LATEST
Recent Posts
Collections
Posts by Topic
Tilray may not be the cuddly, half-baked owner 10 Barrel thought it was getting when the cannabis firm took ownership from Anheuser-Busch last year. Today we learned Tilray had fired 10 Barrel's entire, award-winning innovation brewing team.
Douglas Lager got a soft launch last fall, but an unexpected shortage of draft Rainier in Seattle offered a rare opportunity to expand this spring. I check in with this new project to create a domestic lager in the long lineage of the Northwest’s old breweries.
On Tuesday, Michael Kiser issued an unexpected announcement about the site he founded fifteen years ago: Good Beer Hunting was ending its run. The next day, the Brewers Association announced that Bob Pease was stepping down as CEO after ten years in the job. Some thoughts about these big transitions.
FH Steinbart, the 106-year-old Portland institution, has been sold. This should ensure that the nation’s oldest homebrew shop will carry on for years to come.
One of the great artifacts of brewing culture was saved from history’s dustbin when Chobani founder Hamdi Ulukaya bought Anchor recently. If you had Chobani money, which other important breweries would you save? Our researchers have investigated hte question and have a definitive list.
In my nonscientific surveys of the pubs in which I drink, it seems there has been a transition underway: pilsners replacing pale ales as the standard session beer. I decided to check my work to see if this was really true.
I am compiling a database of breweries in Oregon for a website that will launch soon. It needs to be up-to-date and comprehensive, which means I’ve been poring through websites and social media accounts to find out which breweries still exist. The result? A lot fewer than I expected.
No top ten breweries list this year. But I can’t leave you entirely in the lurch, so here’s Portland’s brewery of the year. As a fun factoid, it has never appeared on one of my top-ten lists, either. Who says beer isn’t exciting anymore?
Winning awards and accolades isn’t enough to make a beer a classic, like Harvey’s Sussex Best or Saison Dupont or Schneider Weisse or Pliny the Elder. It takes decades of time, thought, and refinement. pFriem’s Pilsner is a case study in that unfolding process, and why it’s such a long journey.
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?
While I was in Europe, Carlsberg announced it would finally stop using the antiquate Burton Union system used to make Marston’s Pedigree in Burton, England. The news was sad, but it came far later than I ever expected. A eulogy for a technology that was once state of the art.
In the spring, Dan and others from the brewery head off to a forest just west of town. The trees must be a certain height to harvest, and they can’t pick too much of the new growth. “We bring a load of grain bags out with us—it’s beautiful,” he said. “I love it.” It takes more than one visit to collect 200 pounds of tips.
People are very fond of “authentic” things. Brands seen as authentic enjoy financial reward. But is authenticity a fixed quality a brewery can strive to attain, or a fickle substance as fleeting as smoke on a windy day?
Did you ever wonder if the art on a beer can might have been generated by AI? Increasingly, the answer is likely to be yes. Let’s look examples from two breweries to see where this is all headed.
On Monday night, Cascade Brewing announced it was closing, effective immediately. It was one of the most indelible of the golden-age sour breweries, and its beers were truly unlike any others on the market. A remembrance.
Art Larrance, the founder of Portland Brewing and the Oregon Brewers Festival in the 1980s and the Raccoon Lodge and Cascade Brewing in the 1990s and 2000s, died over the weekend. He left a large legacy and helped create the culture that defines the state.
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.
A team of Irish researchers just published a paper about their project to recreate a 16th-century Irish ale using period ingredients, equipment, and processes. Along the way, they surfaced quite a few things I didn’t know about beer made nearly 500 years ago.
Hard hop water? Have we gone through the looking glass here? No: Great Notion's latest offering works because it’s flavored solely by Citra and Mosaic hops. It’s bright, effervescent, dry, and lightly hop-scented. What’s not to like?