spices), and religious practitioners believed intoxication aided communion with deities and spirits. Outside Portland in McMinnville, great beers are easily found inside the Golden Valley Brewpub; visit to New Seasons in hopes of picking up a six-pack of Tannen Bomb, so named since it arrives in stores along with Christmas trees and is a veritable malt bomb — 125 lbs. of malts per barrel.
The leaves were losing their fiery colors, replaced by brown in only slightly varying shades. Nights arrived an hour earlier, giving up a minute of sunshine with each passing day. But before we grabbed our saws to chop down our Christmas trees, we paused to give thanks. Oddly, no one’s cornered the Thanksgiving beer market. Well pilgrim, Coalition Brewing has just the thing.
Brewery co-founder Kiley Hoyt is a Vermont native, so it makes sense Coalition offers a porter brewed with maple syrup. Loving Cup Maple Porter is available year-round at the brewpub, but was being bottled as a seasonal offering for the first time. The British-style porter is on the dry side, offering desirable chocolatiness without being thick or sweet.
Enter the maple syrup.
A pungent ode to the most wonderful, lupulin time of the year: fresh hop beers. For this month’s Drink Portland review, that’s Laurelwood’s only-in-September version of Workhorse IPA, also available at the Fresh Hop Fest in Hood River.
This Drink Portland review coincided with the debut of pFriem Family Brewers in Hood River. If you’ve ever tasted this or any of their other Belgian-style beers and/or IPAs, you’re glad they did (debut).
The first of my monthly local beer reviews for Drink Portland. Because it’s fun to get paid a little bit to sit down and reflect on the beer in hand. In the summer of 2012, that beer was BridgePort’s seasonal ode to another of Beervana’s nicknames, Stumptown Tart, which I tied into both OBFs (Oregon Brewers Fest AND Oregon Berry Fest. Oh yeah.)
Well, I pitched this story to Draft (vol 6.1, 2011) as an intro to the trend of educational beers. Yes, beers that teach the consumer (and usually the brewer in the process) something such as releasing a series of beers with a control and one variable distinguishing the other iterations. In other words, a pale ale each hopped with a different, single varietal, or a stout and a series of that same batch aged in one differing spent barrel each. The king of these–they’re certainly not vertical tastings which takes one beer as sampled at once over several vintages so instead I call it horizontal tastings–is Mikkeller from Denmark. Dark Horse, one of my favorite Michigan breweries, had a different sort of horse in this race.
I just remember getting an email from the editor of SF Weekly’s food blog, SFoodie, asking for a quote about some upcoming beer something-or-other and I responded, “I can certainly give you one, or how about I just write it up as your new beer writer?”
It was a great gig for a few years, one I happily relinquished when we moved to Portland. As such, I have no intention of archiving every blog post or print story I did for them, but below is a complete list of links to the most fun series I started, Tasting Blind, wherein once a month I lined up a panel of at least 4 local beer experts, including a publican to host it, and brought in many iterations of a beer style including, when possible, locally brewed ones, craft beers from other states, imports, and macro brands if they existed.
1. Pilsners (Feb. 2010)
2. Stouts (Mar. 2010)
3. Hefeweizens (Apr. 2010)
4. Pales (May 2010)
5. IPAs (June 2010)
6. Summer (July 2010)
7. Summer fruits (Aug. 2010)
8. Oktoberfests (Sep. 2010)
9. Pumpkins (Oct. 2010)
10. Coffee beers (Nov. 2010)
11. Holiday beers (Dec. 2010)
Bonus: Blind holiday beers for Willy Week (Dec. 2012)
Bonus 2: Blind holiday beers from the series as continued by my hand-picked replacement at SF Weekly, Jason Henry (Dec. 2011)
Brian Yaeger: Beer Writer 