Tag Archives: Ale Apothecary

NAGBW Award Winner: One Of The World’s Most Obscure Beers Comes To Bend

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It’s almost a good thing I neglected to post this story about smokey, Gotland, Sweden-style farmhouse ale, aka Gotlandsdricke, when it was published in Bend Source Weekly this past year. Why? Because it gives me a chance to share it now, now that it was awarded the 3rd Best Beer Review by the North American Guild of Beer Writers. It’s a real thing!

I neither fell in love with this beer style–perhaps most closely resembling a Polish-style Grodziskie or Lichtenhainer, but those also require high levels of beergeekdom given how obscure they are–neither in Sweden nor here in Bend, Oregon, but in Boston, Mass! That’s the backgrounder on how I played a roll in getting a stab at the style to be made here in Bend…

Lush Life: Tiny Wolf and Portland’s Nanos

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I’m forever deliberating over the impact nanobreweries can or do have on a city’s beer culture. For every Commons (nee Beetje) brewery in Portland or Hess in San Diego, there are seemingly a dozen more that think they can emulate that level of success. To find out what these nanobrewers want to get out of the brewing industry, and what they think can have to contribute, I went straight to the teensy-tiny sources in my August turn at the Mercury’s Lush Life column.

For Members Only

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The inspiration behind this story was actually heading home for the holidays and having my cousin pour me some geeky, ultra-unobtainable bottles

Rare bottles of The Bruery Hoarders Society release for All About Beer Magazine

The Bruery offers limited bottles through its Preservation Society, Reserve Society and Hoarders Society. (Photo courtesy The Bruery)

. I definitely enjoyed getting to drink some of these beers, but wondered how it was that those were the types of beers he typically drinks instead of, like me, on special occasions.

Some beers get fussed over. Some are downright coveted. Rarely are such specimens found perched on the shelf of your local grocer or even in the chiller at your nearest bottle shop. It wasn’t terribly long ago that interesting beer was hard to find on supermarket shelves. Now, the more rare the beer, the faster it disappears from said real estate. Increasingly, smaller breweries are turning to pricey memberships to get their most artful expressions straight to the mouths of devout fans.

Ale Apothecary

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In my first real contribution to Ezra Johnson-Greenough’s New School Beer Blog (Feb. ’13), I decided to sort of workshop the entry I was writing for Oregon Breweries knowing it was a rough draft for the book that wouldn’t be published for nearly two years to come. It also enabled me to publish the story long before the print magazine whose photographer severely delayed my interview with brewer Paul Arney despite my huge time crunch.

The Ale Apothecary will never be a spot on the well-trodden/sloshy Bend Ale Trail. It’s ten miles out of downtown way up in the mountains. There’s no pub. No merch wall. Founder Paul Arney is a man who, after 15 years at Deschutes working his way up to assistant brewmaster, set up his own brewery and has the finished Finnish kuurna to show for it.