Best Brewery?

The Full Pint is running a poll of the "best Pacific NW brewery." As I find polls irresistible, I helplessly clicked through. And then I was confronted with an impossible decision. Best brewery? How would you even begin to assess such a thing? It's far worse than trying to identify a favorite beer (also an impossibility), because you don't even have a standard for measure. Best beer? Best pub? Best location? Best brewer?

Deschutes, which has long had the savviest online presence, tweeted the poll a couple hours ago and are crushing the competition (they've garnered 58% of the vote, out of 32 breweries).

Although I did click a box, I did so out of advocacy--I selected a smaller, non-urban brewery that fewer people know about. Given the impossibility of the task, that seemed as good as any criteria I could imagine.


Cost Calculator
In other news, resident techie Bill has a post up at It's Pub Night that will convert any volume of beer into a six-pack equivalent. That four dollar 22-ouncer look like a deal? Well, plug it into the SPE calc and you realize--yipes, $13.09, that's a bit spendy. So go and play around. (It reminds me of the old days, when I stood in front of the beer cooler and regarded 16-ounce Rainier pounders, 11-ounce Heidelbergs, and the usual assortment of 12-ouncers and tried to figure which was the best deal. Of course, that was way, way before the internets.)