Featured
A wonderful little trend has been building in Portland for years, but I’ve been hesitant to draw attention, lest the harsh sunlight prove fatal to the delicate shoots. But now it seems safe: cask ale has become a real thing.
Books have been the main way we collected and stored knowledge for hundreds of years. In the past decade, while no one noticed, that changed, and books are quickly becoming obsolete.
Adam Milne started Old Town Brewing in 2011, but it stood on the shoulders of a Portland institution, Old Town Pizza. This month the downtown landmark turns 50, giving us a chance to reflect on a half-century of life.
Last year, I worked with Oregon Public Broadcasting to create a podcast, short movie, and print article about Oregon hops and the development of IPAs in the state. They are now available, and I have links and some background on the process.
Each April, the Brewers Association releases an important package of data, headlined by a list of largest US breweries. This year’s numbers were a mixed bag, and revealed a lot about the state of the industry.
Alcohol is a a potent beverage—fun, relaxing, dangerous. We all have different relationships to it, and they often start long before we ever take our first sip. In the second of my “Drinking Life” posts, I investigate mine.
Managing large systems requires more time, money, and staff, none of which is well-spent on ten kegs slowly falling out of code in the cold room.
Carlos Alvarez, founder of the Gambrinus Company, the first to import Corona, has died. With the purchase of Shiner, he became a big player in beer, and eventually one of its biggest philanthropists—but he had a few misses along the way, especially in craft brewing.
People typically talk about “American” or “Pacific Northwest” hops as if they’re a monolith. Yet Oregon’s Willamette Valley, on the wet side of the Cascades, is vastly different than the arid Yakima Valley. The hops grown there are different, too.
On Thursday, organizers announced the winners of the 9th annual Oregon Beer Awards. This unusual competition has matured and become nationally influential. I discuss some of the winners and trends that emerged in 2024.
In celebration of Upright’s 15th anniversary, I asked founder/brewer Alex Ganum and three other friends of Upright to describe memorable beers from the brewery’s run.
Just one year ago we learned that the fourth Oregonian had won the Schehrer Award (Ben Edmunds)—and today I get to congratulate Tonya Cornett for being the fifth!
Somehow, Portland’s Upright Brewery has been around 15 years. Despite reaching its mid-teens, Upright has remained one of the most inventive, interesting, and unexpected breweries in the the country. As we hit this big milestone, let’s revisit what owner/brewer Alex Ganum has accomplished.
We learned today that a Portland institution was closing down: McCormick and Schmick’s RiverPlace restaurant. It was once the toast of the town, featuring the best view in the city. It was also the home of Full Sail’s Portland outpost, an important formative location in creating Portland’s beer scene.
Do you like your cask pints sparkled? We have opinions. Do you like them with a dash of horror? We have you covered. Do you like them in Portland? At long, long last, you’re in luck—and now the fun has been old-school gamified. Read on for all the cask news that’s fit to print.
For hundreds of years, brewers have ranked hops based on their quality. This has led to a sense of nobility among a select class of landrace hops brewers prize the most. But are they noble because they’re old and tested, or because they taste and smell so good?
For the better part of a decade, non-alcoholic beer has been the Next Big Thing. But is it, really?
No.
“I was common practice to take the beer that had splashed into a bucket below the hand pump at the end of the day, add a slurry of asbestos and then run them through a filter. The asbestos-filtered “slops” were then served to the first customers into the pub the next day.”
We can all agree on what a beer currently costs. In Portland, a pint will set you back $7. Before Covid it was $6, and not long before that five. So is $7 expensive? It depends
Nothing in our living memory could prepare us for what was to come, and human brains aren’t wired to understand events as huge and transformational as what we confronted.
Last week, London’s Meantime Brewery was in the news. Its fortunes are bound up with Fuller’s and Dark Star—by coincidence three breweries I toured 13 years ago. Show did they get here?
Oregon is one of the most interesting and important beer regions in the United States, but you wouldn’t know it if you did a web search. No one does a very good job of telling the Oregon story. Until now. I’m excited to announce a new project to promote Oregon beer.
A small paper suggests that long Covid makes hangovers more severe. Other research hints at similar associations following other viral infections. Could it be that Covid is at least partly responsible for the dent we’re seeing in alcohol sales?
Before it closed late last year, the Anchor Brewery had been making steam beer in San Francisco since 1896. Wait, are we really sure about that?
Dating breweries, like counting them, is an act of interpretation. Once a brewery’s age passes into the centuries, interruptions are certain. Sometimes breweries take advantage of those gaps to push their founding date backward. So let’s take the most famous date of all, Weihenstephan and 1040 CE.
I’ve written about beer over the course of something like three million words and 27 years. Almost never in that time have I considered the role beer has played in my own life. Yet there it was, from adolescence forward, through periods when it never seemed to be center frame.
Two years ago, I was so impressed with an obscure technology called GPT-3 that I thought it merited mention on a beer blog. Last year, AI had become such a big deal I wrote a three-post series. We may have come to the final chapter: mundanity. In my possibly final post, I review the situation.
Our friends at AB InBev have offered us a new beer promising a “fathomless palate squeeze.” Wait, what? And Juice Dust? That does not sound appetizing. What is going on here?
In which I look at the national beer market and make some interesting discoveries.
Nine years ago, almost to the day, we recorded our first episode of the Beervana Podcast. All things must end, and it is with deep gratitude and appreciation that we announce the release of our last show. We have a few words going out.